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What’s Up Tonight…
Planets to See In The Sky Tonight … minutes after the sun. It looks like a very bright star, being more luminous than Jupiter further and higher to the south-east. Venus, Earth’s “Evil Twin” is actually the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon. This is because of the planets thick, dense atmosphere…its sulphuric acid clouds reflecting sunlight almost like a mirror. This world is roughly the same size and mass as Earth but the planet has undergone a ...more info
The Night Sky With Binoculars Tonight … very popular object is made for binoculars, a collection of star clusters and nebula. Rising from the north-east mid evening is the return of the impressive constellation of Orion, an unmistakable sign of winter. This famous collection of stars is always spectacular, with the straight line of the three stars of Orion’s belt. If you look below the belt you’ll see… More Info
Meteor Showers 2012…trails of debris as they orbit the Sun. But the source of the Geminids shower is something else, not an icy comet but a 5.1 km wide asteriod called 3200 Phaethon. This near Earth asteroid orbits real close to the Sun, closer than any other known asteroid, getting well inside Mercury’s orbit every one and a half years. So this rocky body takes the full force of solar energy, which likely …More Info
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General Articles…
…When you think of Saturn you’d probably instantly think of the majestic rings, yeah me too. But Saturn’s attractions don’t just stop at the rings and the planet, oh no! The gas giant also has a family of extremely interesting moons. From largest to smallest, they are Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, MimasHyperion, Phoebe…
…from article “Planet Saturn And Its Rings”
News Stories…
Kepler 22b In The Habitable Zone Of A Sun Like Star
Around most stars there exists a certain region, a sweet spot, a not too hot, but also not too cold nice comfortable place. This is exactly where Earth is around the Sun, that perfect prime distance from our star that makes it just right for life to exist. The clincher that makes a planet in this habitable zone a potentially cosy home for extraterrestrial life forms to make a living is of course that sweet wet stuff, water, or to be more exact liquid water. The habitable zone moves …READ MORE >>>
Past News…
Shallow Liquid Water Found On Jupiter’s Icy Moon Europa Jupiter’s ice moon Europa is one of four main moons of the huge gas giant Jupiter, and ever since scientists realised that this place hides a salty ocean beneath its surface, well that made Europa pretty much top of the list when it comes to searching out any potential alien critters hiding out in the solar system. Europa’s subsurface ocean is no insignificant amount of water either, there’s a lot of it, more of the wet stuff exists on Europa actually than all of …More Info>>>
Youngest Millisecond Pulsar Found by Nasa’s Fermi Pulsars are a breed of neutron stars, they spin, have very strong magnetic fields, and that field concentrates electromagnetic radiation into usually two opposing beams. If one or both of their beams sweeps across Earth’s line of sight as it spins, then this is a pulsar. Like cosmic lighthouses in space, they blink on and off at speeds dependent on thier spin rate …More Info>>>
Mars Rover Opportunity’s Three Year Trek On Video On a red ‘star’ in the night sky, a historic journey is taking place…In January 2004 the Nasa Mars Rover Opportunity, and its twin rover Spirit arrived from Earth to start their missions to study the rocks of the red world. The two robot geologists have made incredible disoveries about Mars in the years they’ve been active there, and it’s now known that Mars was More Info>>>
New Images Of Apollo Landing Sites From The LRO Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken even sharper photos of the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 landing sites than ever before after decending to a lower orbit and getting as close as 13 miles from the lunar surface. In the above image showing the Apollo 17 landing site, Moon buggy tracks, Moon buggy, flag, footprints, science equipment ...More Info>>>
7/8/2011 Possible Signs Of Liquid Water On Mars The red planet is a place of mystery, it keeps throwing us question after question. Mars is our neighbouring world, it is tantalisingly close…but yet still so far away. It is the most Earthlike of the planets, but did it have life way back in its past? Does it even have life now? In theory we can dream up all kinds of ways that simple life forms could …More Info >>>
30/6/2011 Most Distant Quasar Discovered Quasars are amongst the most luminous objects in the universe, with a brightness far higher than normal, throwing out vast amounts of light energy over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light, radio, infrared, x-rays, ultra violet, and gamma rays are blasted outwards from the quasar. Incredibly they can emit up to 1,000 times …More Info
23/6/2011 Abell 2744, Galaxy Collisions And Dark Matter Galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster), is a pretty and colourful picture you might think, but this is a scene of such scale and galactic violence that it stretches the imagination. Virtually every single smudge or faintest point of light you can distinguish here is an entire galaxy in its own right. Although the image is nicely …More Info
16/6/2011, Chandra Finds Young Supermassive Black Holes Common Supermassive black holes, the unimaginable gravitational power that lurks at the heart of every galaxy in the universe have always posed a question. What came first, the Supermassive black hole or the galaxy? Did the black hole form first, then form a galaxy of stars, gas and dust around itself ? Did the black holes eventually emerge at the centres of already formed galaxies. Or did…More Info
11/6/2011 Markarian 739 Has Two Supermassive Black Holes At the heart of every galaxy lies a monster, a colossal gravity well that sports a mass hundreds of millions, or even many billions of times the mass of our Sun. These monsters are the supermassive black holes that dominate the cores of their host galaxies, with event horizons even bigger than our solar system …More info
