When Worlds Collide: NASA Telescope Spots Debris

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Telescope sees planets collide

A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets orbiting a young star.

Astronomers say the cosmic smash-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.

In this case, two rocky bodies are thought to have slammed into one another in the last few thousand years.

Details are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The collision involved one object that was at least as big as our Moon and another that was at least as big as Mercury.

The impact destroyed the smaller body, vaporising huge amounts of rock and flinging plumes of hot lava into space.

Infrared detectors on Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope were able to pick up the signatures of the vaporised rock, along with fragments of hardened lava, known as tektites.

Technorati Tags: astronomy, NASA

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Kepler Planet-Seeking Satellite Does its Job Well

National Briefing - Science - Kepler Satellite Quickly Spies a Planet - NYTimes.com

Kepler, the satellite launched by NASA in March to hunt for planets around other stars, found a planet in its first 10 days of operation, astronomers said. Astronomers already knew about the planet from other kinds of observations that swing around a yellow star in Cygnus known as HAT-P-7. This planet is too hot and massive for life, but the ease and precision with which Kepler was able to discern its presence bodes well for the satellite’s ability to find more hospitable Earth-like planets, the Kepler astronomers said in a news release and in a paper to be published in the journal Science on Friday.

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Spitzer Space Telescope Discovers Galaxy, "Wild Creature of the Dark"

NASA - Coiled Creature of the Night

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark -- a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.

The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white.

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame in comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars.

The galaxy's red spiral arms and the swirling spokes seen between the arms show dust heated by newborn stars. Older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue. The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy. Astronomers say it is unclear whether this companion poked a hole in the larger galaxy, or just happens to be aligned in a gap in the arms.

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