ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

NASA's Dawn spacecraft captures best-ever view of dwarf planet Ceres Posted: 27 Jan 2015 11:11 AM PST NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever seen of the dwarf planet Ceres. The images were taken 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) from Ceres on Jan. 25, and represent a new milestone for a spacecraft that soon will become the first human-made probe to visit a dwarf planet.

Asteroid that flew past Earth has moon Posted: 27 Jan 2015 11:06 AM PST Scientists working with NASA's 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, have released the first radar images of asteroid 2004 BL86. The images show the asteroid, which made its closest approach on Jan. 26, 2015 at 8:19 a.m. PST (11:19 a.m. EST) at a distance of about 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers, or 3.1 times the distance from Earth to the moon), has its own small moon.

'Yellowballs' are part of the development of massive star Posted: 27 Jan 2015 10:11 AM PST Citizen scientists wanted to know: What are the yellow objects on these infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope? Astronomers now report that the "yellowballs" are part of the development of massive stars.

Bubbles from the galactic center: A key to understanding dark matter and our galaxy's past? Posted: 27 Jan 2015 08:14 AM PST The astrophysicists who discovered two enormous radiation bubbles in the center of our galaxy discuss what they may tell us about the Milky Way and how they could help in the search for dark matter.

Ancient star system reveals Earth-sized planets forming near start of universe Posted: 27 Jan 2015 08:14 AM PST A Sun-like star with orbiting planets, dating back to the dawn of the Galaxy, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. At 11.2 billion years old, it is the oldest star with Earth-sized planets ever found and proves that such planets have formed throughout the history of the Universe.