Elizabeth Pearson

Recent articles by Elizabeth Pearson

Image of Pluto taken by New Horizons

What’s warming Pluto’s icy heart?

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Heavy metal planet found around dead star

Uranus's rings imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997 in infrared and visible light
Image credit: Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona), and NASA/ESA

40 years of Uranus’s rings

Several sites have been shortlisted as potential homes for a new spaceport. Credit: UK Space Agency

New laws start exciting era for UK space industry

Not all galaxies are neatly shaped, as this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6240 clearly demonstrates. Hubble previously released an image of this galaxy back in 2008, but the knotted region, shown here in a pinky-red hue at the centre of the galaxies, was only revealed in these observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. NGC 6240 lies 400 million light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Holder). This galaxy has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails. This mess of gas, dust and stars bears more than a passing resemblance to a butterfly and, though perhaps less conventionally beautiful, a lobster. This bizarrely-shaped galaxy did not begin its life looking like this; its distorted appearance is a result of a galactic merger that occurred when two galaxies drifted too close to one another. This merger sparked bursts of new star formation and triggered many hot young stars to explode as supernovae. A new supernova was discovered in this galaxy in 2013, named SN 2013dc. It is not visible in this image, but its location is indicated here. At the centre of NGC 6240 an even more interesting phenomenon is taking place. When the two galaxies came together, their central black holes did so too. There are two supermassive black holes within this jumble, spiralling closer and closer to one another. They are currently only some 3000 light-years apart, incredibly close given that the galaxy itself spans 300 000 light-years. This proximity secures their fate as they are now too close to escape each other and will soon form a single immense black hole. Links Images of Hubble

Secrets of galactic butterfly revealed

Curiosity inadvertantly recreated an experiment that was first run by the Apollo 17 astronauts using the Lunar buggy.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Curiosity measures Mount Sharp’s gravity

he existance of Planet Nine was first suggested by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in 2016. Several surveys have since launched to search for the planet, but it has not been found.
Credit: Caltech/R Hurt (IPAC)

Is there no Planet Nine after all?

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Summer arrives late on Saturn’s moon Titan

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Citizen scientists find rare exoplanet in Kepler data

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Interview: Ramy El-Maarry, New Horizons scientist

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Interview: Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8

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A guide to galaxies

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OSIRIS REX discovers water on asteroid Bennu

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Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space