The Pan-STARRS project is publicly releasing the world’s largest digital sky survey from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” said Dr. Ken Chambers, Director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories. “Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the solar system to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.”

“With this release we anticipate that scientists – as well as students and even casual users – around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS,” Chambers added.

The four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies, and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies, or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.

The first Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) observatory is a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakala, on Maui. In May 2010, it embarked on a digital sky survey of the sky in visible and near infrared light. This was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from Hawaii multiple times in many colors of light, with the goal of finding moving, transient, and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, and scanned the sky 12 times in each of five filters.

“Achieving the high quality of the Pan-STARRS1 measurements and maintaining it over such an enormous quantity of data was a unique computational challenge and the results are a tribute to the dedicated efforts of our small team of scientists at the UH IfA and our collaborators who worked to process and calibrate the extraordinary volume of raw image data,” said Dr. Eugene Magnier, lead of the Pan-STARRS Image Processing team.

A number of CfA scientists were involved in analyzing Pan-STARRS data and extracting groundbreaking results. For example, Dr. Douglas Finkbeiner and students Edward Schlafly and Gregory Green led the effort to map the interstellar dust in the Milky Way in three dimensions. They used the colors of nearly 1 billion stars, requiring photometric calibration at a level unprecedented for ground-based surveys.

“The tiny particles in dust clouds make background stars fainter and redder, for the same reason the sky turns red at sunset,” said Dr. Finkbeiner. “In order to measure the subtle color shifts, we must know the brightnesses and colors of the stars at the percent level. With vastly more data than any human could ever look at directly, this required serious effort, and I’m proud of everyone who contributed.”

“Pan-STARRS also has given us an unprecedented view of the dynamic and transient nature of astronomical phenomena,” said CfA astronomer Dr. Edo Berger. “Our group discovered and studied new types of supernova explosions and the disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes from the Pan-STARRS data.”

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys program was undertaken by the PS1 Science Consortium – a collaboration among 10 research institutions in four countries with support from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Consortium observations for the sky survey, mapping everything visible from Hawaii, were completed in April 2014. This data is now being released publicly.

“The cooperation between STScI and the Pan-STARRS team at the University of Hawaii has been essential to ensuring that this initial data release is successful,” explained Dr. Marc Postman, Head of the Community Missions office at STScI, and liaison between STScI and the PS1 Consortium. “STScI was a natural partner to host the Pan-STARRS public archive given its extensive experience serving astronomy data to the international community. In advance of the release of the Pan-STARRS data, STScI staff helped perform checks of data quality, helped write archive user documentation, tested and installed the local data storage and database query system, and designed, built and deployed the web-based user interfaces to the archive system.”

The rollout is being done in two stages. Today’s release is the “Static Sky,” which is the average of each of those individual epochs. For every object, there’s an average value for its position, its brightness, and its colors. In 2017, the second set of data will be released, providing a catalog that gives the information and images for each individual epoch.

The Space Telescope Science Institute provides the storage hardware, the computers that handle the database queries, and the user-friendly interfaces to access the data.

The survey data resides in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), which serves as NASA’s repository for all of its optical and ultraviolet-light observations, some of which date to the early 1970s. It includes all of the observational data from such space astrophysics missions as Hubble, Kepler, GALEX, and a wide variety of other telescopes, as well as several all-sky surveys. Pan-STARRS marks the nineteenth mission to be archived in MAST. </s> The world’s largest digital survey of the visible universe, mapping over three billion stars and galaxies in unprecedented detail, has been released. The Pan-STARRS observatory (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System), a 1.8-metre telescope at the summit of Haleakala on Hawaiian Island of Maui, first started digital mapping of the sky in 2010.

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It was the first survey whose goal was to observe the sky very rapidly over and over again, looking for moving objects and transient or variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth.

The survey took about four years to complete and scanned the sky 12 times in five filters. The data comprise three billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies and various other objects.

The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with single-spaced text, researchers said.

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“For the past three years, we put much effort into checking the quality of the data and defining the most useful structure for the catalogue,” said Roberto Saglia, who led the Pan-STARRS participation at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

“In more than 100 teleconferences we discussed and improved test results, such as for astrometry or photometry for selected sky regions that have been observed previously with other telescopes,” said Saglia.

“We also thought a lot about how best to combine the individual observations and how to present the relevant information for each type of objects,” he said.

This compressed view of the entire sky visible is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of 4 years, researchers said.

