Slow period upsets pulsar theories
Inside a pulsar the neutrons are thought to decay into protons and electrons, which are then accelerated by the pulsar’s powerful magnetic field. Since protons and electrons are charged particle...
New light on the Solar corona
The solar corona reaches temperatures of 1 million degrees Kelvin, while the Sun’s surface – the photosphere – is only 6000 Kelvin. The researchers used the UV camera on TRACE to cre...
Shuttle launches X-ray telescope
X-ray observations with Chandra will complement infrared images from the Hubble Space Telescope and higher-energy observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will have a resolution that...
Galactic nuclei outdistances quasars
Wil van Breugel from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands found their galactic nucleus by looking for ...
How to predict solar flares
Richard Canfield and David McKenzie from Montana State University in the US, and Hugh Hudson from the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Japan, analysed two years worth of images from the X-ray sat...
Hubble upsets star-formation theories
The stellar history of local galaxies is calculated by plotting the different size and brightness of stars in the target galaxy. However, when viewed from Earth, star systems and star clusters can som...
Gamma-ray bursts spring more surprises
There are a number of reasons why GRB980425 is associated with SN1998bw. Both occurred at the same time, at the same location and in the same direction as each other. SN1998bw is also a rare Type Ib/c...
Scientists hail SOHO
“This is the best news I’ve heard since we lost contact with SOHO” says Roger Bonnet, ESA’s director of science. “We should just hope that the damage sustained by SOHO...
Radar finds SOHO
Attempts to locate the satellite with NASA’s Deep Space Network had been unsuccessful. However, by bouncing radio waves from the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico off the satellite, and detecti...
Black hole alert for astronomers
When a star explodes as a supernova, the remnants of the explosion can fall inwards to form a neutron star or a black hole. Neutron stars are easy to detect because they emit powerful radio waves. Bla...
