Read article: ‘Floating planets’ challenge theorists
Many planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but they are usually detected by observing the wobble of the parent star induced by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. Zapatero ...
The Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the velocity of a galaxy increases with distance, is one of the most fundamental constants in cosmology. Astronomers can only obtain an accurate value f...
Read article: New planets and star birth in Manchester
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will present evidence for what it believes is the youngest massive star cluster ever detected in the Milky Way. It contains about 100 type-O stars, th...
The origin of gamma-ray bursts is one of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics. Some 3000 of these short-lived bursts of intense gamma-rays have been detected in the last three decades, but it...
The other priorities established by the panel are the ground-based 30-metre Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, the space-based Constellation-X Observatory, expansion of the Very Large Array radio teles...
Fundamental physics is a new activity for ESA, although it has ambitious plans to launch LISA, a set of three spacecraft that would detect gravitational waves. It is also considering proposals to test...
Read article: Hubble prepares for the next ten years
Recently a “second decade” working group looked at the future of the billion-dollar telescope, which is funded by NASA and the European Space Agency. After ten years in orbit, what more ca...
The first virtual observatory to receive significant funding will be a European project called ASTROVIRTEL, which is based at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany. European astronomers will be ab...
Read article: Hubble sees mystery object
There are four possible explanations for the object: a highly obscured galaxy, an old elliptical galaxy at redshift 3 or 4, a galaxy at redshift 12, or an intergalactic carbon star. However, there are...
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...