“Based on Pan-Starrs, researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example white dwarfs,” said Thomas Henning, director of the Planet and Star Formation Department of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

“This will expand the census of almost all objects in the solar neighbourhood to distances of about 300 light-years,” Henning said.

“We gathered about 4 million stellar light curves to identify Jupiter-like planets in close orbits around cool dwarf stars in order to constrain the fraction of such extrasolar planetary systems,” he said.

“We also monitored our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, where we detected several microlensing events and many new Cepheids variables,” said Ralf Bender, director of Extraterrestrial Physics. “This allowed us to better constrain compact dark matter in M31 and improve its distance accuracy,” Bender said. </s> Astronomer Ed Shaya was in his office looking at data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2012 when he noticed something unusual: The light from a galaxy had quickly brightened by 10 percent. The sudden bump in light got Shaya instantly excited, but also nervous. The effect could be explained by the massive explosion of a star — a supernova! — or, more troublingly, a computer error.

“I just remember on that day, not knowing whether I should believe it or not,” he remembers. Rather than celebrate, he thought, “Did I make a mistake? Am I doing this all wrong?”

Stellar explosions forge and distribute materials that make up the world in which we live, and also hold clues to how fast the universe is expanding. By understanding supernovae, scientists can unlock mysteries that are key to what we are made of and the fate of our universe. But to get the full picture, scientists must observe supernovae from a variety of perspectives, especially in the first moments of the explosion. That’s really difficult — there’s no telling when or where a supernova might happen next.

A small group of astronomers, including Shaya, realized Kepler could offer a new technique for supernova-hunting. Launched in 2009, Kepler is best known for having discovered thousands of exoplanets. But as a telescope that stares at single patches of space for long periods of time, it can capture a vast trove of other cosmic treasures –especially the kind that change rapidly or pop in and out of view, like supernovae.

“Kepler opened up a new way of looking at the sky,” said Jessie Dotson, Kepler’s project scientist, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “It was designed to do one thing really well, which was to find planets around other stars. In order to do that, it had to deliver high-precision, continuous data, which has been valuable for other areas of astronomy.”

Originally, Shaya and colleagues were looking for active galactic nuclei in their Kepler data. An active galactic nucleus is an extremely bright area at the center of a galaxy where a voracious black hole is surrounded by a disk of hot gas. They had thought about searching for supernovae, but since supernovae are such rare events, they didn’t mention it in their proposal. “It was too iffy,” Shaya said.

Unsure if the supernova signal he found was real, Shaya and his University of Maryland colleague Robert Olling spent months developing software to better calibrate Kepler data, taking into account variations in temperature and pointing of the instrument. Still, the supernova signal persisted. In fact, they found five more supernovae in their Kepler sample of more than 400 galaxies. When Olling showed one of the signals to Armin Rest, who is now an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltlimore, Rest’s jaw dropped. “I started to drool,” he said. The door had opened to a new way of tracking and understanding stellar explosions.

Today, these astronomers are part of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey, a collaboration between seven scientists in the United States, Australia and Chile looking for supernovae and active galactic nuclei to explore the physics of our universe. To date, they have found more than 20 supernovae using data from the Kepler spacecraft, including an exotic type reported by Rest in a new study in Nature Astronomy. Many more are currently being recorded by Kepler’s ongoing observations.

“We have some of the best-understood supernovae,” said Brad Tucker, astronomer at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, who is part of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey.



 Why do we care about supernovae?

A longstanding mystery in astrophysics is how and why stars explode in different ways. One kind of supernova happens when a dense, dead star called a white dwarf explodes. A second kind happens when a single gigantic star nears the end of its life, and its core can no longer withstand the gravitational forces acting on it. The details of these general categories are still being worked out.

The first kind, called “type Ia” (pronounced as “one a”) is special because the intrinsic brightness of each of these supernovae is almost the same. Astronomers have used this standard property to measure the expansion of the universe and found the more distant supernovae were less bright than expected. This indicated they were farther away than scientists had thought, as the light had become stretched out over expanding space. This proved that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate and earned those researchers the Nobel Prize in 2011. The leading theory is that a mysterious force called “dark energy” is pushing everything in the universe apart from everything else, faster and faster.

But as astronomers find more and more examples of type Ia explosions, including with Kepler, they realize not all are created equal. While some of these supernovae happen when a white dwarf robs its companion of too much matter, others are the result of two white dwarfs merging. In fact, the white dwarf mergers may be more common. More supernova research with Kepler will help astronomers on a quest to find out if different type Ia mechanisms result in some supernovae being brighter than others — which would throw a wrench into how they are used to measure the universe’s expansion.

