Some bodies have a very disturbing effect on the order in the solar system - P/2013 P5 is one of them. With several clearly visible tails, it may look like a comet, but orbits around the Sun within the asteroid belt - and thus cannot be unequivocally classified into either of these two categories. An international team which includes scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research has now used the Hubble space telescope to investigate this mysterious body. Their diagnosis: P/2013 P5 is an asteroid that rotates so rapidly under the radiation pressure of the Sun that it loses material into space.
Soon after its discovery in late summer of last year, the media hyped ISON to be the comet of the millennium. At the time when it is expected to come closest to the Sun, on 28 November 2013, it is supposed to shine as bright as the full moon. And even though the predictions have now been revised, ISON could still conjure up a quite passable light show at the beginning of December.
It's a bouncing baby . . . star! Combined observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed the throes of stellar birth as never before in the well-studied object known as HH 46/47.
ISON is approaching the Sun. An international observation campaign which involves ground-based telescopes, space probes and space telescopes has been running for some time and is already providing initial findings. The comet is now in the sights of the STEREO twin probes which monitor our Sun and how it affects the space weather from their orbits. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau is also integrated into the scientific activities.
An international team of high-energy physicists says the discovery of an electrically charged subatomic particle called Zc(4020) is a sign that they have begun to unveil a whole new family of four-quark objects.
Like our Milky Way, every known large galaxy has at its center a supermassive black hole, some of which are surrounded by a super-bright disk of hot gas called a quasar -- but now a research team that includes Penn State astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of quasars in distant galaxies that even the most current theories had not predicted.
Astronomers have discovered a "weird and freakish object" resembling a rotating lawn sprinkler in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The find, reported online in today's (Nov. 7) issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, has left them scratching their heads and searching for an explanation for the strange asteroid's out-of-this-world appearance.
Black holes—massive objects in space with gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape them—come in a variety of sizes. On the smaller end of the scale are the stellar-mass black holes that are formed during the deaths of stars. At the larger end are supermassive black holes, which contain up to one billion times the mass of our sun. Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into the supermassive variety by taking on mass from their surroundings and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain the problem of supermassive black holes existing in the early universe—such black holes would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang.
In a new study, Dartmouth researchers rule out a controversial theory that the accelerating expansion of the universe is an illusion.
NASA technologists working to advance a pioneering technology that promises to detect tiny perturbations in the curvature of space-time now want to apply the same technique to map variations in Earth's gravity field.
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