Space and astronomy news
Interested in space and astronomy but you’ve never actually looked through a telescope? Until you’ve actually gone out and done some actual observing with your own two eyes, you won’t know what you’re missing. In this article, Fraser gives you a kick in the pants to get out there under the skies and start enjoying …
Continue reading “First Light: An Introduction to Stargazing”
Image credit: ESO A new series of photographs taken by the European Southern Observatory show a rare look into the very early stages of heavy star formation. This time in a star’s life is usually obscured from sight because of thick clouds of gas and dust, but in star cluster NGC 3603, the stellar wind …
Image credit: ESA Using the space-based XMM-Newton X-Ray observatory astronomers with the European Space Agency have made the first direct measurement of a neutron star’s magnetic field. A neutron star is a very dense object with the mass of a large star packed into a radius of only 20-30 km, and they were predicted to …
Continue reading “Neutron Star’s Magnetism Measured for the First Time”
Image credit: ESO Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have discovered a star which is extremely flat All rotating objects in space are flattened due to their rotation; even our Earth is 21 kilometres wider at the equator than it is pole-to-pole. But this new star, called Achernar, is 50% wider at its equator than …
Image credit: ESO An international survey by the European Southern Observatory has uncovered more than 1000 luminous red variable stars in nearby galaxy Centaurus A (aka NGC 5128). This is the first survey that’s ever been performed on a galaxy outside our own Milky Way. These stars, known as Mira-variables, pulse in a very specific …
Continue reading “Survey Finds 1000 Variable Stars in Nearby Galaxy”
Image credit: RAVE Researchers from 11 countries are working together to measure the motion and composition of 50 million stars in the Milky Way. This new survey is called RAVE (Radial Velocity Experiment), and astronomers will be able to use the data gathered to construct a very detailed history of our galaxy. They will be …
Continue reading “Astronomers Begin a Massive Survey of the Milky Way”
Image credit: NRAO Gamma ray bursts (GRB) are the largest known explosions in the Universe; immensely powerful, quick to fade, but usually incredibly far away. Astronomers with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory got lucky, though, when they analyzed a recent GRB and discovered it was only 2.6 billion light-years away (most are usually 4 times …
Image credit: ESA Europe is ready to begin this summer’s invasion of Mars with the launch of its Mars Express spacecraft, due to lift off on June 2. The spacecraft is currently packed safely away on top a Soyuz-Fregat rocket at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off …
Image credit: NASA A team of astronomers have weighed a group of planets orbiting a pulsar by precisely measuring their orbits. So far, two of the system’s three planets have been weighed, and they’re 4.3 and 3.0 times the mass of the Earth. What’s unusual is that the spacing between the planets almost exactly match …
Image credit: NRAO Using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers have discovered a recently exploded supernova 140 million light years from Earth. The supernova is in a region where two galaxies are colliding together, and furiously forming new stars. The astronomers consider this super star cluster region a “supernova factory” because …