“To get a better idea of constraining dark energy, we have to understand better how these type Ia supernovae are formed,” Rest said.

Another kind of supernova, the “core collapse” variety, happens when a massive star ends its life in an explosion. This includes “Type II” supernovae. These supernovae have a characteristic shockwave called the “shock breakout,” which was captured for the first time in optical light by Kepler. The Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey team, led by team member Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, spotted this shock breakout in 2011 Kepler data from a supernova called KSN 2011d, an explosion from a star roughly 500 times the size of our Sun. Surprisingly, the team did not find a shock breakout in a smaller type II supernova called KSN 2011a, whose star was 300 times the size of the Sun — but instead found the supernova nestled in a layer of dust, suggesting that there is diversity in type II stellar explosions, too.

Kepler data have revealed other mysteries about supernovae. The new study led by Rest in Nature Astronomy describes a supernova from data captured by Kepler’s extended mission, called K2, that reaches its peak brightness in just a little over two days, about 10 times less than others take. It is the most extreme known example of a “fast-evolving luminous transient” (FELT) supernova. FELTs are about as bright as the type Ia variety, but rise in less than 10 days and fade in about 30. It is possible that the star spewed out a dense shell of gas about a year before the explosion, and when the supernova happened, ejected material hit the shell. The energy released in that collision would explain the quick brightening.

Telescopes on Earth offer a lot of information about exploding stars, but only over short periods of time — and only when the Sun goes down and the sky is clear – so it’s hard to document the “before” and “after” effects of these explosions. Kepler, on the other hand, offers astronomers the rare opportunity to monitor single patches of sky continuously for months, like a car’s dashboard camera that is always recording. In fact, the primary Kepler mission, which ran from 2009 to 2013, delivered four years of observations of the same field of view, snapping a picture about every 30 minutes. In the extended K2 mission, the telescope is holding its gaze steady for up to about three months.

With ground-based telescopes, astronomers can tell the supernova’s color and how it changes with time, which lets them figure out what chemicals are present in the explosion. The supernova’s composition helps determine the type of star that exploded. Kepler, on the other hand, reveals how and why the star explodes, and the details of how the explosion progresses. Using the two datasets together, astronomers can get fuller pictures of supernovae behavior than ever before.

Kepler mission planners revived the telescope in 2013, after the malfunction of the second of its four reaction wheels — devices that help control the orientation of the spacecraft. In the configuration called K2, it needs to rotate every three months or so — marking observing “campaigns.” Members of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey made the case that in the K2 mission, Kepler could still monitor supernovae and other exotic, distant astrophysical objects, in addition to exoplanets.

The possibilities were so exciting that the Kepler team devised two K2 observing campaigns especially useful for coordinating supernovae studies with ground-based telescopes. Campaign 16, which began on Dec. 7, 2017, and ended Feb. 25, 2018,included 9,000 galaxies. There are about 14,000 in Campaign 17, which is just beginning now. In both campaigns, Kepler faces in the direction of Earth so that observers on the ground can see the same patch of sky as the spacecraft. The campaigns have excited a community of researchers who can advantage of this rare coordination between Kepler and telescopes on the ground.

A recent possible sighting got astronomers riled up on Super Bowl Sunday this year, even if they weren’t into the game. On that “super” day, the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN) reported a supernova in the same nearby galaxy Kepler was monitoring. This is just one of many candidate events that scientists are excited to follow up on and perhaps use to better understand the secrets of the universe.

A few more supernovae may come from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, (TESS) which is expected to launch on April 16. In the meantime, scientists will have a lot of work ahead of them once they receive the full dataset from K2’s supernova-focused campaigns.

“It will be a treasure trove of supernova information for years to come,” Tucker said.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. </s> Usually at such distances scientists can only image galaxies, collections of billions of stars such as our own Milky Way, or supernovas and gamma ray bursts, colossal cosmic explosions. Beyond about 100 million light years it is impossible to make out individual stars even with the most powerful telescopes. In this case, a rare cosmic alignment naturally magnified the supergiant more than 2,000 times, allowing astronomers to see it. The B-type blue supergiant star, hundreds or even thousands of times brighter than the sun, was discovered in Hubble Space Telescope images taken over the course of a year between April 2016 and 2017.

