Astronomy

  Messier 106 is a superb spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici. Image: David Wills. Sniff out the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici), the home of the magnificent Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in the far northern sky, and you’ll find more galaxies than you can shake a stick at. Prominent Messier 106 (NGC 4258) is a superb spiral galaxy that holds its own in the company of the likes of the Sunflower Galaxy (M63) and M94. It’s bright enough to be found through a pair of binoculars and it looks like a galaxy through even a small telescope.    M106 lies in the north-western corner of Canes Venatici, 7.5° south-east of Phecda (gamma Ursae Majoris), the star at the south-eastern corner of the Plough’s ‘bowl’. AN graphic by Greg Smye-Rumsby. Where to look Messier 106 is located in the north-western corner of Cane...

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — The dark dunes of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, could have fallen from space. More than enough cometary material may have struck Titan to have formed its vast dune fields, planetary scientist William Bottke reported March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Computer simulations suggest that the enigmatic drifts formed from objects hailing from the primordial Kuiper Belt, a modern source of comets beyond the orbit of Neptune. The proposed scenario could also explain the presence of similar material observed on other worlds, said Bottke, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. *{color:var(--zephr-color-text-main)}.zephr-payment-form-relative-container{position:relative}.zephr-payment-form-flex-con...

A view created by Condor and computer technologies of extremely faint shells of ionized gas surrounding the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis. Credit: Condor Team A new telescope called the "Condor Array Telescope" may open up a new world of the very-low-brightness universe for astrophysicists. Four new papers, published back to back in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) this month, present the first scientific findings based on observations acquired by Condor. The project is a collaborative led by scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). ...

When a galaxy runs out of gas and dust, the process of star birth stops. That takes billions of years. But, there’s a galaxy out there that was already dead when the Universe was only 700 billion years old. What happened to it? That’s what an international team of astronomers wants to know. “The first few hundred million years of the Universe was a very active phase, with lots of gas clouds collapsing to form new stars,” said Tobias Looser from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. “Galaxies need a rich supply of gas to form new stars, and the early universe was like an all-you-can-eat buffet.” So, when the galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU showed up in a JWST observation, it didn’t exhibit much evidence of ongoing star formation. (JADES stands for JWST Advanced Deep E...