News articles tagged with 'telescope'
Strange new 'species' of ultra-red galaxy discovered
— 2 Dec 2011 10:29 | AstronomyIn the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even…
Telescope ferrets out planet-hunting targets
— 9 Apr 2011 11:37 | AstronomyAstronomers have come up with a new way of identifying close, faint stars with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite. The technique should help in the hunt for planets that lie…
Astrophysicist: White dwarfs could be fertile ground for other Earths
— 31 Mar 2011 15:03 | AstronomyPlanet hunters have found hundreds of planets outside the solar system in the last decade, though it is unclear whether even one might be habitable. But it could be that the best place…
A very cool pair of brown dwarfs
— 28 Mar 2011 17:42 | AstronomyBrown dwarfs are essentially failed stars: they lack enough mass for gravity to trigger the nuclear reactions that make stars shine. The newly discovered brown dwarf, identified as…
The drama of starbirth
— 16 Mar 2011 13:12 | AstronomyThe star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO's Very Large Telescope gives…
The most distant mature galaxy cluster
— 9 Mar 2011 20:20 | Astronomy'We have measured the distance to the most distant mature cluster of galaxies ever found,' says the lead author of the study in which the observations from ESO's VLT have been used,…
Super-sharp radio 'eye' remeasuring the universe
— 20 Feb 2011 16:06 | AstronomyUsing the super-sharp radio 'vision' of astronomy's most precise telescope, scientists have extended a directly-measured 'yardstick' three times farther into the cosmos than ever before,…
Improving microscopy by following the astronomers' guide star
— 18 Feb 2011 18:02 | AstronomyA corrective strategy used by astronomers to sharpen images of celestial bodies can now help scientists see with more depth and clarity into the living brain of a mouse. Eric Betzig,…
Reflected glory
— 17 Feb 2011 17:06 | AstronomyMessier 78 is a fine example of a reflection nebula. The ultraviolet radiation from the stars that illuminate it is not intense enough to ionise the gas to make it glow - its dust particles…
Earth-size planet candidates found in habitable zone
— 3 Feb 2011 17:18 | AstronomyNASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.…