A brief roundup of the latest astronomy news
Infant gas giant
Astronomers have discovered evidence of a gas giant planet in its earliest stages of formation. Intriguingly, it appears to be forming ‘top-down’ – where the disc of dust surrounding a planet breaks apart – rather than by the dominant ‘bottom-up’ theory of planet creation, when material gathers slowly over time.
Amateur astronomers’ awarded accolades
Two amateur astronomy projects have received an award from the Astronomical Society of Australia for their scientific merit: The Backyard Observatory Supernova Search, which has found 200 confirmed supernovae; and Trevor Barry, who tracked an electrical storm on Saturn for seven months.
SKA will have a British brain
The government has awarded £15m to several UK institutions to build the software that will control the Square Kilometre Array. The recipients include the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford, as well as the Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury STFC Laboratories.
Infant black hole is unearthed
The embryo of a supermassive black hole, dating from just 750 million years after the Big Bang, has been discovered buried in archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery could yield vital clues to how these cosmic colossi found at the heart of many galaxies grow to their enormous size.
The masses map Mars
Members of the public have helped map out the surface of Mars by identifying unusual ridge features. So far the ‘Planet Four: Ridges’ project has mapped 20 per cent of Mars’s surface in the region surrounding Jezero Crater, where the Perseverance rover is currently exploring, but hopes to eventually map the whole surface. Find out more at https://bit.ly/P4Ridges
Galactic record breaker
A galaxy has been spotted 13.5 billion lightyears away, breaking the record for the most distant astronomical object ever seen by 100 million lightyears. The object, HD1, was observed over 1,200 hours by four telescopes: Subaru, VISTA, UK Infrared and Spitzer.