Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean under its surface. Such an … Read the rest of this article
Light Pollution is the bane of astronomers everywhere. We’ve been complaining about it for decades and for the most part, get ignored for our efforts. Some local authorities are more clued in and have added shielding to street lamps for example or implemented lights-out policies at certain times of the night.
But it’s a losing battle. The ever-expansion of our … Read the rest of this article
This August sees the return of the Perseid meteor shower and, with the moon setting around midnight on Aug 11, the early hours of the 12th should allow for a fantastic show. But say if you’re clouded out?
The shower has been observed for around 2,000 years and the particles of dust making up the individual meteors we see today … Read the rest of this article
Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun’s vast magnetic field is about to flip.
“It looks like we’re no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal,” says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.”
While working to correct an extreme case of myopia (otherwise known as short-sightedness), Dutch optician Hans Lippershey stumbled upon the fact that a particular arrangement of lenses seemed to magnify distant objects.
This was the birth of the modern telescope.
Lippershey’s first telescope, or ‘dutch perspective glass’ as it was first known, came with a whopping magnification of 3x! Galileo … Read the rest of this article
The mysterious, almost mystical bright light emerging from these thick, ominous clouds is actually a telltale sign of forming stars.
Here, a very young star is being born in the guts of the dark cloud LDN 43 – a massive blob of gas, dust and ices, gathered 520 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus, The Serpent Bearer.
Stars … Read the rest of this article
Have you ever wanted to take pictures like an astronaut? Now is your chance. There’s an original Hasselblad 500EL Electric Camera kit on Ebay right now. And it’s just like the ones that were used on the Apollo Moon missions. If you act fast—and have a spare $74,950.00 laying around—it could be yours!
The camera’s listed by camera dealer Setadel … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are triggered by the merger of two small, super-dense stellar objects, such as a pair of neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.
The definitive evidence came from Hubble observations in near-infrared light of the fading fireball produced in the aftermath of a … Read the rest of this article
New observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have helped astronomers crack a longstanding puzzle about galaxy evolution.
For years, scientists have wondered why galaxies that have ceased forming new stars — so-called “quenched galaxies” — were smaller long ago than they are today. Perhaps, they thought, ancient quenched galaxies continued to grow by merging with smaller cousins that had also … Read the rest of this article
This stunning image of M31 captured by Subaru Telescope‘s Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) displays the fruits of international collaboration and technological sophistication aligned with cutting-edge science. The telescope has a large 1.5-degree field of view.
In addition to providing information about a nearby galaxy that resembles our own, this image demonstrates HSC’s capability to fulfill Subaru Telescope’s intention of producing … 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
(Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
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