European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: NASA/SWIFT

Most detailed seurveys ever of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
UV image credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)
Visible image credit: Axel Mellinger, Central Michigan Univ.

Astronomers at NASA and Pennsylvania State University have used NASA's Swift satellite to create the most detailed ultraviolet light surveys ever of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies.

"We took thousands of images and assembled them into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy, resulting in the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths," said Stefan Immler, who proposed the program and led NASA's contribution from the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Immler presented a 160-megapixel mosaic image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and a 57-megapixel mosaic image of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) at the 222nd American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis on Monday.

The new images reveal about 1 million ultraviolet sources in the LMC and about 250,000 in the SMC. The images include light ranging from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms, which is a range of UV wavelengths largely blocked by Earth's atmosphere. (read more)

Source: NASA/Swift

An artist's rendering of an outburst on an ultra-magnetic neutron star, also called a magnetar.
Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Astronomers using NASA's Swift X-ray Telescope have observed a spinning neutron star suddenly slowing down, yielding clues they can use to understand these extremely dense objects.

A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight, and exploded as a supernova. A neutron star can spin as fast as 43,000 times per minute and boast a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth's. Matter within a neutron star is so dense a teaspoonful would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.

This neutron star, 1E 2259+586, is located about 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It is one of about two dozen neutron stars called magnetars, which have very powerful magnetic fields and occasionally produce high-energy explosions or pulses.

Observations of X-ray pulses from 1E 2259+586 from July 2011 through mid-April 2012 indicated the magnetar's rotation was gradually slowing from once every seven seconds, or about eight revolutions per minute. On April 28, 2012, data showed the spin rate had decreased abruptly, by 2.2 millionths of a second, and the magnetar was spinning down at a faster rate. (read more)

Source: ESA

Massive star cluster Cyg OB2.
Image credits: ESA/G. Rauw.

Two massive stars racing in orbit around each other have had their colliding stellar winds X-rayed for the first time, thanks to the combined efforts of ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Swift space telescopes.(read more)

Source: NASA/SWIFT

Video Source: YouTube

Source: NASA Science News

Artist's impression of the evaporation of HD 189733b's atmosphere.
Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Working in tandem, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Swift satellite have caught a distant star blasting one of its own planets with a powerful stellar flare. The eruption stripped thousands of tons of material from the planet's atmosphere. (read more)

Source: NASA News/SWIFT

Image credit: NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al

Two studies appearing in the August 25 issue of th journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco. (read more)

Source: NASA News

Hubble Space Telescope image of (596) Scheila.
Image credits: NASA/ESA/D. Jewitt (UCLA).

Late last year, astronomers noticed an asteroid named Scheila had unexpectedly brightened, and it was sporting short-lived plumes. Data from NASA's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope showed these changes likely occurred after Scheila was struck by a much smaller asteroid.

"Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons," said Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park and lead author of the Swift study. "Yet this is the first time we've been able to catch one just weeks after the smash-up, long before the evidence fades away."

Asteroids are rocky fragments thought to be debris from the formation and evolution of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Millions of them orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt. Scheila is approximately 70 miles across and orbits the sun every five years. (read more)

Source: NASA News

NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to study one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts yet observed. More than a week later, high-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from its location.

Astronomers say they have never seen anything this bright, long-lasting and variable before. Usually, gamma-ray bursts mark the destruction of a massive star, but flaring emission from these events never lasts more than a few hours.

Although research is ongoing, astronomers say that the unusual blast likely arose when a star wandered too close to its galaxy's central black hole. Intense tidal forces tore the star apart, and the infalling gas continues to stream toward the hole. According to this model, the spinning black hole formed an outflowing jet along its rotational axis. A powerful blast of X- and gamma rays is seen if this jet is pointed in our direction. (read more)