A team of astronomers has discovered that a very bright star located two thousand light-years from Earth appears to lose its luminosity every 27 years for 18 months due to an "eclipse." Their study is published today in the journal Nature.
For centuries, astronomical phenomena have been taken as initiatory signals to divine the future or explain the evils of the present. Miguel Ángel Sabadell reviews the role that superstition and astrology have played in the history of humanity.
These bright blue stars are not only older than they appear, but instead of running out of fuel, they gain mass at the end of their life, a phenomenon that has puzzled astronomers for decades. Now, Robert Mathieu, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), believes he has solved the enigma.
Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who has been in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS) for about 80 days, has used his mobile phone to post a series of unusual images of the Earth captured from outer space on his Twitter account. some of them taken from the recently opened viewpoint.
The discovery of a star that could be as old as the Universe supports the theory that the Milky Way "devoured" other smaller galaxies to its current size, according to a study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge ( USA).
These are observation instruments that can work without human intervention, thanks to computerized devices such as automatic focusing systems, CCD cameras, detectors of meteorological conditions, and so on. Generally small or medium in size, they allow the astronomer to access, through the internet, the data they collect from places far from the telescope.
María Cruz Gálvez-Ortiz and Dr. John Barnes, astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire, have participated together with other European astronomers in the discovery of the youngest exoplanet known around a solar-type star, which has been baptized as BD + 20 1790b.
At the dawn of the universe, the galaxies in which stars were created contained between three and ten times more molecular gas than their current counterparts, according to a study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and published today by Nature. The discovery, in which the Spanish astronomer Santiago Garcia-Burillo of the National Astronomical Observatory has participated, explains the high rate of star creation in young galaxies.
Danni Büchner is invited to Sam Dylan's Halloween party. But the "Goodbye Germany" emigrant has no desire for many other party guests. And find clear words.
