Space and astronomy news
“Shine on… Shine on Harvest Moon… Up in the sky. I ain’t had no clear skies since January, February, June and July…” Oh! Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Welcome to this week’s edition where we’ll be taking a closer look a lunar features and just what makes a globular… Well… A globular! Time to get out the binoculars and telescopes and turn a eye to the sky, because…
Here’s what’s up!
Continue reading “What’s Up this Week: October 2 – October 8, 2006”
Australia and South Africa have been shortlisted to host the Square Kilometer Array, a massive radio telescope that will be built in 2018. The array will have thousands of antennas, spread out over an area of 3,000 km (1,800 miles), and should be 50 times more powerful than the most powerful array of radio telescopes we have today. The Australian site will be near Meekathara in the western side of the country, while the South African site will be near Carnarvon. Both sites were chosen because of the low interference of man-made radio signals in the surrounding countryside.
Continue reading “Giant Radio Telescope May Go to Australia or Africa”
Now in its final science mapping orbit, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is sending back some of the highest resolution images ever taken of the Red Planet. The images are so sharp, they show objects and features approximately 1 metre (3 feet) across. In addition to its high resolution camera, the spacecraft is equipped with a mineral-mapping spectrometer, a ground-penetrating radar, and a context camera for viewing large swaths of the planet.
Continue reading “First High Res Images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter”
Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory to map a vast disc of gas and dust surrounding a newly born massive star. The star is called HD 97048, and it’s located in the Chameleon I dark cloud, a stellar nursery 600 light-years away. The central star has 40 times the mass of our Sun, and the surrounding disc stretches 12 times further than the orbit of Neptune in our own Solar System.
Continue reading “A Closer Look at Planetary Formation”
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a giant cloud vortex in the upper atmosphere of Uranus. This cloudy feature measures 1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers (1,100 miles by 1,900 miles) – large enough to engulf 2/3rd of the US. Although rare on Uranus, these cloud spots are actually quite common on Neptune, since the ice planet has a much more active atmosphere. Since this region of Uranus’ atmosphere was previously in shadow, astronomers theorize that heat from the sun created the vortex.
Continue reading “Dark Spot in Uranus’ Clouds”
A Soyuz capsule carrying the crew of Expedition 13 and space tourist Anousheh Ansari landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Thursday. The spacecraft slowed its descent using retrorockets and parachutes, and landed softly on its side. A dozen helicopter teams arrived on the scene minutes later to help the astronauts out of the spacecraft. They were then flown to a training centre outside Moscow. The total return time back to Earth took about 3 hours from when the capsule detached from the space station.
Continue reading “Expedition 13, Ansari Return to Earth”
Thanks to everyone who emailed me to win a copy of Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 DVD. In the end, more than 500 of you threw your names into the hat. And the winner is… Chris Houser from Boone, North Carolina. Chris, the DVD will go out in the mail today. Of course, it’ll probably get snarled up in the Canada-US border, so let me know when you receive it.
Continue reading “Battlestar Galactica Giveaway… and the Winner is…”
Astronomers think they’ve got a handle on how Sun-sized stars come together. But the formation of the largest stars – more than 10 times the mass of the Sun – still puzzle astronomers. New observations on a 20 solar mass star have revealed that these giant stars maintain a torus of material around themselves. They can continuously feed from this “doughnut” of material, while powerful jets of radiation pour from their poles. The material can continue gathering onto the star while avoiding this radiation, which would normally blast it back into space.
Continue reading “How the Really Big Stars Form”
An international team of astronomers have turned up two new Jupiter-sized planets orbiting distant stars. These planets are incredibly close to their parent stars; just a fraction of the distance from Mercury to the Sun. Astronomers believe these planets are being eroded by the intense radiation of their stars. The discovery was made using the new SuperWASP program, which looks for stars that dim and brighten on a regular schedule as a planet passes in front of them.
Continue reading “Two Hot New Planets Discovered”
This photograph shows a star forming region in NGC 3576, located about 9,000 light years from Earth. The image was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which reveals the higher energy emissions from the region. The blue dots are newly born stars generating ferocious solar winds (the more diffuse parts of the image). NGC 3576 is a particularly dense nebula, so many of these stars have been hidden from previous observations, until they were revealed by Chandra.
Continue reading “Star Formation in NGC 3576”