**Update…try the new and better comments function on the left (click tag to bring into centre of screen). You can post anonymously, or join and sign in with your Google, Yahoo, and Twitter accounts, allowing you to display your profile, photo etc and contact other members**
Scroll down to news…”Magnetar Throws A Spanner In The Works”
Today’s Galaxy…The brightest object in this image is the elliptical galaxy NGC 4881, this spherical island universe is 352 million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, and is an outlying member of the giant Coma Cluster of galaxies. The Coma Cluster is a vast collection of … More info
The Nasa SOHO Spacecraft sees our restless star launch a huge eruptive prominance from it’s surface far out into space. A massive amount of material is thrown outwards in this arching loop that would absolutely dwarf the planet Earth. This is one of the largest such outbursts witnessed by the Nasa SOHO Spacecraft.
This is a place of million degree plasma, twisted and contorted magnetic fields, even solar tsunamis race across it’s surface with waves that rise higher than the Earth. In just one second the Sun puts out more energy than has been used in all of human history, and it’s big, very big. It’s volume would take one million, three hundred thousand Earths to fill. Although compared to some other stellar specimens, our Sun is totally puny. It would take seven thousand, million, million Earth’s to fill the hyper giant star VY Canis Majoris’ volume.
Planets to See in Your Sky Tonight (updated daily)…Jupiter is now very well placed in the evening sky to observe. It is very obvious, and so bright that would cause someone not even interested in astronomy to wonder what it is. It will continue growing in angular size and brightness, and by mid September the biggest of the planets with it’s collection of four main moons will be at opposition, with a magnitude of ..…more info
“The Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse”… Red supergiant Betelgeuse sits at Orion’s left shoulder in the northern winter sky. Everyone has probably looked at it, in this striking constellation. But you will never see it again as just a boring point of light. It is a turbulent, volatile monster…..more info
“Jupiter’s Moon Europa, It’s Ice Crust, and The Question of Alien Life”…secrets of it’s alien world locked away under a crust of 5 to 10 miles of ice. But this ice is not inanimate and inert, it is continually shifting, splitting, and moving. Some of the cracks in the ice span 15 to 20 miles wide. The moon is a messy scene of criss cross lines, cracks, splits, and ice ridges that look like they’ve ….more info
(Check out my other articles in right hand margin)
The Known Universe
The Best News Stories, My Take On It…
18th August 2010, Magnetar Throws a Spanner In The Works
In the zoo that is the universe, there is a thing called a magnetar…a vicious beast. Even at a distance of 1,000 kilometres away one would kill you with it’s colossal magnetic field, ripping your flesh due to the diamagnetism of water. At a distance half way to the Moon, a magnetar would wipe your credit card. They are a rare type of neutron star left over from the death of a large mass star in a supernova, and have a very high gravitational field. They are only tens of kilometres across, spin faster than a kitchen blender, and have …More Info
Recent News…
23/7/2010 R136a1 The Most Massive Star There is a monster lurking out there, a star that has blown away the upper limits for what was ever thought possible for a sun in the universe. Blazing with an brightness that is literally unimaginable to the human mind, ten million times that of our Sun. You know how you can’t look directly …more info
17/7/2010 Big Stars Do It Like Small Stars With the help of Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have now realised that the big guys of the universe, the most massive stars, do indeed form just like their smaller stellar neighbours. Gas and dust …More Info
5/7/2010 ESA’s Planck Sees The Oldest Light In The Universe Esa’s Planck spacecraft has finished scanning the entire sky in it’s mission to map the light from the beginning of time. Quite a while ago…13.7 billion years in fact, the Big Bang happened, an event of unimaginable power that spewed out …More Info
24/6/2010 Super Winds Rage On Giant Exoplanet Looks like the wind’s picking up…! On an extrasolar planet 150 light years away in the constellation Pegasus, there are winds that would make even the most violent hurricanes on Earth look like a gentle breeze. Astronomers …More Info
4/6/2010 Mars Was Wet And Life Friendly More interesting news from the red planet…Nasa’s Mars rover “Spirit”, the one that got stuck for good in the Martian soil earlier in the year, ”struck gold” when it was examining rocks way back in 2005. The rover was …More Info
27/5/2010 Mars’ Spiral Ice Cap Pattern Solved This is the northern ice cap of the cold desert world Mars, it contains mainly water ice together with frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). But what you probably can’t help noticing though is the strange spiral …More Info
18/5/2010 Titan Shows Earthlike River Beds on Xanadu Imagine looking up at our Moon with a telescope and not seeing the barren, dusty place pummeled by craters we all know so well but a moon with an atmosphere, rivers, vast lakes, rain, wind, clouds, and even tides…dream on!! …More info
13/5/2010 Herschel Sees a Hole, Not a Cloud This is the ghostly looking reflection nebula NGC 1999 near to the famous Orion Nebula 1,500 light years away. NGC 1999 shines from the light of a young star embedded within it, and has been known about for a while. …more info
6/5/2010 Herschel Sees a Big Baby This is the recent image taken from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory of a baby giant that is still growing. Herschel’s special talent is to peer into space with it’s sensitive detectors tuned to the far infrared and see the coldest …more info
27/4/2010 ESA’s Planck Sees The Stuff of Star Formation Esa’s Planck Observatory is a mission to study the cosmic microwave background radiation.The CMB is a remnant of what was emitted way back through the depths of time to just a few hundred thousand years after the mother of all explosions …more info
21/4/2010 Nasa’s New Solar Observarory’s First image Our 4.5 billion year old star is a seething
13/4/2010 The Rosette Nebula’s Baby Giants
8/4/2010 Epsilon Aurigae is Seen Eclipsed By Dust Cloud Epsilon Aurigae is a star in the constellation Auriga, near the brightest star Capella. In this stunning and eerie image a vast dark dust cloud can be seen passing across our line of sight in front of the star, eclipsing it. This star has been the subject of much…more info
2/4/2010 Centaurus A Black Hole Creates Enormous Plumes A huge power house rages at the heart of the active galaxy Centaurus A, 12 million light years away. The power house is the central supermassive black hole, estimated at hundreds…more info
- posted on 11 hours ago
