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+12 +3
Astronomers Create Map of Milky Way's Central Bulge
Two international teams of astronomers have used two telescopes in Chile to produce the best 3D map yet of the central bulge of our Milky Way Galaxy.
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+11 +3
Found: A Strange Lonely Planet without a Star
An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes.
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+10 +1
Alien spotting: By 2020, we’ll finally have the ability to locate life-harboring, alien planets
The latest estimate is that there are up to 50 sextillion potentially habitable planets in the universe. Now it’s time to go one step further, though: The scientific community is preparing to launch a bevy of new space telescopes that can peer across the universe and tell us how many of those planets actually harbor life.
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+10 +3
Strange Object Boosts Kuiper Belt Mystery
As we probably all know by now, the Kuiper belt — a populated region of the solar system found just beyond the orbit of Neptune — is a strange place. Once thought to have a population of just one, astronomers have identified thousands of other minor planetary bodies. In fact, it was the accelerated discoveries in the Kuiper belt that ultimately led to the reclassification (or demotion, depending on which way you look at it) of Pluto from “planet” to lowly “dwarf planet.”
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+10 +4
When Galaxies Collide: The Growth of Supermassive Black Holes
Galaxies may look pretty and delicate, with their swirls of stars of many colours – but don’t be fooled. At the heart of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, including in our own Milky Way.
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+13 +1
NASA Satellite Captures Brightest Space Explosion Ever Recorded
The monster gamma ray burst happened only a quarter of the universe away, which scientists say makes it one of the best chances to observe a collapsing star ever.
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0 +1
Hubble Space Telescope Sees Evidence of Water Vapor Venting off Jupiter Moon
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.
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+17 +1
Deepest galaxy cluster ever pictured
The "deepest ever" image of a group of galaxies - "Pandora's Cluster" - has been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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+11 +1
Could Some Alien Worlds Be More Habitable Than Earth?
Planet hunters have always been keen to find Earth's twin, but an astrobiology team now suggests that "superhabitable" planets may be even better places to look for alien life.
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+26 +1
Spiral Galaxies in Collision
Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart.
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+9 +1
Astronomers Create Cloud Map of Nearby Brown Dwarf Luhman 16B
Scientists using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have learned what the weather is like on the surface of one of the objects in the system Luhman 16AB.
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+13 +1
The Oldest Known Star In The Universe
Astronomers announced yesterday that they discovered the oldest known star in the universe. They believe the star is from the second generation of stars ever to form.
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+15 +1
NASA's Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision
The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during an encounter with the Andromeda galaxy, predicted to happen 4 billion years from now.
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+19 +1
Here's why the Europa mission is real, and could very well happen
How is this possible? Especially in a time of very tight budgets? After all any credible mission to fly a large robotic mission to Europa, land and possibly penetrate the ice to see if life is indeed there would be incredibly expensive. And NASA has said it can afford no more Flagship-class science missions.
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+16 +1
Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet
The vast majority of stars in our Milky Way galaxy host planets, many of which may be capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study suggests. Astronomers have detected eight new exoplanet candidates circling nearby red dwarf stars, which make up at least 75 percent of the galaxy's 100 billion or so stars.
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+23 +1
Why Aliens and Volcanoes Go Together
The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia. It was a good fit: Lovelock believed that the living and inanimate parts of the Earth formed a single, interacting, and self-regulating system. Lovelock’s work grew, in part, out of research he had done for NASA, and published in a 1965 Nature paper, about the signs of life we might look for on other planets.
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+22 +1
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel
A tediously accurate map of the solar system
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+22 +1
Milky Way Punier Than We Thought
Looks like our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has gone on the ultimate weight-loss program, according to astronomers. According to a new supercomputer simulation, it turns out that the entire mass of our Milky Way galaxy is about half that of the great Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbouring spiral galaxy some 2.6 million light-years away from us. Astronomers had long thought the galaxies were twins.
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+2 +1
Hubble confirmed the existence of an unusually distant galaxy cluster
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+21 +1
Astronomers Find A Supermassive Black Hole In A Tiny Galaxy
An international team of astronomers have announced that they’ve discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M60-UCD1. This is the smallest known galaxy to have a supermassive black hole.
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