Astronomers have spotted a carbon-rich asteroid in the icy region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt — the first such asteroid ever found exiled from the inner solar system.
ESO telescopes find first confirmed carbon-rich asteroid in Kuiper Belt
Planets are basically just giant dust bunnies.
Alpha Centauri, a three-star system just 4 light-years away that is the sun’s nearest neighbor, ought to be a great place to look for Earth-like planets. But last week, at a meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) here, astronomers lamented the way the system has thwarted discovery efforts so far—and announced new efforts to probe it.
M– USE data points to isolated neutron star beyond our galaxy
A dark cloud of cosmic dust snakes across this spectacular wide field image, illuminated by the brilliant light of new stars.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System — the ageing red giant π1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from the PIONIER instrument reveals the convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star, which has 350 times the diameter of the Sun. Each cell covers more than a quarter of the star’s diameter and measures about 120 million kilometres across. These new results are being published this week in the journal Nature.
Astronomers recently scrambled to observe an intriguing asteroid that zipped through the solar system on a steep trajectory from interstellar space—the first confirmed object from another star.
An international team of astronomers from Chile and Germany has managed to capture an image of unprecedented detail of another star — that isn’t the Sun — the red supergiant star Antares. The team has also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in the extended atmosphere of Antares.
For the first time ever, ESO astronomers have been able to capture a clear image of a star system 11 quadrillion kilometers away using the combined forces of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain.
