May 30: Tiny crystals of a green mineral called olivine are falling down like rain on a burgeoning star, according to observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

May 30: NASA has ended operational planning activities for the Mars rover Spirit and transitioned the Mars Exploration Rover Project to a single-rover operation focused on Spirit’s still-active twin, Opportunity.

May 30: An assorted mix of colorful galaxies is being released today by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, or WISE. The nine galaxies are a taste of what’s to come. The mission plans to release similar images for the 1,000 largest galaxies that appear in our sky, and possibly more.

May 30: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found a rare class of oddball stars called blue stragglers in the hub of our Milky Way, the first detected within our galaxy’s bulge.

May 26: Bright fireballs appear somewhere on Earth every day. Most are caused by rocky asteroids. On Friday, May 20th, however, a less common object struck in the skies over the southeastern USA.

May 26: NASA has broadcast-quality audio and video clips from the ongoing STS-134 space shuttle and other missions available online through the Internet Archive website.

May 25: The Astronomy Podcasts page stopped working a while back but I was only recently alerted to it. It’s up and running again now.

May 24: An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.

May 20: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and a European Southern Observatory ground-based telescope tracked the growth of a giant early-spring storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere that is so powerful it stretches around the entire planet.

May 20: A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

May 20: Astronomers have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds are probably outcasts from developing planetary systems and, moreover, they could be twice as numerous as the stars themselves.

May 18: Ernst Pollmann, Chairman of the VdS-Spectroscopy-Group in Germany and an ative spectroscopist, has requested the assistance of AAVSO photoelectric photometry (PEP) observers in a campaign to observe the S Doradus variable P Cygni through the 2011 observing season.

May 16: Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off today on her last mission to the International Space Station. Following launch of the STS-134 mission at 12:56 GMT (14:56 CEST), Endeavour is heading towards a docking with the Station at 10:15 GMT (12:15 CEST) on Wednesday, 18 May.

May 15: New data analysis from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. The finding heralds the first direct confirmation of this kind of magma layer at Io and explains why the moon is the most volcanic object known in the solar system.

May 10: NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn is expected to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 188 million kilometers (117 million miles) from Earth.

May 9: In case you’re wondering why this site hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s because I was away on vacation. That means a vacation from PCs and the internet as much as traveling to a foreign destination. I don’t take a laptop with me and I don’t slink off to internet cafes when no one’s watching. So everything I normally do online just goes dormant. Now I’m back, new news items will start appearing on the site again.

Filed under: Astronomy News