European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: ESO Science Release eso1216

The dust ring around Formalhaut.
Image credits: Millimeter/submillimeter: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).
Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

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. This is the first published science result from ALMA in its first period of open observations for astronomers worldwide.(read more)

Source: ESA

Space dust coming off comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann.
Image credits: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (APL/JHU), M. Mutchler and Z. Levay (STScI).

There’s just about nowhere that state-of-the-art space technologies cannot reach – from the martian atmosphere to those hard-to-clean spots under the couch. The search for space dust is giving us cleaner homes. (read more)

Source: NASA/JPL

Supernova remnant called SN 1987A.
Image credit: ESA/NASA-JPL/UCL/STScI

New observations from the infrared Herschel Space Observatory reveal that an exploding star expelled the equivalent of between 160,000 and 230,000 Earth masses of fresh dust. This enormous quantity suggests that exploding stars, called supernovae, are the answer to the long-standing puzzle of what supplied our early universe with dust.(read more)