It could only be seen because of an effect called "gravitational lensing" that occurs when massive galaxy clusters bend the light of objects behind them. In effect the galaxies act as a magnifying glass that can render dim far away objects visible. The lensing phenomenon, predicted by Albert Einstein, is the result of a massive object bending space-time around it and forcing light beams to take a curved path. Lead scientist Dr Patrick Kelly, who worked on the observations while at the University of California at Berkeley, US, said: "You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions."

The star has the long formal name MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 (LS1), but has been dubbed "Icarus" by the astronomers. A report on its discovery appears in the journal Nature Astronomy. Co-author Professor Alex Filippenko, also from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "For the first time ever we're seeing an individual normal star, not a supernova, not a gamma ray burst, but a single stable star, at a distance of nine billion light years.

He added that other gravitational lensing alignments should allow more distant stars to be studied. "There are alignments like this all over the place as background stars or stars in lensing galaxies move around, offering the possibility of studying very distant stars dating from the early universe, just as we have been using gravitational lensing to study distant galaxies," said Prof Filippenko. "For this type of research, nature has provided us with a larger telescope than we can possibly build." </s> A giant black hole ripped apart a star and then gorged on its remains for about a decade, according to astronomers. This is more than ten times longer than any observed episode of a star’s death by black hole.

Researchers made this discovery using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift satellite as well as ESA’s XMM-Newton. They published their findings February 6 in Nature Astronomy.

The trio of orbiting X-ray telescopes found evidence for a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), wherein the tidal forces due to the intense gravity from a black hole can destroy an object – such as a star – that wanders too close. During a TDE, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. As it travels inwards to be ingested by the black hole, the material heats up to millions of degrees and generates a distinct x-ray flare.

“We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” said Dacheng Lin from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who led the study. “Dozens of tidal disruption events have been detected since the 1990s, but none that remained bright for nearly as long as this one.”

According to coauthor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, the observations of this TDE with a long-lasting bright phase fit the theoretical predications made in a 2015 paper he wrote with a former graduate student, coauthor James Guillochon, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

“We correctly predicted in advance of observations that some TDEs would be discovered with long-lived light curves,” Ramirez-Ruiz said. “The pieces of the star have to make an accretion disk promptly in order for the material to be digested by the black hole. With a lower mass black hole, stars can get disrupted farther away from the event horizon, and as a result we expect circularization and accretion to be slow.”

The extraordinary long bright phase of this event spanning over ten years means that a large amount of mass had to be digested by the black hole. The theoretical model supports either the complete digestion of a star with twice the mass of the sun, or the partial disruption of a much more massive star, Ramirez-Ruiz said, adding that he favors the full disruption of a lower mass star.

The X-ray source containing this force-fed black hole, known by its abbreviated name of XJ1500+0154, is located in a small galaxy about 1.8 billion light years from Earth.

The source was not detected in a Chandra observation on April 2nd, 2005, but was detected in an XMM-Newton observation on July 23rd, 2005, and reached peak brightness in a Chandra observation on June 5, 2008. These observations show that the source became at least 100 times brighter in x-rays. Since then, Chandra, Swift, and XMM-Newton have observed it multiple times.

The sharp x-ray vision of Chandra data shows that XJ1500+0154 is located at the center of its host galaxy, the expected location for a supermassive black hole. The x-ray data also indicate that radiation from material surrounding this black hole has consistently surpassed the so-called Eddington limit, defined by a balance between the outward pressure of radiation from the hot gas and the inward pull of the gravity of the black hole.

“For most of the time we’ve been looking at this object, it has been growing rapidly,” Guillochon said. “This tells us something unusual—like a star twice as heavy as our Sun—is being fed into the black hole.”

This TDE may help answer the question as to how supermassive black holes in the early universe grow. If supermassive black holes can grow from TDEs or other means faster than the Eddington limit, this could explain how supermassive black holes were able to reach masses about a billion times higher than the sun when the universe was only about a billion years old.

“This event shows that black holes really can grow at extraordinarily high rates,” said co-author Stefanie Komossa of QianNan Normal University for Nationalities in Duyun City, China. “This may help understand how precocious black holes came to be.”

Based on the modeling by the researchers, the black hole’s feeding supply should be significantly reduced in the next decade. This would result in XJ1500+0154 fading in x-ray brightness over the next several years.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations. </s> Seventeen years after the initial stellar explosion, astronomers were able to locate the surviving companion to a supernova. Photo by Hubble/NASA/ESA

April 27 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best evidence yet that double-star systems host supernovas.

