Supernova link to gamma-ray bursts
A supernova explosion marks the death of a certain type of star. During the evolution of these stars, nuclear reactions take place at their cores, creating light elements like hydrogen and helium. Hea...
Read article: Astronomers find middleweight black hole
Astronomers find middleweight black hole
The black hole is around 600 light years from the centre of galaxy M82. “This black hole might eventually sink to the centre of the galaxy where it may grow to become a supermassive black hole&#...
Read article: Ulysses probes the solar maximum
Ulysses probes the solar maximum
“Solar activity has been increasing for the past three or four years, and now Ulysses has started observing much more disturbed conditions at increasing solar latitudes,” explains Andre Ba...
Cluster takes shape
The Rumba and Tango satellites were sent into space on board a French-Russia launcher. Over the next week they will rendezvous with the Salsa and Samba satellites that were launched on July 16. The fo...
Read article: Wobbling pulsar discovered
Wobbling pulsar discovered
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, and are the collapsed cores of supergiant stars that have exploded as supernovae. They are extremely dense, typically 20 km across but with masses a million times g...
Comet Hyakutake makes a mark on Ulysses
Ulysses was launched to make continuous measurements of the solar wind, a steady stream of ionized particles that flows outwards from the star. In 1998 Pete Riley and colleagues from Los Alamos Nation...
Astronomers check out the far side of the Sun
Charles Lindsey of the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Arizona and Douglas Braun of Northwest Research Associates in Colorado used data from a Doppler imager on the Solar Heliospheric Observator...
Black holes ‘mimic’ the Sun
The team claim to have evidence for: an thin outer layer that is hot; a warm middle layer that is also optically thick; and a “cold” inner layer. The similarity of these layers to that of ...
‘Naked’ black holes seen
Black holes are usually detected by the effects of their vast gravitational field on the orbits of nearby astronomical objects such as stars. Naked black holes have no such material near them making i...
Astronomy and physics dominate Science top ten
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang...
