Technology

New discovery of very bright and most distant supernovae

A small portion of one of the fields from the Supernova Legacy Survey showing SNLS-06D4eu and its host galaxy (arrow). The supernova and its host galaxy are so far away that both are a tiny point of light that cannot be clearly differentiated in this image. The large, bright objects with spikes are stars in our own galaxy. Every other point of light is a distant galaxy. (Credit: UCSB)

Main Point:

Astronomers have found two “dinosaurs of supernovae”, i.e. super luminous supernovae, while working for the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) in 2006 and 2007. Read more…

Europe’s Gaia mission to study our galaxy in 3D

Gaia liftoff (Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja, 2013)

Main Points:

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched its 740m-euro (£620m) star-surveying satellite Gaia aboard a Russian-made Soyuz rocket into space from the Sinnamary complex in French Guiana on Thursday at 06:12 local time (09:12 GMT). Gaia is named after an ancient Greek mythic deity. Read more…

NASA’s colorful images of landscapes of asteroid Vesta

This colorful composite image from NASA’s Dawn mission shows the flow of material inside and outside a crater called Aelia on the giant asteroid Vesta. The area is around 14 degrees south latitude. The images that went into this composite were obtained by Dawn’s framing camera from September to October 2011. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLAMPS/DLR/IDA)

Main Point:

Scientists have revealed the colorful geological structures in newly published images of the giant asteroid Vesta. Read more…

First-ever clear view of W49A in our galaxy

This image from the Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array maps the projected density of molecular gas in the central 30 light-years of W49A. Brighter colors mark denser regions. The brightest region at the image center is less than three light-years across, yet it contains about 50,000 Suns’ worth of molecular gas.
(Credit: Roberto Galván-Madrid (ESO)/Hauyu Baobab Liu (ASIAA, Taiwan)/Tzu-Cheng Peng (ESO))

Main Point:

Astronomers got a first-ever clear view of a giant star cluster formation in W49A region located on the opposite side of our galaxy. Read more…

4 spiral arms are reassured for our galaxy

This shows the distribution of massive stars in the new study. Our location within the Galaxy is circled in black. (Image credit: J. Urquhart et al. Background image by Robert Hurt of the Spitzer Science Center.)

Main Points:

Scientists have finally confirmed that our Milky Way galaxy has four spiral arms. This confirmation has been done after a study of massive stars in the Milky Way for about 12-years.

Published in:

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Study Further:

We live in Milky Way galaxy and that is the reason, we cannot look at its shape from outside – at last not at this time, perhaps in the future we may be able to see – so, the scientists devised a way to deduce its shape from the study of the stars present in it and their distances from us.

Initially, in 1950s, astronomers used radio telescopes to observe our Galaxy with the help of clouds of gas in which new stars are formed. They noted four major arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Then, NASA’s Spitzer telescope looked at low-mass stars in 2008 and showed only two arms resulting in a debate among astronomers.

In the present study, astronomers used several radio telescopes in Australia, USA and China and looked at about 1650 massive stars that had been identified by the RMS Survey. They reassured that our Milky Way galaxy has four spiral arms. Massive stars have less life, i.e. about 10 million years, than lower mass counterparts resulting in their less common presence in galaxies. Read more…