Astronomy

A Hubble Space Telescope false-colour view (left) of a 100-billion-mile-wide disc of dust around the star Vega. The James Webb Space Telescope (right) resolves the glow of warm dust in a disc halo. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, S. Wolff (University of Arizona), K. Su (University of Arizona), A. Gáspár (University of Arizona). In the 1997 movie “Contact,” adapted from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, the lead character, scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actress Jodie Foster), takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star – but no obvious planets are visible. It looks like the filmmakers got it right. A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson, used NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unpreced...

Voyager 1 was launched waaaaaay back in 1977. I would have been 4 years old then! It’s an incredible achievement that technology that was built THAT long ago is still working. Yet here we are in 2024, Voyager 1 and 2 are getting older. Earlier this week, NASA had to turn off one of the radio transmitters on Voyager 1. This forced communication to rely upon the low-power radio. Alas technology around 50 years old does sometimes glitch and this was the result of a command to turn on a heater. The result was that Voyager 1 tripped into fault protection mode and switch communications! Oops.  Voyager 1 is a NASA space probe launched on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer planets and beyond. Initially, Voyager 1’s mission focused on flybys of Jupiter a...

IC 10 is a dwarf irregular galaxy that’s a member of our Local Group. Intense star formation here leads to its ‘starburst’ classification. Image: Leonardo Orazi. Galaxies are everywhere, including within the unlikely Winter Milky Way territory of Cassiopeia. There are three well known though rather elusive Local Group galaxies found here. NGC 147 and 185 are satellites of the mighty Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31), the Local Group’s dominant force. Though IC10 is not gravitationally bound to Messier 31, it appears to be part of the Andromeda subgroup, along with Messier 33, the Triangulum Galaxy. AN Graphic by Greg Smye-Rumsby. NGC 147: a companion of the mighty Andromeda Galaxy Dwarf spheroidal galaxy NGC 147 (Caldwell 17) is one of mighty Andromeda Galaxy’s (Messier 31) retinue. NGC 147 i...