Astronomers unveil largest map of cold cosmic dust

October 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - The Herschel telescope has captured images of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way, a region that is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string. On September 3, Herschel aimed its telescope at a reservoir of cold gas in the constellation of the Southern Cross near the Galactic Plane.

September 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - By linking the twin, 10-meter telescopes in Hawaii, astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory discovered an extended, double-layered dust disk orbiting 51 Ophiuchi, a star that is 410 light-years from Earth.

September 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new analysis by scientists has determined that a billion-light-year-wide cold spot in the universe, which was found in 2004, is merely a statistical artifact, and one that's really nothing special. Earlier, theories had abounded that it's a cosmic defect, a mysterious supervoid, or even an "imprint" of a parallel universe.

September 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In high-resolution images of comet Holmes, which erupted in 2007, astronomers have detected multiple "mini comets" bursting out at 451 kilometers an hour, which is the largest known cometary outburst in history. According to National Geographic News, the fragments were recently revealed in high-resolution images of comet Holmes, a relatively small body discovered in 1892 that mysteriously erupted in 2007.

September 4th, 2009 TORONTO - Andromeda and Triangulum, the two galaxies closest to our own, collided two to three billion years ago, changing the galactic structure, according to evidence unearthed by astronomers. The collision appears to have plucked millions of stars from the Triangulum disk to form a faint stream visible in the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) data, says Larry Widrow, professor of physics and Astronomy at Queen's University.

August 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has made the most high-resolution images of a dying giant star to date. Led by Keiichi Ohnaka at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, the astronomers, for the first time showed how the gas is moving in different areas over the surface of a distant star known as Betelgeuse.

August 6th, 2009 MUNICH - Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have determined that interactions in a star that has a companion may be the engine fuelling its remarkable nebula. The astronomers found the star in a stunning new image of a field of stars towards the constellation of Carina.

July 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The world's largest, most technologically advanced telescope is all set to make its formal debut on July 24 in Spain's Canary Islands. Known as the Gran Telescopio Canarias, the telescope has a 10.4-meter diameter mirror, and has more light-collecting area than any other telescope.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new image, taken with an infrared camera on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, has revealed a cosmic fireworks display, in the form of tens of thousands of previously unseen comet-shaped knots inside the Helix Nebula. he sheer number of knots - more than have ever been seen before - looks like a massive fireworks display in space.

June 26th, 2009 MUNICH - With help of a unique "ballistic study" that combines data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have now solved a long-standing mystery of the Milky Way's particle accelerators. The study shows that cosmic rays from our galaxy are very efficiently accelerated in the remnants of exploded stars.

June 25th, 2009 LONDON - A new research by European scientists has provided evidence that an enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus is fed by a salty ocean, a discovery that may have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. The Cassini spacecraft made a surprising discovery about Saturn's sixth largest moon, Enceladus, on its exploration of the giant ringed planet in 2005.

June 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New data obtained from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes has pinpointed the source of "cosmic blobs" as growing supermassive black holes. This discovery helps resolve the true nature of gigantic blobs of gas observed around very young galaxies.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions called supernovae in distant galaxies, variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way, and reveal new classes of astronomical objects. All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has found most dark gamma-ray bursts occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes. Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

April 8th, 2009 BERLIN - The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the image of an oddball galaxy that is highlighted with striking swirling dust lanes and glittering globular clusters. Dubbed NGC 7049, the galaxy is found in the constellation of Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies, a so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG).