Here’s a preview of our newest Cosmic Journeys episode. It surveys the most powerful supervolcanoes and the scientific quest to understand them. Coming soon.

In landmark observations, the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has given astronomers the best ever three-dimensional view of the deep Universe. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South region for a total of 27 hours the new observations reveal the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies than ever before in this tiny piece of the sky. The new observations are allowing astronomers to go beyond the Hubble Deep Field and reveal a host of previously unseen objects.

From ESO, observations made at telescopes in South America have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris.

The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, and less prominent rings have also been found around the other giant planets. Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System. Now observations of the distant minor planet Chariklo as it passed in front of a star have shown that this object too is surrounded by two fine rings.

Chariklo is the largest member of a class known as the Centaurs and it orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System. The astronomers found much more than they were expecting. A few seconds before, and again a few seconds after the Continue reading An Asteroid with Rings? →

A gem from NASA Astrophysics. Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study combined data from NASA satellites, ground-based observing campaigns and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars’ interactions.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae is actually two massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them close every 5.5 years. Both produce powerful stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties. Astronomers have established that the brighter, cooler primary star has about 90 times the mass of the sun and outshines it by 5 million times. Its smaller, hotter companion weighs in at about 30 solar masses and emits a million times the sun’s light.

At closest approach, or periastron, the stars are 225 million kilometers apart, or about the average distance between Mars and the sun. Astronomers observe dramatic changes in the system during Continue reading Superstar Duet in Eta Carinae →

NASA observations show the dynamism of Greenland’s Ice sheet in the changing elevation of its surfaces. Recent analysis of seven years of readings from NASA’s ICESat satellite and four years of laser and and ice-penetrating radar data from NASA’s airborne mission Operation IceBridge shows the changes taking place.

In the animation featured here, the colors shown on the surface of the ice sheet represent the accumulated change in elevation since 2003. The light yellow over the central region of the ice sheet indicates a slight thickening due to snow. This accumulation, along with the weight of the ice sheet, pushes ice toward the coast. Thinning near coastal regions, shown in green, blue and purple, has increased over time and now extends into the interior of the ice sheet where the bedrock topography permits. As a result, there has been an average loss of 300 cubic kilometers of ice per year between 2003 and 2012.

This animation portrays the changes occurring in the surface elevation of the ice sheet since 2003 in three drainage regions: the southeast, the northeast and the Jakobshavn regions. In each region, the time advances to show the accumulated change in elevation from 2003 through 2012.

From HubbleCast. The Hubble Space Telescope has returned to one of its most famous landmarks: the Eagle Nebula, also known as the Pillars of Creation. The revolutionary space telescope has delivered a new visible-light image as well as a revealing infrared image. These two images show the Eagle Nebula in more detail than ever before.

Our Sun is located 24-26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. It circles the galaxy every 225-250,000 years, at a speed of 220 kilometers per second. The sun is a medium size star, a Yellow Dwarf, G type main sequence. It’s about one million times the size of planet Earth.

Core temperature:15,000,000 °C. Surface temperature: 5,500 °C.

The sun emits a steady stream of charged particles, the solar wind, at 450 km per second. It increases in strength during active periods, every 11 years or so. Active periods are marked by an increase in sunspots. Sunspots are Earth-sized regions where intense magnetic fields prevent hot gas from reaching the surface, driving temperatures down to around 4,000°C. They often correspond to active regions.

Where magnetic activity drives the formation of coronal loops, or prominences. Solar flares. And Solar tsunamis, technically “fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical waves.” In February 2009, the Stereo spacecraft detected one that rose to 100,000 km high, and raced outward at 250 kilometers per second. It was associated with an eruption of gas and magnetic fields called a coronal mass ejection.

A CME can blast a billion tons of matter out at 10 to 12 million kilometers per hour. Continue reading Solar Storms: 10 Hottest Facts →

So what else is new? Science has known since the late 1990s that the universe is accelerating outward. That means it will continue to dissipate on into the future through a number of well defined epochs. A large international collaboration called the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Project (GAMA) has been surveying deep regions of the universe to find out how the energy output of galaxies has changed.

They found that a large sampling are emitting about half the energy they did two billion years ago. This is because rates of star birth are steadily declining. This is part of a slow decline in our current epoch, known as the Stellar Epoch, the epoch of stars. As one astronomer put it, the universe has settled down on the couch, while getting lazier and older. The timeline of this epoch, however, is many trillions of years into the future.

What happens with a giant solar outburst on the scale of the Great Solar Storm of 1859 hits the Earth. Solar scientists got a taste of such a blast in 2012 when the Sun erupted in a giant coronal mass ejection. In one of the largest solar computer simulations ever performed, scientists tracked the impact of a massive wave of solar plasma as it slammed into Earth.

Dawn, the speedy ion-drive spacecraft, left Earth in 2007 bound for Vesta and Ceres in the Asteroid Belt. These are no ordinary asteroids. Scientists see them as tiny, still born planets. They sent Dawn out to fly around them, map them, and look for evidence that will transport them to very early days of our solar system.

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