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.
‘Hubble Finds Blue Straggler Stars in the Galactic Bulge. Source: Hubblesite.org
Blue stragglers are so named because they seemingly lag behind in the aging process, appearing younger than the population from … Read the rest of this article
Bright fireballs appear somewhere on Earth every day. Â Most are caused by rocky asteroids. On Friday, May 20th, however, a less common object struck. Â
Sky watchers in the southeastern USA watched a big but fragile piece of comet break apart in Earth’s atmosphere. The resulting fireball was the brightest meteor observed in nearly 3 years by NASA’s all-sky … Read the rest of this article
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.
The agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston is digitizing, cataloging and archiving audio files for news media use. These files include an entire calendar day’s conversation between the Mission Control Center and the crews aboard the shuttle … Read the rest of this article
The Astronomy Podcasts page stopped working a while back but I was only recently alerted to it. It’s up and running again now.
Some of the Podcast sub-pages were also not working and these have been fixed too.
It was down to a couple of bad plugins on the site.
If you should come across any other posts or pages … Read the rest of this article
Centaurus A is a giant elliptical active galaxy 12 million light-years away. At its heart lies a black hole with a mass of 55 million suns. Now, the TANAMI project has provided the best-ever image of particle jets powered by the black hole, revealing features as small as 15 light-days across. The jets feed vast lobes of radio-emitting gas that … Read the rest of this article
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. The rare storm has been wreaking havoc for months and shooting plumes of gas high into the planet’s atmosphere.
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Thermal infrared images of Saturn from the Very Large …
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.
The survey used data from NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia.
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Astronomers think that the expansion of …
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.
“Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected,” said … Read the rest of this article
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.
PEP data are needed for correlation with spectra of … Read the rest of this article
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Endeavour on the launch pad |
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.
ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori and his five crewmates will spend 16 … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
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