Satellite News

Galaxy NGC 908. Image credit: ESOClick to enlarge
This photograph of galaxy NGC 908 was taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This spiral galaxy was first discovered in 1786 by William Herschel, and is considered a starburst galaxy. Clusters of young, massive stars pepper its spiral arms indicating regions of furious star formation. NGC 908 must have had a recent encounter with another galaxy; the gravitational interaction between the galaxies caused gas clouds to collapse, igniting star formation.

Globalstar Inc. launched a promotion in the United States that will drop the price of…

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scheduled the launch of its Solar-B satellite for Sept. 24 aboard an M-5 rocket…

Viasat, the Nordic direct-to-home platform, closed June with 652,000 subscribers, adding…

Elara Networks selected iDirect Technologies to supply a technology platform to a privately held pharmacy chain based in Mexico, iDirect announced…

Boeing Co. lost $160 million in its 2006 second quarter due in part to charges related to the settlement charges of ethical conduct, while warning the cost to close its Connexion by Boeing satellite Internet service could cost the company another $350 million, the company reported July 26. In May, Boeing…

Artist impression of dust around a black hole. Image credit: ESAClick to enlarge
Look into the sky with X-ray instruments, and you’ll see a background radiation in all directions. Astronomers think these X-rays are produced by the supermassive black holes at the centres of most galaxies. But astronomers can’t find these black holes, which should be bright in the most energetic range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Maybe they’re hiding; shrouded in thick clouds of gas and dust. Or maybe something else is generating all the X-ray background radiation.

Artist impression of a pulsar’s magnetosphere. Image credit: W.Becker/MPIClick to enlarge
Pulsars are the rapidly spinning corpses of massive stars. And although they were discovered nearly 40 years ago, they still hold many mysteries. One such mystery: why do pulsars have million-degree hotspots around their poles? New data from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-Ray observatory have cast doubt on the theory that charged particles are colliding with the pulsar’s surface at its poles. XMM-Newton failed to see the X-ray emissions in several old pulsars that should have been very bright if particles were continuously colliding.