Super-energetic Bursts Discovered Near Giant Black Hole - July 4 Combining gamma-ray telescopes with the supersharp radio'vision'of the Very Long Baseline Array showed astronomers the location from which very-high-energy gamma rays are emerging from the core ot the giant galaxy M87....Read More
Coolest Spacecraft Ever In Orbit (-273 Degrees Celsius) - July 4 On July 2 the detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument reached their amazingly low operational temperature of -273°C, making them the coldest known objects in space. The spacecraft has also just entered its final orbit around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2....Read More
Largest Ever Survey Of Very Distant Galaxy Clusters Completed - July 3 Astronomers have completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies. Named the Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey,"SpARCS"detects galaxy clusters using deep ground-based optical observations. SpARCS is designed to find clusters, snapped as they appeared long ago in time, when the universe was 6 billion years old or younger....Read More
Favorable chemistry and episodes with thin films of liquid water during ongoing, long-term climate cycles may sometimes make the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed last year a favorable environment for microbes.