12/5/2011 The Crab Nebula Flares Up In Gamma Rays Take a look at this object, you could never deny that it is a thing of beauty. But its origin lies in one of the most violent events in the universe. This is the famous Crab Nebula, and marks the scene of a cataclysmic blast so powerful that an observer in another galaxy would have seen the explosion outshining our entire …More Info
21/3/2011 Rain Storms On Titan Showers, rainstorms and a really good soaking! Now you’d be forgiven in thinking I was talking about Earth’s weather, but no, incredibly this is rainstorms on another world. This other world is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the only one known to have a thick atmosphere. Ok this isn’t exactly the cool sweet waterwe all know and love falling from the alien sky…More Info
3/2/2011 Kepler Nets An Exoplanet Bounty From May to September 2009 Kepler looked at 156,000 stars in its field of view. At least 1,200 planet candidates have been found, with some 54 of them in the cosy habitable zone of their star. “In the habitable zone” means water, and if it’s there it would be flowing on (or under) the surface…ocean planets with alien sea …More info
26/1/11 Hubble Digs Out The Most Distant Galaxy The Hubble Telescope is a time machine. It not only coaxes galaxies into view from billions of light years across the universe, it also looks back billions of years in time. All because light has a finite speed (186,000 miles per sec). In fact any telescope is a time machine, even your eyes for that matter when …more info
12/1/11 Kepler Finds First Rocky Exoplanet This is exciting stuff ! The holy grail of the planet hunters is to discover small, rocky Earth sized planets orbiting distant stars. Planets happily going around their sun in the cozy habitable zone, meaning that the solvent of life H2O, can exist in liquid form. We’ve had some interesting news recently, such as with the exoplanet …More Info
3/12/2010 Red Dwarfs Crank Up The Star Count You’ve heard the quote “There’s more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth”. Well if you thought that was pretty astounding, then it now looks like we need another two planets full of beaches !! It all comes down to red dwarfs, smaller, cooler and longer living stars than our Sun. …More Info
18/11/2010 Extragalactic Exoplanet Discovered We have a newly discovered exoplanet in our Galaxy…it is a member of our Galaxy but has not originated from our Galaxy. This new planet has been unmasked as a true alien world by European astronomers, alien in the galactic sense of the word. It and its host star are visitors from another star system, actually born outside…More Info
21/10/2010 Galaxy Smashes The Distance Record Light from a galaxy that existed way back, just as the new universe was getting its act together…! Only weeks after the news of a potential “other Earth” (Gliese 581g), astronomers have done it again with the discovery of the most distant object ever. This extremely remote galaxy is catalogued as UDFy-38135539…yes I know, very memorable! But this star system , which would have been much …More Info
30/9/2010 Exoplanet Gliese 581g, A Possible Place For Life? Out there in the depths of space is a planet resembling Earth, just down the road at a measly 20 light years away in fact. Ok, if we could travel so fast that we could do 7 laps of the Earth in 1 second (light speed) then we just might have a chance at visiting someday, but it would still take us 20 years to get there. So …More Info
7/9/2010 Is There Life On Mars? The planet Mars is place of mystery, it’s the most Earth like of the planets in our solar system gaining our affection and fascination for centuries, and we now have the place mapped down to a resolution of one metre. This freeze dried desert world continues to tease us with tantalising hints of comfortable conditions for life in the past, or …More Info
18/8/2010 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 …more info
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 at the Sun for more than a split second or so, …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 in an interstellar cloud very slowly starts to coalese, clumping together into knots of denser material. These …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 its 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 all the matter, energy, time, and everything else we do not even know about yet. …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 Astronomers using ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) have detected a superstorm with frightening …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 at a rocky outcrop called “Comanche” at the time, as it was making it’s way down from the summit of ”Husband Hill“. The …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 structure of the ice that eminates from the centre. Looking almost like a spiral galaxy this pattern in the north polar cap was first spotted …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!! We don’t have that but Saturn does, in the shape of it’s incredible moon Titan. Titan even …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. The image is dominated by that bizzare looking extremely dark area of the nebula, a dark and dense …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 stuff floating around in space that goes into making new suns. The Herschel Telescope can reach the parts …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 the Big Bang itself. This radiation is the oldest known radiation in the universe, and it’s Planck’s job to map the entire sky for this ancient …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 debate for over a century, as it has been noticed to dim for a period of two years every 27 years. Now astronomers looked to have ….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 of millions of times the mass of the Sun. Gas, dust, and other interstellar spiral into the gravity well at a ferocious rate. All this activity produces vast amounts of energy that emits over large swaths of the …more info
