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A spacecraft from Earth is about to do something no other spacecraft has done before: take off, orbit a comet, and send a lander to it. The European Space Agency (ESA), NASA’s European counterpart has developed the Rosetta probe to hurl towards Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission is simple in principle, but the work behind it is […]
Astronomers operating the Hubble telescope have captured the most comprehensive (and most colorful) picture ever assembled of the evolving Universe. This was part of a study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UVUDF) project. Prior to this study, there was a significant lack of data for astronomers. They knew a lot about the […]
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… at about 2 billion light years away from Earth lies radio-galaxy Hercules A, also known as 3C 348. At a first glance it looks just like another massive galaxy out there – at least when looking in the visible spectrum. In the radio wavelengths however, […]
This past weekend, the last American space shuttle, the Endeavour, made its final trip through the streets of Los Angeles to the California Science Center. The trip lasted from midnight Friday morning until midday Sunday as the shuttle traveled at the high speeds of two miles per hour. There were many delays and the shuttle […]
The northern hemisphere is accustomed enough to the dazzling Aurora Borealis phenomena, an event which occurs when charged particles collide with atoms from the extreme latitude atmosphere. However, yesterday almost the whole North American continent was bewildered by an incredible spectacle of lights, as Aurora Borealis apparitions were reported as far south as Kansas, Arkansas […]
Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, is a definite oddball of the solar system. It has its axis titled by a whopping 98 degrees, which makes it orbit on its side. The general accepted theory is that a big impact with an object several times the size that of the Earth nodged its axis […]
This Monday (June 27), an asteroid the size of a bus just buzzed our planet after a flyby which brought it closer to Earth than most satellites. Dubbed asteroid 2011 MD, it was first spotted by MIT’s Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program just last week on June 22, but there never was any […]
Launched in 1997 on a mission to study Saturn and its satellites, the Casisni spacecraft reached the system in 2004. Since then it has provided numerous invaluable scientific findings regarding the second largest planet in our solar system, and other important scientific findings alike. One such finding was detailed in a recently published study, which […]
The planet in case is 55 Cancri e, and it’s 60 per cent larger in diameter than Earth but eight times as massive, which makes it twice as dense as Earth, and almost as dense as lead. Earth like rocky planets Generally speaking, planets come in two flavours: rocky earth-like planets, or gas giants […]
On the 28th of March the Swift telescope observed a peculiar gamma-ray blast in a distant corner of the visible universe, some 3.8 billion light years away, bewildered astronomers around the world. The powerful blast is theoretically caused, scientists say, by a black hole located in the center of the distant galaxy whose gravity tore […]
Romantics and astronomy aficionados alike (much of the same aren’t they?) will rejoice as this Saturday a rare spectacle of the moon will occur when it will come around closest its been to the Earth in 18 years! Much like planetary movement, Earth natural satellite movement is an ellipse, meaning it has points where its […]
Yes, you’ve read that right. There are over 50 billion planets in our galaxy alone, according to the Kepler telescope, scientists now estimate that not only there are over 500 bilion planets in the galaxy, but that there are over 500 million life-cable planets out there as well. These numbers obviously come from Nasa’s own […]
A new study suggests that a blunder of cosmic proportions has been made when estimating the total number of stars in the universe; the research points out that a specific kind of galaxy has 10 times more red dwarf stars than previously estimated. This would not only triple the number of stars throughout the universe, […]
One of the most intense Cold War fronts, and probably the only one to actually provide mankind a monumental legacy, was the so called space race. Each of the behemoth nations battled each other for space supremacy for decades raising hopes for millions of people as to someday the stars may belong to man and […]
Commercial space flight is starting to promise to become a very lucrative market since an ever growing interested is harnessed by the big corporations of the world. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in cooperation with Scaled Composites (Mojave, CA), announced their sincere intentions of entering the commercial space travel market, after recently the giant Boeing also […]
Now, that’s not Sauron’s eye. Pictured above is the most highly detailed photo of a sunspot ever taken at present date, captured and recently released by the Big Bear Solar Observatory, CA. The whole event was captured by Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), which has a resolution covering about 50 miles on the Sun’s […]
Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]
The above photo was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope around mid last year, proving excellent practice for Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. Captioned is the by now famous NGC 3603 nebula, located in the Carina spiral arm – it’s by far one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky […]
The discovery of 9 new planets raises some serious questions on the matter of how planets are formed. Two astronomers from the University of California, Santa Barbara reported the discovery, and of them, two are spinning in the opposite direction the planets in our solar system are spinning. This, along with other recent studies of […]
Pluto is so upset that it’s no longer a planet, that it’s turning all red with anger ! No, seriously. There’s been a whole lot of “Pluto-related news” these days including the 2006 chalking off of the planet list, and naming it a “dwarf planet”, and the news just gets better and better. Recently, astronomers […]
As I was writing in a previous post, Titan is quite unique, in that aside from our planet it’s the only place in our solar system where significant quantities of liquid are to be found (though most are liquid ethane and methane). That doesn’t seem to make much of a difference considering the chemistry of […]
It was Thursday night when locals from Norway started to notice a strange, rotating light that just baffled them. It was visible long enough to be seen, photographed and recorded by half of country. The blue light seemed to appear from behind the top of a mountain; it rose, began to spin, then began to […]
Star clusters are among the pretties things you can see, when it comes to astrophysical observations. Recently, ESO provided some amazing pictures of one of the most beautiful nestles ever to be seen, located deep in the constellation of Crux. The cluster is named Kappa Crucis Cluster and has been nicknamed ‘the jewel box’ (by […]
Ram pressure is the pressure exerted on a body when it passes through a fluid medium; this causes a drag force that is exerted on the body. The same pressure occurs when a galaxy (body) is moving through an intergalactic gas (fluid), and in this case, the ram pressure can sweep a significant part of […]
Stormy weather conditions may delay the launch of space shuttle Endeavour, currently scheduled for liftoff on Saturday, July 11. This comes on the heels of two delays last month caused by a hydrogen gas leak. A similar problem delayed the launch of space shuttle Discovery in March. The 16-day mission will feature a number of […]
Unfortunately for some, the green visitor is not an alien coming to greet us but something else, even though it also comes from far, far away. On the 24th of February the comet Lulin will pass within 61 million kilometers of Earth, thus being able to be seen with the naked eye from some locations. […]
As we learn (or at least should) at quite an early age, Galileo Galilei had quite the impact on science, making numerous improvements in telescopes and conducting early observations of the Moon, making the first map of our planet’s satellite. Right? Wrong. Despite the fact that he will always remain “father of modern observational astronomy” […]
Recently, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered no more, no less than 12 pulsars, and it also detected gamma ray pulse from 18 others. These findings are forcing scientists to rethink what we know about dying stars, as they totally underestimated the power of these stellar cilinders. “We know of 1,800 pulsars, but until Fermi […]
After more than 400 years, science-enthusiasts and not only can finally pay a tribute to the man who revolutionized people’s perception of the Universe. After having analyzed DNA taken from two strands of hair and a tooth, scientists finally concluded that the remains found in Frombrok Cathedral in Poland are, in fact, the ones of […]
Despite the fact that they have worked round the clock for fixing Hubble, it seems NASA engineers have once again hit a snag and they’re currently trying to figure out what is the next step. The telescope stopped sending pictures three weeks ago, and at first it was believed that it wouldn’t take that long […]
Using the RHESSI spacecraft, scientists managed to calculate the Sun’s roundness with a level of precision that surpasses anything of this type that has been attempted before. They found that the star which the Eart rotates around is not quite a sphere, but it has a thin “cantaloupe skin”. This skin causes the equatorial radius […]
A few days ago, something remarkable has been captured by NASA’s telescopes, as an unusual set of Gamma rays were picked up by the Swifst satellite. What’s so remarkable about the find is that the respective burst of Gamma rays is the farthest such discovered, and, according to NASA’s specialists, originated from an explosion near […]
Actually, it’s not about the brightest star of all, but the brightest star in our galaxy. It seems there’s a new contender for the title of Milky Way brightest star; it’s near its dusty center, and infrared observations performed by NASA have revealed how bright it is by piercing the dust that surrounds it. The […]
The Phoenix Lander was definitely a marking moment for scientists and researchers, who now have the opportunity of actually seeing what they could have just speculated about before. For example, just take a look at this picture the probe sent back on Friday. Phoenix scientist Ray Arvidson said there may be ice directly […]
