astronomy – Page 2 – आवारा मुसाफिर

Mysterious Neptune dark spot detected from Earth for the first time

August 26, 20232915 Views

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin. Large spots are common features in the atmospheres of giant planets, the most famous being Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. On Neptune, a dark spot was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989, before disappearing a few years later. “Since the first discovery of a dark spot, I’ve always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are,” says Pat...

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Stunning star nursery is latest JWST image to amaze astronomers

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July 13, 2023789 Views

The stunning picture of the star-forming region closest to Earth is the latest to be released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA unveiled the image to mark one year since the landmark telescope released its first photograph. The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. It shows an area in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, 120 parsecs (390 light years) away, that contains roughly 50 young stars — most of which have masses similar to, or less than, that of the Sun. It is the closest star-forming region to Earth. The vertical and horizontal red streaks on the upper and right-hand side of the image are molecular hydrogen illuminated by jets of material produce...

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A stellar week of space talk & astronomy with Maldivian luxury

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July 4, 2023843 Views

Astronaut Tim Peake lands at Anantara Kihavah Maldives Villas Resort One of the UK’s most famous astronauts, Tim Peake, is visiting Anantara Kihavah Maldives Villas Resort, this November to host a special evening of conversation with guests and a separate talk about space dedicated to teens. Situated in the Baa Atoll, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Anantara Kihavah is home to the first overwater observatory in the Maldives and the most powerful telescope in the region. The private island resort’s location just above the equator means that both hemisphere’s stars are visible from the resort. Coupled with minimal light pollution and open skies, it is possible to see sights such as the pale-yellow rings of Saturn and the counter-rotating zones and belts of Jupiter and the ...

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Hidden views of vast stellar nurseries revealed

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May 12, 2023727 Views

Astronomers pierce together more than one million images using ESO telescope Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth. This image shows the L1688 region in the Ophiuchus constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. Credit:ESO/Meingast et a...

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Earth’s destiny! With a gulp and burp, a star swallows a Jupiter-sized planet

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May 4, 2023741 Views

In a glimpse of the dismal fate awaiting Earth, scientists for the first time have observed a star, bloated in its old age, swallowing a Jupiter-like planet, then expelling some material into space in an energetic belch. It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets. Researchers said on Wednesday the star was in the early stages of what is called the red giant phase late in its lifespan as it depleted hydrogen fuel in its core and its dimensions began to expand. As the star grew, its surface reached the orbit of the doomed planet, with mayhem ensuing. The star, which started out similar to our sun in size and composition, is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the directio...

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Astronomers find leftovers of the first stars

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May 4, 2023727 Views

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers have found for the first time the fingerprints left by the explosion of the first stars in the Universe. They detected three distant gas clouds whose chemical composition matches what we expect from the first stellar explosions. These findings bring us one step closer to understanding the nature of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang. This artist’s impression shows a distant gas cloud that contains different chemical elements, illustrated here with schematic representations of various atoms. Credit:ESO/L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser “For the first time ever, we were able to identify the chemical traces of the explosions of the first stars in very distant gas clouds,” says Andrea Saccardi, a PhD student at the Observatoire de ...

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First direct image of a black hole expelling a powerful jet

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April 28, 20231152 Views

For the first time, astronomers have observed, in the same image, the shadow of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) and the powerful jet expelled from it. The observations were done in 2018 with telescopes from the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT). Thanks to this new image, astronomers can better understand how black holes can launch such energetic jets. This image shows the jet and shadow of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy together for the first time. This image gives scientists the context needed to understand how the powerful jet is formed. The new observations also revealed that the black hole’s ring, shown here in the inse...

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Astronomers witness the birth of a very distant cluster of galaxies from the early Universe

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March 30, 2023697 Views

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, astronomers have discovered a large reservoir of hot gas in the still-forming galaxy cluster around the Spiderweb galaxy — the most distant detection of such hot gas yet. Galaxy clusters are some of the largest objects known in the Universe and this result, published in Nature, further reveals just how early these structures begin to form. Galaxy clusters, as the name suggests, host a large number of galaxies — sometimes even thousands. They also contain a vast “intracluster medium” (ICM) of gas that permeates the space between the galaxies in the cluster. This gas in fact considerably outweighs the galaxies themselves. Much of the physics of galaxy clusters is well understood; however, observatio...

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Volcanoes on Venus? ‘Striking’ finding hints at modern-day activity

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March 17, 2023419 Views

Discovery highlights need for future missions after NASA puts one on hold Scientists have found some of the strongest evidence yet that there is volcanic activity on Venus. Because the planet is a close neighbour to Earth and originally had water on its surface, one big question has been why its landscape is hellish while Earth’s is habitable. Learning more about its volcanic activity could help explain its evolution — and Earth’s. Scientists have known that Venus is covered in volcanoes, but whether or not any of them is still active has been long debated. Now, researchers have discovered that at least one of them probably is, by examining radar images of the planet’s surface collected by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft between 1990 and 1992. They determined that a volcanic vent located...

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Astronomers astonished by ring around frigid distant world Quaoar

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February 9, 2023913 Views

The small distant world called Quaoar, named after a god of creation in Native American mythology, is producing some surprises for astronomers as it orbits beyond Pluto in the frigid outer reaches of our solar system. Researchers said on Wednesday they have detected a ring encircling Quaoar akin to the one around the planet Saturn. But the one around Quaoar defies the current understanding of where such rings can form - located much further away from it than current scientific understanding would allow. The distance of the ring from Quaoar places it in a location where scientists believe particles should readily come together around a celestial body to form a moon rather than remain as separate components in a disk of ring material. "This is the discovery of a ring located in a p...