Seventeen years after astronomers first spotted a supernova 40 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 7424, a Hubble photograph revealed a second star, the supernova's surviving companion.

"We know that the majority of massive stars are in binary pairs," Stuart Ryder, researcher at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney, said in a news release. "Many of these binary pairs will interact and transfer gas from one star to the other when their orbits bring them close together."

The companion in Hubble's image was more than just a spectator to the action 17 years ago. The companion is a cosmic criminal, guilty of theft. Millions of years before its companion exploded a fire death, the star was creating instability in the primary star by siphoning off hydrogen from its stellar envelope, the layer that shuttles energy from the core to the star's atmosphere.

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As a result of millions of years of theft, the primary star demise, dubbed SN 2001ig, was classified as a Type IIb stripped-envelope supernova, an explosion characterized by a lack of hydrogen.

Most scientists thought Type IIb stripped-envelope supernovas originated in single star systems, their out envelopes blown away by strong stellar winds. But over the years, astronomers have struggled to find the primary stars responsible for such explosions.

"That was especially bizarre because astronomers expected that they would be the most massive and the brightest progenitor stars," said Ori Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Also, the sheer number of stripped-envelope supernovas is greater than predicted."

Astronomers now think as many as half of all Type IIb stripped-envelope supernovas may originate in binary star systems.

The revelation might not have happened if SN 2001ig occurred just a little farther away. The stellar system sits right on the edge of Hubble's photographic limits. The companion is so faint, it likely would be invisible to Hubble if it was a few more light-years away. A bit of luck allowed for the breakthrough.

"We were finally able to catch the stellar thief, confirming our suspicions that one had to be there," said Alex Filippenko, astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.

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RELATED Hubble captures glow of giant galaxy cluster </s> A multitude of discoveries are on the horizon after this much awaited release, which is based on 22 months of charting the sky. The new data includes positions, distance indicators and motions of more than one billion stars, along with high-precision measurements of asteroids within our Solar System and stars beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Preliminary analysis of this phenomenal data reveals fine details about the make-up of the Milky Way's stellar population and about how stars move, essential information for investigating the formation and evolution of our home Galaxy.

"The observations collected by Gaia are redefining the foundations of astronomy," says Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science.

"Gaia is an ambitious mission that relies on a huge human collaboration to make sense of a large volume of highly complex data. It demonstrates the need for long-term projects to guarantee progress in space science and technology and to implement even more daring scientific missions of the coming decades."

Gaia was launched in December 2013 and started science operations the following year. The first data release, based on just over one year of observations, was published in 2016; it contained distances and motions of two million stars.

The new data release, which covers the period between 25 July 2014 and 23 May 2016, pins down the positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars, and with a much greater precision. For some of the brightest stars in the survey, the level of precision equates to Earth-bound observers being able to spot a Euro coin lying on the surface of the Moon.

With these accurate measurements it is possible to separate the parallax of stars – an apparent shift on the sky caused by Earth's yearly orbit around the Sun – from their true movements through the Galaxy.

The new catalogue lists the parallax and velocity across the sky, or proper motion, for more than 1.3 billion stars. From the most accurate parallax measurements, about ten per cent of the total, astronomers can directly estimate distances to individual stars.

"The second Gaia data release represents a huge leap forward with respect to ESA's Hipparcos satellite, Gaia's predecessor and the first space mission for astrometry, which surveyed some 118 000 stars almost thirty years ago," says Anthony Brown of Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Anthony is the chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium Executive, overseeing the large collaboration of about 450 scientists and software engineers entrusted with the task of creating the Gaia catalogue from the satellite data.

"The sheer number of stars alone, with their positions and motions, would make Gaia's new catalogue already quite astonishing," adds Anthony.

"But there is more: this unique scientific catalogue includes many other data types, with information about the properties of the stars and other celestial objects, making this release truly exceptional."

Something for everyone

The comprehensive dataset provides a wide range of topics for the astronomy community.

As well as positions, the data include brightness information of all surveyed stars and colour measurements of nearly all, plus information on how the brightness and colour of half a million variable stars change over time. It also contains the velocities along the line of sight of a subset of seven million stars, the surface temperatures of about a hundred million and the effect of interstellar dust on 87 million.

