Astronomers have compiled the first detailed 3D map of the inner regions of the Milky Way. More here.
They find a box/peanut shaped bulge with an elongated bar and a prominent X-structure, which had been hinted at in previous studies. This indicates that the Milky Way was originally a pure disk of stars, which then formed a thin bar, before buckling into the box/peanut shape seen today.
After more than two weeks the labor strike at the ALMA telescope array in Chile has ended.
Some good news from the James Webb Space Telescope: The project manager said today that all the problems outlined in a December GAO report have been resolved.
Some of these issues are also described here.
NASA has lost contact with its Deep Impact probe and is racing against time to save it.
Cumulative data from a variety of space probes now shows that the direction of the interstellar wind has shifted during the past forty years.
A survey of planetary nebulae near the Milky Way’s central bulge has revealed that they tend to be aligned with each other.
This discovery is unexpected and suggests that the influence of the bulge, probably its magnetic field, is far greater than predicted.
Astronomers submit a slew of proposals for using the partly crippled Kepler space telescope.
Ideas range from a survey of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects to a study of Jupiter-sized exoplanets in large orbits. Kepler scientists will sort through the proposals and decide by 1 November which ones, if any, to recommend to NASA headquarters for further review.
Sadly, none of these ideas excites me very much. The tragedy here is that we have this really good optical telescope above the atmosphere, and we can’t point it accurately enough to use it.
Brazil stalls paying its share for the construction of the Extremely Large Telescope.
They signed the agreement in 2010, but can’t get their legislature to allocate the money.
Hubble sees a cosmic caterpillar.
I am always astonished at the weird loveliness of these astronomical objects. They are big, tenuous, faint, and almost impossible to see. And yet, when we tease them out of the darkness they blind us with beauty.
Using the combined power of 200,000 home computers astronomers have discovered 24 new pulsars in the Milky Way.
Astronomers have identified a star almost identical to the Sun, except that it is 4 billion years older.
They have dated this old age by the amount of lithium detected in the star.
A union strike has shut down the new ALMA telescope array in Chile.
