News

Rogue stars ejected from the galaxy are found in intergalactic space

Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core.

Vesta shown by NASA's Dawn mission

NASA's Dawn mission has rivealed new images of the giant asteroid Vesta, uncovering new intriguing secrects of its surface. The latest results include stunning colorized images that suggest that the giant asteroid has an unexpectedly wide variety of rocks on its surface and gravity data that show Vesta is curiously dense at the south pole.

ALMA Reveals Workings of Nearby Planetary System

A new observatory still under construction has given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby planetary system and provided valuable clues about how such systems form and evolve. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut must be much smaller than originally thought.

Herschel sees dusty disc of crushed comets

Astronomers using ESA's Herschel Space Observatory have studied a ring of dust around the nearby star Fomalhaut and have deduced that it is created by the collision of thousands of comets every day.

Kepler Explorer App: Planets At Your Fingertips

Kepler Explorer, a new app for iPads and iPhones developed by OpenLab, provides interactive displays of recently discovered planetary systems based on Kepler data. The app starts with drop-down menus listing all the Kepler-discovered planetary systems, including our own solar system.The app is now available for free on the iTunes Apple Store.

EXOMARS: Esa goes on with Russian support

After NASA abandoned the EXOMARS project, the European Space Agency (ESA) turned to the support of the Russian Federal Space Agency (RosCosmos), which will donate the delivery system, the Proton rocket. The european mission will start in 2016. The comment of the President of INAF and COSPAR Giovanni Bignami.

Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs

A new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighbourhood. This is the first direct measurement of the frequency of super-Earths around red dwarfs, which account for 80% of the stars in the Milky Way.

The engine of the Crab Nebula

The pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula is bursting with energy. This was just confirmed by the MAGIC collaboration operating two large telescopes on the Canary islands. MAGIC observed the pulsar and found out periodic emission of short pulses stretching till the energies as high as 400 GeV. This is 50-100 times more than expected from theory.

Black holes: a new theory is coming

Astronomers from the UK and Australia have put forward a new theory about why black holes become so hugely massive, growing so fast that they are ten billions of times heavier than the Sun. Black holes grow sucking in a disc of gas spiraling around the hole. The astronomers are now trying to find some solutions and explanations and they're testing new theories. They are wondering what would happen if the gas came from different directions at the same time. This might explain how these black holes got so big so fast.

VISTA Stares Deep into the Cosmos

ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects.

The Feeding Habits of Teenage Galaxies

New observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope are making a major contribution to understanding the growth of adolescent galaxies. In the biggest survey of its kind astronomers have found that galaxies changed their eating habits during their teenage years - the period from about 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang.

Solar Storm and auroras in progress

NASA claimed the second strongest solar storm just happened since the beginning of the new solar cycle. The comments of INAF’s solar astrophysicists Alessandro Bemporad and Mauro Messerotti.

The Hercules fighting galaxies

A new spectacular image from the VST (VLT Survey Telescope) the Italian instrument realized from INAF - OA Capodimonte in collaboration with ESO.

Re-Ionization: When and How?

National Workshop. April 11-12, 2012. IASF Milano, via Bassini 15, 20133 Milano

X-ray Astronomy: towards the next 50 years!

International conference, Oct 1st to Oct 5th, 2012, Milan (Italy)

The Time Machine Factory

We are pleased to announce that the conference "The Time Machine Factory" will be held in Torino (Italy), from October 14 to 19, 2012. The conference is being organized by Osservatorio Astrofisico of Torino- INAF, INRiM and Politecnico di Torino.