Gaia also observes objects in our Solar System: the second data release comprises the positions of more than 14 000 known asteroids, which allows precise determination of their orbits. A much larger asteroid sample will be compiled in Gaia's future releases.

Further afield, Gaia closed in on the positions of half a million distant quasars, bright galaxies powered by the activity of the supermassive black holes at their cores. These sources are used to define a reference frame for the celestial coordinates of all objects in the Gaia catalogue, something that is routinely done in radio waves but now for the first time is also available at optical wavelengths.

Major discoveries are expected to come once scientists start exploring Gaia's new release. An initial examination performed by the data consortium to validate the quality of the catalogue has already unveiled some promising surprises – including new insights on the evolution of stars.

"The new Gaia data are so powerful that exciting results are just jumping at us," says Antonella Vallenari from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, Italy, deputy chair of the data processing consortium executive board.

"For example, we have built the most detailed Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stars ever made on the full sky and we can already spot some interesting trends. It feels like we are inaugurating a new era of Galactic archaeology."

Named after the two astronomers who devised it in the early twentieth century, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram compares the intrinsic brightness of stars with their colour and is a fundamental tool to study populations of stars and their evolution.

A new version of this diagram, based on four million stars within five thousand light-years from the Sun selected from the Gaia catalogue, reveals many fine details for the first time. This includes the signature of different types of white dwarfs – the dead remnants of stars like our Sun – such that a differentiation can be made between those with hydrogen-rich cores and those dominated by helium.

Combined with Gaia measurements of star velocities, the diagram enables astronomers to distinguish between various populations of stars of different ages that are located in different regions of the Milky Way, such as the disc and the halo, and that formed in different ways. Further scrutiny suggests that the fast-moving stars thought to belong to the halo encompass two stellar populations that originated via two different formation scenarios, calling for more detailed investigations.

"Gaia will greatly advance our understanding of the Universe on all cosmic scales," says Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.

"Even in the neighbourhood of the Sun, which is the region we thought we understood best, Gaia is revealing new and exciting features."

For a subset of stars within a few thousand light-years of the Sun, Gaia has measured the velocity in all three dimensions, revealing patterns in the motions of stars that are orbiting the Galaxy at similar speeds.

Future studies will confirm whether these patterns are linked to perturbations produced by the Galactic bar, a denser concentration of stars with an elongated shape at the centre of the Galaxy, by the spiral arm architecture of the Milky Way, or by the interaction with smaller galaxies that merged with it billions of years ago.

At Gaia's precision, it is also possible to see the motions of stars within some globular clusters – ancient systems of stars bound together by gravity and found in the halo of the Milky Way – and within our neighbouring galaxies, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

Gaia data were used to derive the orbits of 75 globular clusters and 12 dwarf galaxies that revolve around the Milky Way, providing all-important information to study the past evolution of our Galaxy and its environment, the gravitational forces that are at play, and the distribution of the elusive dark matter that permeates galaxies.

"Gaia is astronomy at its finest," says Fred Jansen, Gaia mission manager at ESA.

"Scientists will be busy with this data for many years, and we are ready to be surprised by the avalanche of discoveries that will unlock the secrets of our Galaxy."

Explore further: How many stars to expect in Gaia's second data release

More information: A series of scientific papers describing the data contained in the release and their validation process will appear in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A series of 360-degree videos and other Virtual Reality visualisation resources are available at sci.esa.int/gaia-vr

Gerard Gilmore. Gaia: 3-dimensional census of the Milky Way Galaxy, Contemporary Physics (2018). DOI: 10.1080/00107514.2018.1439700 </s> For the third time, scientists have detected a spacetime rumble caused by a violent collision of two black holes. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made the detection, determining that the two black holes merged to create one large black hole in a galaxy about 3 billion light-years away.

"We have observed – on the 4th of January, 2017 – another massive black hole-black hole binary coalescence; the in-spiral and merging of black holes 20 and 30 times the mass of our sun," Dave Shoemaker, a senior research scientist who works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, told reporters during a special news briefing on Wednesday (May 31).

This gargantuan black hole smashup created an even more massive spinning black hole, approximately 49 times the mass of our sun. In an instant, the equivalent mass twice that of our sun was converted directly into gravitational waves — briefly producing more energy than all the energy that is radiated as light by all the galaxies in the universe at any moment, LIGO scientists say.

