Cosmic dust inteferes with astronomical observations

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.

October 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astrophysicists have used the H.E.S.S. telescopes to detect gamma rays emitting from the heart of the NGC 253 galaxy.

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 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Mathematicians at the University of Leeds, UK, have determined that cosmic flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are produced by jets of plasma that originate from invading black holes. Gamma ray bursts are beams of high-energy radiation that are similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons.

September 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has been declared fully rejuvenated, has captured colorful, multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. Hubble's suite of new instruments allows it to study the universe across a wide swath of the light spectrum, from ultraviolet all the way to near-infrared.

September 9th, 2009 Newly fixed Hubble's deep space photos again amazeWASHINGTON — A refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is showing Earth the sharpest photos yet of cosmic beauty, complete with heavenly glows. NASA on Wednesday unveiled the first deep space photos taken by Hubble since its billion dollar repair mission last spring.

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.

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 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of scientists has analyzed 22 interstellar meteorite grains to suggest the stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict. The analysis was done by University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

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 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A recent US military policy decision explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released. For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by US classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere.

April 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at North Carolina (NC) State University have used a mathematical model that allows them to get a clearer picture of the galaxy's youngest supernova remnant by clearing away the distortions caused by "cosmic dust". Their new data provides evidence that this remnant is from a type Ia supernova - the explosion of a white dwarf star - and raises questions about the ways in which magnetic fields affect the generation of the remnant's cosmic ray particles.

April 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using a two-tonne telescope, scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have found that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away. The finding was a result of a two-year analysis of data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project.

March 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has expanded the Hubble Space Telescope's capability by improving the calibration of its instruments. Dan Batcheldor and his team improved the calibration of Hubble's Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer to enable high-precision polarimetry.

February 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The constellation of Orion the Hunter swaddles a cluster of newborn stars called the Trapezium, each of them as dazzling as 100,000 suns and with 15 to 30 times the sun's mass. Where did the Trapezium stars originate? New data from the Submillimeter Array (SMA), a joint project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is helping answer this question.