Hubble's Successor: The James Webb Space Telescope

Radio signal-hunting astronomers find no alien life near Milky Way stars

After a hunt for Milky Way radio signals came up empty, the team of astronomers behind it has estimated that fewer than one in a million stars in the galaxy could have advanced civilisations residing on their orbiting planets.

Extreme life might be visible on colourful exoplanets

Lichens and algae could be the first life forms we find on Earth-like exoplanets, by looking for their light signatures in a planet's distinctive colouring.

Astronomers have found several rocky worlds in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface, and many more are thought to exist. As telescopes get more sensitive, we should be able to collect light reflected off such planets and look for clues to their surface conditions.

Full Moon, Partial Eclipse, and Jupiter

This week we are presented with a collection of celestial alignments that are quite visible in an urban setting.

Bridging Cities of Galaxies

Image credits: Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect: ESA Planck Collaboration; optical image: STScI Digitized Sky Survey

Planck has discovered a bridge of hot gas that connects galaxy clusters Abell 399 (lower center) and Abell 401 (top left). The galaxy pair is located about a billion light-years from Earth, and the gas bridge extends approximately 10 million light-years between them.

Nebula new photo

Australian astrophotographer Dave Larkin used the Internet based Slooh Space Camera's Canary Island 20'' robotic telescope to capture this photo of the Lagoon Nebula

Solar Eclipses: An Observer’s Guide (Infographic)

Solar system’s birth record revised

Some 4.567 billion years ago, our solar system’s planets spawned from an expansive disc of gas and dust rotating around the sun. While similar processes are witnessed in younger solar systems throughout the Milky Way, the formative stages of our own solar system were believed to have taken twice as long to occur. Now, new research lead by the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, suggests otherwise.

Exomoons may give us first glimpse of habitable worlds

That's no planet (Image: Frizaven/3D Space Simulator Celestia)

Moons, rather than planets, could star in the first images of habitable worlds outside our solar system. Once taken, such images would offer unprecedented clues to the moons' ability to support life by providing the chemical signatures carried in their light.

Scientists could find alien life within 40 years, says royal astronomer

Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society, said evidence of whether beings exist not only beyond earth but beyond our solar system, could be found in that time, a newspaper reported.

Lord Rees said he believed that astro-physicists could be able to view images of distant planets outside the solar system as soon as 2025. This could potentially lead to the discovery of some form of life on them.

NASA's Chandra Shows Milky Way Is Surrounded by Halo of Hot Gas

This artist's illustration shows an enormous halo of hot gas (in blue) around the Milky Way galaxy. Also shown, to the lower left of the Milky Way, are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, two small neighboring galaxies (roll your mouse over the image for labels). The halo of gas is shown with a radius of about 300,000 light years, although it may extend significantly further.

 Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to find evidence our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded in an enormous halo of hot gas that extends for hundreds of thousands of light years. The estimated mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of all the stars in the galaxy.

Curiosity Mars rover picks up the pace

The target rock has been named in honour of a rover engineer, Jake Matijevic, who died in August

The Curiosity rover is making good progress towards its first major science destination on Mars.

The vehicle has now driven 289m (950ft) since its landing on the Red Planet some six weeks ago.

Today on Mars: Curiosity Is All Set to Sift Sand and Bake Rocks

Sand Sifter This image shows the open inlet where powered rock and soil samples will be funneled down into the Mars rover Curiosity for analysis. It was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Curiosity's 36th Martian day, or sol, on Mars (Sept. 11 on Earth). MAHLI was about 8 inches away from the mouth of the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument when it took this picture. The entrance of the funnel is about 1.4 inches in diameter and the mesh screen is about 2.3 inches deep. Once the samples have gone down the 0.4-inch holes in the funnel, CheMin will be shooting X-rays at the samples to identify and quantify the minerals. Read more about what CheMin can do here. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A battery of tests checking out the Mars rover Curiosity should wrap up today, and she's passing them all with flying colors. Very soon, the rover will start doing what it was sent to Mars to do: Swallowing some soil, baking it and X-raying it, with the goal of finding out whether life could ever have survived on the planet.
This image shows the entrance to the CheMin instrument (for Chemistry and Mineralogy), which will sift Martian dirt so it can be X-rayed. CheMin will identify minerals by examining the diffraction patterns of X-rays that pass through the spaces between atoms.

NASA | Afterschool Universe: Life Cycle of a Small Star

Afterschool Universe is an out-of-school-time astronomy program for middle school students that explores basic astronomy concepts through engaging hands-on activities and then takes participants on a journey through the Universe beyond the Solar System.

This video shows a simple kinesthetic activity that models the life cycle of a star with a mass similar to our sun.

Read more...
http://universe.nasa.gov/au/http://universe.nasa.gov/au/

Hot DOG surprise reveals new stage in galaxy evolution

Here's a frankfurter that won't fit on a bun. Hot dust-obscured galaxies, or hot DOGs, are a new type of cosmic object that could help answer a decades-old problem: which came first, the galaxy or the black hole?

The newly discovered galaxies are among the brightest in the universe, 1000 times brighter than the Milky Way, but they are so heavily clouded by dust that they had gone entirely unnoticed until now – hence the description "hot, dust-obscured".

Gravity waves spotted from white-dwarf pair

An artist's conception of the white dwarf pair shows how they would radiate spirals of gravitational waves

Researchers have spotted visible-light evidence for one of astronomy's most elusive targets - gravity waves - in the orbit of a pair of dead stars.

Building Blocks of Life Found Around Young Star

A team of astronomers has found molecules of glycolaldehyde — a simple form of sugar — in the gas surrounding a young binary star. This image shows the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region in infrared light, as seen by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE). IRAS 16293-2422 is the red object in the centre of the small square. The inset image is an artist’s impression of glycolaldehyde molecules, showing glycolaldehyde’s molecular structure (C2H4O2). Carbon atoms are shown as grey, oxygen atoms as red, and hydrogen atoms as white. (Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Calçada (ESO) & NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team)

A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right time, to be included in planets forming around the star.

Telescope for kids

Pulsar timekeepers measure up to atomic clocks

Keeping time: using an array of pulsars to look for gravitational waves

An international team of astronomers has come up with a new way of keeping track of time by observing a collection of pulsars – rapidly rotating stars that emit radio pulses at very regular intervals. Although the ultimate goal of the research is to use pulsar timing to detect gravitational waves, the group has shown that the pulsar-based timescale can also be used to reveal inconsistencies in timescales based on atomic clocks.

Recreating a Slice of the Universe

Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years.