After many years of planning, development and construction, LIGO took its first observations in 2002. However, it wasn't until Sept. 14, 2015, that the first historic detection of gravitational waves — an event called "GW150914" — was made. That happened after LIGO underwent upgrades (known as Advanced LIGO) to boost its sensitivity. Then, a second detection ("GW151226") followed a few months later in December, confirming that the first discovery was no fluke.

Now, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration — which consists of over a thousand scientists around the world — has confirmed the third gravitational wave detection ("GW170104"), meaning we're at the cusp of a completely new kind of astronomy.

All the gravitational waves detected so far have been created by the collision of stellar-mass black holes of varied sizes. These are black holes that are a few to a few dozen times the mass of our sun that were likely formed by the death of very massive stars after they'd run out of fuel and exploded as supernovas billions of years ago. Advanced LIGO has reached a crossroads in our gravitational wave search, finally reaching a sensitivity that can detect when very distant black holes collide, creating faint gravitational waves that we now know fill our universe.

The 2015 events were caused by mergers creating black holes 62 and 21 solar masses in galaxies 1.3 and 1.4 billion light-years away, respectively. (Note: As gravitational waves travel at the speed of light these mergers happened 1.3 and 1.4 billion years ago.) This latest detection originated from a merger creating a black hole of 49 solar masses (another "heavy" black hole like the first one), but the merger happened over twice as far away than previous events.

"What this means is that we now have a second candidate in the "heavy" black hole category," says Bangalore Sathyaprakash, of Penn State and Cardiff University and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

This is important as, before LIGO made its first detection (a 62 solar mass black hole) and its most recent one (a 49 solar mass black hole), there was no observational evidence that these large black holes even existed. This is an incredible early discovery. Scientists have revealed a brand-new type of large black hole in only three detections.

Things are about to get even more exciting as LIGO undergoes more planned upgrades and other observatories join the hunt for gravitational waves.

"We should expect to see one binary merger event per day once LIGO's designed sensitivity is reached," says Sathyaprakash.

When gravitational waves are detected the conditions of the colliding black holes at the time of the merger can be studied.

"In our analysis, we cannot measure the spins of the individual black holes very well, but we can tell if the black holes are generally spinning in the same direction as the orbital motion," says astrophysicist Laura Cadonati, LIGO Scientific Collaboration deputy spokesperson from Georgia Tech.

But an idea of the individual black hole's spin relative to one another can be figured out by studying the "fingerprint" of the gravitational wave signal, says Cadonati.

Theoretical models of merging black holes indicate that if the two black holes' spins are not aligned, the merging event will happen faster than if the spins are aligned. Also, additional wobbles in the signal are predicted as two spin-aligned black holes get close and begin to merge.

Spin-aligned black holes were likely sibling stars. Both would have been born from massive stars that evolved in close proximity in ancient star factories as a binary pair, eventually dying as supernovas.

But in this most recent event, the merging occurred relatively quickly and no additional oscillations were observed, meaning the two black holes were likely not spin-aligned and probably didn't form together. This gives a clue to their origin: Rather than being formed from sibling binary stars, they were strangers and evolved independently, drifting toward one another in the center of a dense stellar cluster where they eventually merged.

"This has implications for astrophysics ... while we cannot say with certainty, this finding likely favors the theory that these two black holes formed separately in a dense stellar cluster, sank to the core of the cluster and then paired up, rather than being formed together from the collapse of two already paired stars," adds Cadonati.

As black holes are gravitational monsters, they're governed by Einstein's general relativity, so by studying the gravitational waves they produce when they collide, scientists also can study the waves for an effect known as "dispersion." For example, when light travels through a prism, the different wavelengths will travel at different speeds through the glass. This causes dispersion in the beam of light — this is the mechanism that creates a rainbow.

General relativity forbids dispersion from happening to gravitational waves, however. This latest signal traveled across a record 3 billion light-years of spacetime to reach Earth, and LIGO didn't detect any dispersion effects.

"It looks like Einstein was right – even for this new event, which is about two times farther away than our first detection," says Cadonati in a statement. "We can see no deviation from the predictions of general relativity, and this greater distance helps us to make that statement with more confidence."

A New Window to the 'Dark Universe'

Einstein's famous theory of general relativity predicts the existence of gravitational waves, but it's taken humanity over a century to develop the technological know-how to build a detector sensitive enough to perceive them. When an energetic event occurs (like a black hole merger or neutron star collision), spacetime becomes violently disturbed and energy is carried away from the event in the form of gravitational waves — like ripples traveling across the water's surface after dropping a pebble in a pond.

