A camera used at the Gemini North telescope to monitor sky conditions from Hawaii’s Maunakea captured a remarkable time-lapse sequence of the Kīlauea volcanic eruption. The sequence shows the glow from an extensive region of fissures over the course of a single night (May 21-22). During the sequence, multiple fissures expelled lava in the area in and around Leilani Estates in the Puna district of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. The lava also flowed into the ocean during the period of the video.
A new study using Gemini data reveals that the ratio of binary stars in Kepler’s K2 exoplanet host stars is similar to that found elsewhere in our neighborhood of the Milky Way. According to lead author Dr. Rachel Matson of NASA’s Ames Research Center, “While we have known that about 50% of all stars are binary, to confirm a similar ratio in exoplanet host stars helps set some important constraints on the formation of potential exoplanets seen by Kepler.”
Self-driving cars. Facial recognition. Finding cancerous cells in CT scans. Ensuring thousands of products we use daily are manufactured correctly. Each rely on “smart” machines (or computers) processing large amounts of information, mostly images, and making decisions based on that information. Training machines to “see” and understand real-world objects, like a stop sign in front of a self-driving car, can be a very difficult task and often leaves little room for error.
Much of the light in the universe comes from stars, and yet, star formation is still a vexing question in astronomy.
To piece together a more complete picture of star birth, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at star formation among galaxies in our own cosmic back yard. The survey of 50 galaxies in the local universe, called the Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS), is the sharpest, most comprehensive ultraviolet-light look at nearby star-forming galaxies.
The LEGUS survey combines new Hubble observations with archival Hubble images for star-forming spiral and dwarf galaxies, offering a valuable resource for understanding the complexities of star formation and galaxy evolution. Astronomers are releasing the star catalogs for each of the LEGUS galaxies and cluster catalogs for 30 of the galaxies, as well as images of the galaxies themselves. The catalogs provide detailed information on young, massive stars and star clusters, and how their environment affects their development.
Astronomers using data from both of the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrographs (GMOS – North and South) measured the motions of stars within a sample of 32 massive elliptical cluster galaxies and found the stellar motions inconsistent with these galaxies’ solitary cousins.
Where do the stars in our Galaxy come from? All the stars we see in the night-time sky belong to our Milky Way galaxy, and while most stars were likely born here, in the Milky Way, many appear to have originated in other galaxies and migrated to our shores.