Evidence for Frame Dragging Black Holes
Gravity can do more than floor you. According to recent measurements of a star system thought to contain a black hole, it can spin you too. This effect, called frame-dragging, is most prominent near massive, fast spinning objects. Now, a team ...
The Magnetic Carpet Of The Sun
The Sun has a magnetic carpet. Its visible surface appears to be carpeted with tens of thousands of magnetic north and south poles joined by looping field lines which extend outward into the Solar Corona. Recently, researchers have revealed maps ...
The Milky Way's Gamma-Ray Halo
Our Milky Way galaxy appears to be surrounded by a halo of gamma rays. Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, with more than a hundred thousand times the energy of visible light, but known gamma-ray sources don't ...
Blue Stragglers in Globular Clusters
This old dog is doing new tricks. On the left is ancient globular cluster 47 Tucanae which formed many billions of years ago. On the right is a closeup of its dense stellar center by the Hubble Space Telescope, released last week. Circled are ...
Irregular Moons Discovered Around Uranus
Where did these two irregular moons of Uranus originate? Last week two previously undiscovered moons of the distant gas planet were confirmed, the first in irregular orbits. All fifteen previously known moons of Uranus are 'regular', circling ...
White Dwarf Stars Cool
Diminutive by stellar standards, white dwarf stars are also intensely hot ... but they are cooling. No longer do their interior nuclear fires burn, so they will continue to cool until they fade away. This Hubble Space Telescope image covers a ...
M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of ...
Haunting Mars
This Halloween, the news about Mars is good news - Mars Global Surveyor will resume aerobraking into a mapping orbit around the haunting red planet. Wide angle cameras onboard the spacecraft recently recorded this shadowy image of Olympus Mons, ...
3-D View Of Jupiter's Clouds
very day is a cloudy day on Jupiter, the Solar System's reigning gas giant. This 3-dimensional visualization presents a simplified model view from between Jovian cloud decks based on imaging and spectral data recorded by the Galileo spacecraft. ...
Stereo Saturn
Get out your red/blue glasses and launch yourself into this stereo picture of Saturn! The picture is actually composed from two images recorded weeks apart by the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its visit to the Saturnian System in August of 1981. ...