But to detect these waves, astronomers need to build an observatory that can detect incredibly minuscule wobbles in the fabric of spacetime as these waves travel through our planet. Gravitational waves are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum; they cannot be detected by ordinary telescopes that are only sensitive to light.

To open the window to this "dark universe," physicists build gravitational wave detectors like LIGO that reflect incredibly precise lasers along 2.5 mile-long (4 kilometer-long) "L"-shaped tunnels. These tunnels are shielded from external vibrations caused by wind, traffic, tectonic activity and other terrestrial interference. Through a method known as laser interferometry, the distance between the reflecting mirrors inside the tunnel can be measured to a very high precision. Should a gravitational wave travel through our planet, a tiny change in distance may be recorded by the interferometer – this represents the minute squeezing and stretching of spacetime that occurs as gravitational waves propagate.

It's as if physicists have created a virtual tripwire that notifies us when an invisible gravitational wave intruder rumbles local spacetime.

One detector isn't enough to confirm a gravitational wave event, however. In the case of LIGO, one detector is located in Hanford, Washington, and another is located in Livingston, Louisiana — separated by 1,865 miles (3,002 kilometers). Only when the same event is detected by both locations can scientists confirm a gravitational wave signal. Two detectors can even determine a rough direction as to where the wave was traveling from, but if more detectors are added to the network, astronomers hope to eventually pinpoint, with increasing precision, where they originate.

More gravitational wave observatories are planned, and the European Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy, is currently undergoing commissioning. Once online, Virgo will be used in conjunction with LIGO to boost observational power of gravitational waves and allow better localization of the cosmic events causing the signals.

Now that the existence of gravitational waves has been confirmed, and astronomers are detecting more black hole mergers, we are entering a new era for astronomy. This is gravitational wave astronomy, where the dark universe will finally be revealed. </s> The moon is much older than we thought, scientists have found.

Our closest neighbour is 4.51 billion years old, scientists have established.

The new estimate comes from rocks brought back by Apollo 14 scientists in 1971. And it means that we were as much as 150 million years out in our guess of how old it was.

We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

Shape Created with Sketch. Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Nasa's most stunning pictures of space 1/30 Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa 2/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa 3/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA 4/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago 5/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa 6/30 Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa 7/30 Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes Nasa 8/30 NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa 9/30 Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa 10/30 Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa 11/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 12/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa 13/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa 14/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa 15/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa 16/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa 17/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa 18/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa 19/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station 20/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts 21/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity 22/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA 23/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto 24/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta 25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA 26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa” 28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) 29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere 30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region 1/30 Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa 2/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa 3/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA 4/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago 5/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa 6/30 Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa 7/30 Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes Nasa 8/30 NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa 9/30 Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa 10/30 Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa 11/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 12/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa 13/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa 14/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa 15/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa 16/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa 17/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa 18/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa 19/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station 20/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts 21/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity 22/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA 23/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto 24/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta 25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA 26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa” 28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) 29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere 30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

The moon was formed within just 60 million years of the birth of the solar system, according to the new research. Previously, scientists had thought that it came about around 100 million to 200 million years after our solar system did.

The study was done by uranium-lead dating on small fragments of the mineral zircon that were taken from the samples. Those pieces of zircon were no bigger than a grain of sand, but they record their own history.

Apollo 11's Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell collected 92 pounds of rocks and used tubes to dig up soil while exploring the moon's Fra Mauro highlands in February 1971. They conducted two spacewalks, spending nine hours altogether out on the lunar surface.

The research could help us learn more about not only the moon, but also our solar system and even our own Earth, according to the lead author Melanie Barboni, of UCLA.

Ms Barboni said she is studying more zircons from Apollo 14 samples, but does not expect the findings to change her estimate of 4.51 billion years for the moon's age – possibly extending it to 4.52 billion years at the most.

"It would be more a double-checking than anything else," she said of the research.

This week, scientists also proposed a new theory of where the moon actually came from. It’s actually made up of a lot of tiny rocks that mushed together to form the satellite that we know today, scientists proposed.

It’s the age at which the moon became the solid mass we know today that Ms Barnobi and her team have worked out. "We finally pinned down a minimum age for the moon formation," she said, "regardless of how it formed."
Pan-STARRS project releases its first astronomical catalog, consists of 2 petabytes of data collected over four years. An astronomer from collaborating institution also discloses that his group has studied new types of supernova explosions and the disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes from data of this Massive Digital Sky.