Heavens

This image of Abell 2744 is the first to come from Hubble's Frontier Fields observing programme, which is using the magnifying power of enormous galaxy clusters to peer deep into the distant Universe. Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, is thought to have a very violent history, having formed from a cosmic pile-up of multiple galaxy clusters.

After nearly a decade of development, construction and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets orbiting around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

"Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we were seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect," says Bruce Macintosh of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the team who built the instrument.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A team of scientists led by astronomers at the University of California, Riverside has used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to uncover the long-suspected underlying population of galaxies that produced the bulk of new stars during the universe's early years.

The galaxies are the smallest, faintest, and most numerous galaxies ever seen in the remote universe, and were captured by Hubble deep exposures taken in ultraviolet light.

After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

When Cyclone Phailin hit India in late 2013 it became the largest storm to batter the subcontinent in over a decade. The storm, officially classified as a Category 5 tropical cyclone, affected more than 12 million people in India and neighboring countries, and required mass evacuations.

This news release is available in German.

The efficiency of the new method is based on a X-ray focussing optics being firmly fixed to the object to be imaged. While this approach initially provides a blurry image, this can be focussed in the computer based on the hologram information. At the same time, the rigid connection between the object and the focussing optics elegantly solves the problem of vibration induced jitter that plays an enormous role at the nanometre scale.

COLLEGE PARK, MD – Students in a University of Maryland undergraduate astronomy class have made a rare discovery that wowed professional astronomers: a previously unstudied asteroid is actually a pair of asteroids that orbit and regularly eclipse one another.

Fewer than 100 asteroids of this type have been identified in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, said Melissa Hayes-Gehrke, who teaches the hands-on class for non-astronomy majors in which eight students made the find in the fall semester 2013.

Green space in towns and cities could lead to significant and sustained improvements in mental health, finds a new study published in the journal of Environmental Science & Technology.

Analysing data that followed people over a five year period, the research has found that moving to a greener area not only improves people's mental health, but that the effect continues long after they have moved.

The findings add to evidence that suggests increasing green spaces in cities - such as parks and gardens - could deliver substantial benefits to public health.

An international team of astronomers, using NASA's Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.

This accomplishment opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes. It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Surprisingly, although the planet weighs the same as Earth, it is 60 percent larger in diameter, meaning that it must have a very thick, gaseous atmosphere.

A newly discovered system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar--all packed within a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun -- is enabling astronomers to probe a range of cosmic mysteries, including the very nature of gravity itself.

The international team, which includes UBC astronomer Ingrid Stairs, reports their findings in the journal Nature on January 5.

Striking new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope capture, for the first time, the remains of a recent supernova brimming with freshly formed dust. If enough of this dust makes the perilous transition into interstellar space, it could explain how many galaxies acquired their dusty, dusky appearance.

Galaxies can be remarkably dusty places and supernovas are thought to be a primary source of that dust, especially in the early Universe. Direct evidence of a supernova's dust-making capabilities, however, has been slim and cannot account for the copious amount of dust detected in young, distant galaxies.

A newly discovered system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar--all packed within a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun -- is enabling astronomers to probe a range of cosmic mysteries, including the very nature of gravity itself.

The international team, which includes UBC astronomer Ingrid Stairs, reports their findings in the journal Nature on January 5.

Self-driving vehicles offer the promise of significant benefits to society, but raise several policy challenges, including the need to update insurance liability regulations and privacy concerns such as who will control the data generated by this technology, according to a new RAND Corporation study.