news 2016

Astronomers of the Universities of Tübingen and Vienna are investigating the basic principles of the formation of stars "How do massive stars form?" is one of the fundamental questions in modern astrophysics, because these massive stars govern the energy budget of their host galaxies.

Franz Viehböck took off 25 years ago - the one and only Austrian in space. Researchers at TU Graz performed pioneering work in extraterrestrial materials analysis and facilitated the first ever networked communication between several locations on Earth and in space. Friday, 4 October 1991: the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played the Blue Danube by Johann Strauss as Franz Viehböck glided into the Soviet space station "Mir".

TUGSAT-1/BRITE-Austria and UniBRITE, Austria's first satellites in space, celebrate their third birthday. "Astronomy & Astrophysics" publishes three papers with the ESA-missions latest results. Photographic material available for download at the end of the text. . "BRITE stands for BRIght Target Explorer.

Stars do not accumulate their final mass steadily, but in a series of violent events manifesting themselves as sharp stellar brightening. According to this theory of Eduard Vorobyov from the University of Vienna, stellar brightening can be caused by fragmentation due to gravitational instabilities in massive gaseous disks surrounding young stars, followed by migration of dense gaseous clumps onto the star.