USRA Scientists Serving on Science Team for NASA s Mars 2020 Mission and Perseverance Rover apnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from apnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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SOFIA Begins First Series of Science Flights from Germany
February 4, 2021 GMT
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COLUMBIA, Md., Feb. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) will conduct its first-ever series of observations from Germany in March 2021. Many of the observations seek to answer fundamental questions in astronomy, including how stars can transform galaxies and what is the origin of cosmic rays in the Milky Way galaxy.
SOFIA, a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR, recently completed scheduled maintenance and telescope upgrades at Lufthansa Technik’s facility in Hamburg, Germany. Now, the observatory will take advantage of its proximity to science teams at the Max-Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Bonn and the University of Cologne, which operate
A magnetar s flare just helped unlock the secrets of these strange stars astronomy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astronomy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy.
This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home.
“This has always been regarded as a possibility, and several GRBs observed since 2005 have provided tantalizing evidence,” said Kevin Hurley, a Senior Space Fellow with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, who joined several scientists to discuss the burst at the virtual 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “The April 15 event is a game changer because we foun