The ball aproaches the field and… touchdown! NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived the fiery dive into Mars’ atmosphere Sunday to make a three-point landing in the planet’s arctic regions. This is absolutely a fantastic achievement which included an impressive amount of work and so many people that struggled for this common magnificent objective. “It looks […]
Our life may be better or worse, our health may be better or worse, but one thing has definitely improved over the past decades: technology; and that’s a really big thing. So what better way to prove the progress of technology than 2 pictures of Earth? The first was taken from the weather […]
Recently, a team of researchers (with the help of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and a host of international telescope partners) have managed to get the clearest observation yet of the “core” of a black hole. A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field […]
The hunt is on for finding other planets we can live on; this is probably the next step for us as a species, and may just be crucial, considering how things are developing on Earth. But we haven’t had much luck with that so far. Now, scientists are using a method which is claimed […]
After the “crash site” in Peru, meteorites keep the headlines again! This time, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen found the biggest meteorite to ever crash in the British islands. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of […]
The date of March 19, 2008 will be remembered as a very important day in astronomy and science; it’s the day mankind had its first chance of witnessing the birth of a black hole. It all started when the “Pi of the Sky” telescope detected the brightest ever optical outburst from a distant place, about […]
Scientists from the American Geophysical Union published some fascinating findings concerning some unexpected luminous spots on Jupiter caused by its moon Io, which they have observed. Io is in fact in some ways similar to Earth, in that it causes auroras on its mother planet. It also has the most spectacular volcanic activity in the […]
Nature published these findings of scientists from Houston, Texas, about the original proportion of oxygen isotopes in the Sun. This problem is still not fully solved, and it has even split the science world into two groups, which published contradictory results from analyses of lunar soils, believed to contain embedded solar oxygen because the Moon […]
The Cassini spacecraft has made numerous valuable discoveries along the time, such as the ‘building blocks’ of life on Titan, as well as the mountains there, and the partial rings of Saturn, and now scientists eagerly await the dive of the probe into the water plum of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. This will be […]
Mars has fueled many speculations for many centuries, and just several decades ago it was proved that there is no macromolecular life there. But still, there are numerous phenomenae that make it resemble Earth, such as avalanches. Whatsmore, recently scientists studying images from The University of Arizona found never-before-seen impact “megabreccia” and a possibly once-habitable […]
This project was backed up by U.S., Italian and German partners and it promised to be the next step in taking pictures of celestial objects. It consists of a giant binocular telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz, and it recently made its first picture, using the its twin side-by-side, 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) primary mirrors together, achieving […]
There are still so many things we don’t know about our solar system, and if by some way we manage to acquire information about it, probably many mysteries would be solved. Still, it’s always nice to see that scientists are not wasting time and almost every week they find something incredible. For example, gaps in […]
MESSENGER is a spacecraft which recently made a flyby near Mercury and it gave scientists a whole new perspective over the planet. Researchers are amazed by the wealth of images and data which show a surprising diversity of geological processes which took and are still taking place and a very different magnetosphere from the one […]
The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a very interesting and important rare flyby over the sun’s north pole. This spacecraft is different from anyother, being able to sample winds at the sun’s poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. However, this is not the first time it has been over the Sun’s poles; this […]
Not a Hollywood movie or something like that; not even a pun. The title is in the most literal fashion it could be. But how could this be? Worlds can’t collide, can’t they? Hard to say. Anyway astronomers have announced that a mystery object orbiting a star 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from […]
In some ways Venus could be consider to be the twin sister of our planet but in other ways it is pretty much opposite. High temperatures and crushing air pressure make it resemble a place christians would rather not visit (or name) than a planet. But now scientists have received images which confirm the fact […]
