New Discoveries at Mercury

Mercury's magnetic field is "alive." Volcanic vents ring the planet's giant Caloris Basin. And Mercury has shrunk in on itself more than previously suspected.
These are just a few of the new discoveries by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, which flew past Mercury on January 14, 2008. The results are described in a series of 11 papers published in a special July 4th issue of Science magazine.
Six of the papers in Science report studies of the planet's surface--its colors, mineralogy, and the shape of its terrain. For instance, the color enhanced image below reveals evidence of volcanic vents along the margins of Caloris basin, one of the Solar System's largest and youngest impact basins:
"By combining Mariner 10 and MESSENGER data, the science team was able to reconstruct a comprehensive geologic history of the entire Caloris basin interior," says James Head of Brown University, lead author of one of the Science reports. "The basin was formed from an impact by an asteroid or comet during a period of heavy bombardment in the first billion years of Solar System history. As with the lunar maria, a period of volcanic activity followed, producing lava flows that filled the basin interior. This volcanism is responsible for the comparatively light, red material of the interior plains intermingled with [newer] impact crater deposits."
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The Heat is On: Spitzer's Infrared Views of the Cosmos

RCW 38 is at a distance of ~1.7 kpc (~5500 light years) from us, near the famous Vela supernova remnant and the Gum nebula. This starforming region contains a number of highly massive O stars embedded in a dense obscuring cloud. The stars are about 2 million years old, indicating that star formation is ongoing is this relatively young region.

Telescope snaps most distant object

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers tracking a mysterious blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe -- a smudge 13 billion light-years away.

Hawaii's Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst.

"Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun," said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old -- at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

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Peanut-shaped Stellar Explosion Spotted By Hubble

ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2009) — Using the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an international team of astronomers have taken the first optical images of a dramatic stellar outburst and discovered a peanut-shaped bubble expanding rapidly into space.

Team member Valerio Ribeiro, a graduate student from Liverpool John Moores University presented their results on Wednesday 22nd April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire. Read more......

Mauna Kea telescopes spy mysterious blob at cosmic dawn

April 23, 2009 - Mauna Kea, Hawaii

This composite image of Himiko, an Alpha-Lyman blob, is shown in false color. Himiko sits nearly 13 billion light years from Earth and spans 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. The thick horizontal bar at the lower right corner presents a size of 10 thousand light years.

Using a number of telescopes, including the Subaru and Keck observatories on the summit of Mauna Kea, scientists have discovered what they describe as a mysterious space blob 13 billion light years from Earth.

Dubbed Lyman-Alpha blobs, these huge bodies of gas are thought to be precursors to galaxies.

Astronomers using the Japanese Subaru telescope were the first to find it, and therefore have named this object Himiko for a legendary Japanese queen. Himiko stretches for 55 thousand light years, a length comparable to the radius of the Milky Way's disk, which is a record for that early point in time.

A press release about the discovery issued by the W.M. Keck Observatory said this Lyman-Alpha blob is one of the most distant objects ever found. Its distance does not easily allow researchers to understand its physical origins. The object could therefore be ionized gas powered by a super-massive black hole, a primordial galaxy with large gas accretion, a collision of two large young galaxies, super wind from intensive star formation or a single giant galaxy with a large mass of about 40 billion Suns.
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A world away, two planets somewhat like Earth

By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer

The most Earth-sized planet and the most temperate planet known beyond our solar system both circle a dim red star 21 light-years away. These discoveries, announced yesterday at a meeting in England, moved astronomers a step closer to their dreams of finding other planets capable of supporting life as we understand it.
Since 1995, scientists have found more than 350 planets orbiting other stars, but most suffer from the same problems that make our neighbors in the solar system so inhospitable.
Many of the so-called extrasolar planets orbit so close that their stars would sterilize their surfaces. Others are jumbo "gas giants," like Jupiter, and therefore unlikely to have solid surfaces.
Astronomers suspect that Earthlike planets are out there but that they are nearly impossible to detect with current technology.
This latest finding came from a Swiss and French team working at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. They announced this latest finding at an international conference at the University of Hertfordshire, in conjunction with the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.
For the last four years, the team has been studying this relatively nearby solar system, called Gliese 581, named after Wilhelm Gliese, who cataloged this and other nearby stars. It now appears to have four planets. Read More.....

Scientists discover lightest exoplanet yet

The planet orbiting Gliese 581 has a mass twice that of Earth.
Provided by ESO
April 21, 2009 Well-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet "e" in the famous system Gliese 581 is only about twice the mass of Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist. These amazing discoveries are the outcome of more than 4 years of observations using the most successful low-mass-exoplanet hunter in the world, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph attached to the 3.6-meter European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope at La Silla, Chile. Read More....