News by Subject Space & Planetary

Cristina Ramos Almeida, researcher at the IAC, and Claudio Ricci, from the Institute of Astronomy of the Universidad Católica de Chile, publish a review in Nature Astronomy of the most recent results on the material that obscures active galactic nuclei obtained from infrared and X-ray observations, their respective fields of research.

A 50-year-old debate has at last been settled: the highest-energy cosmic rays do not originate in our own Galaxy but in galaxies located tens or even hundreds of millions of light years away. The evidence comes from the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, which has been gathering data since 2004 about these particles that constantly bombard the Earth. The CNRS is the observatory's principal French funding agency.

Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays -- whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way. The answer is a galaxy or galaxies far, far away, according to a report published Sept. 22 in Science by the Pierre Auger Collaboration.

A new study reveals that cosmic rays with the highest energies that make their way to Earth originated from outside our Milky Way galaxy.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope helped an international team of astronomers find that an unusual object in the asteroid belt is, in fact, two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. These include a bright halo of material, called a coma, and a long tail of dust.

The most-studied galaxy in the universe -- the Milky Way -- might not be as 'typical' as previously thought, according to a new study. Early results from the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey indicate that the Milky Way's satellites are much more tranquil than other systems of comparable luminosity and environment. Many satellites of those 'sibling' galaxies are actively pumping out new stars, but the Milky Way's satellites are mostly inert, the researchers found.

Astronomers have used ALMA to capture a strikingly beautiful view of a delicate bubble of expelled material around the exotic red star U Antliae. These observations will help astronomers to better understand how stars evolve during the later stages of their life-cycles.