Astrophysics

On June 5th, 2012, the planet Venus will pass in front of the Sun as seen from Earth in what for many will be a once-in-a-lifetime event: a transit of Venus. The transit will be visible across Canada and in other parts of the world, and is already garnering global attention.But should you care? The next transit of Venus will be in 2117  Image courtesy of Antonio Cerezo, Pablo Alexandre, Jesus Merchan and David Marsan “The last transit of Venus occurred in 2004. If you missed it, this...Read Full Story

A study of X-rays emitted a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away has unmasked a stellar mass black hole in Andromeda, a spiral galaxy about 2.6 million light-years from Earth.Two Clemson University researchers joined an an international team of astronomers, including scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in publishing their findings in a pair of scientific journals this week. Scientists had suspected the black hole was possible since late 2009 when an X...Read Full Story

The first scientific results from ESA’s Planck mission were released at a press briefing January 11th in Paris. The findings focus on the coldest objects in the Universe, from within our Galaxy to the distant reaches of space. This animation illustrates the position on the sky of all compact sources detected by Planck during its first all-sky survey and listed in the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC). It shows how they compare to the microwave view of the sky, also seen by...Read Full Story

Using state-of-the-art technology and sophisticated data analysis tools, a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has developed a new and powerful technique to directly determine the mass of an active galaxy at a distance of nearly 9 billion light-years from Earth. Now, a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, led by Dr Katherine Inskip, has, for the first time, succeeded in directly "weighing" both a galaxy and its central black hole at...Read Full Story

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a new statistical study of the so-called 'ultra-compact dwarf galaxies' (UCDs), which are still mysterious objects. A team of astronomers has investigated how many of these UCDs exist in nearby galaxy clusters and groups. They show that the properties of UCDs match those of bright star clusters.Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the results of a detailed investigation of how many 'ultra-compact dwarf galaxies' (UCDs) can be found in nearby galaxy...Read Full Story