29/3/2010 Pac Man Appears on Mimas Well no…Pac Man is not really on Mimas, but it sure looks like it from the latest and highest resolution temperature map of Saturn’s icy satellite. Mimasis nicknamed “The Death Star” from it’s 81 mile wide impact crater Herschel that takes up nearly a third of it’s width, it is also the moon with the job of keeping the Cassini Division clear….more info
17/3/2010 Earliest Black Holes Seen Without Dust disks Black holes are monstrous gravity wells where our understanding of physics breaks down, places where not even light itself, the fastest thing in the universe can escape. The centres of most galaxies are thought to hold a supermassive black hole, including ours. They nearly always sport a disk of gas and dust, which rotates the hole at..more info
15/3/2010 Phobos Reveals itself in Amazing Detail Phobos is the largest of Mars’ two moons, the other being Deimos. Phobos hugs the red planet, orbiting closer than any other known moon in the solar system, and travels faster around Mars than Mars itself rotates. It is destined to be torn apart by Mars’ gravity as it drops below the Roche Limit in about 11 million years time, …more info
9/3/2010 Cassini Sees a Ghostly Rhea The Nasa Cassini Spacecraft, a 22 foot long piece of hardware at around 790 million miles away, moves amongst the environment of the gas giant Saturn. The fact that we can get this thing to be in just the perfect position, pointing in the right direction, at exactly the right time to see just about anything we want is pretty incredible…more info
5/3/2010 Possible Life Enabling Molecules Found in M42 Nebula The Orion Nebula is a vast star forming region 24 light years across, located in the Sword of Orion. It shows up a bright nebulous patch visible in the smallest of telescopes or even binoculars. The different life stages of stars have been seen here, new born stars, collapsing clouds of gas and dust, and proto-planetary…more info
2/3/2010 Chandrayaan Spacecraft Finds Lunar Water Ice We’ve studied the Moon with our telescopes, landed on it numerous times, mapped it, measured it, and dated it. But even now we are still finding out new things about our nearest neighbour in space, and we thought we knew pretty much everything we could about Lunar. An Indian spacecraft called….more info
3/2/2010 A Tiger Stripe’s Hot Spots Revealed This is Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn at around the size of England. Take a look at those strange looking blue lines near it’s south pole, they are nicknamed the “Tiger Stripes“ and are fractures in the moon’s icy crust. This is a place where the temperature of the frigid satellite is higher, and eruptions of …more info
18/2/2010 Oldest Most Primitive Stars Found When the mother of all explosions, the Big Bang, went off around 13 billion years ago, the very first stars to form in the newly born Universe were primitive in their make up. They were the very first generation of stars and inferior to a star like our Sun which is rich in heavy elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as ….more info
16/2/10 The Murchison Meteorite,Full of Life’s Building Blocks Take a look at this lump of apparantly ordinary looking rock, it doesn’t seem anything spectacular. But this thing has been floating around our solar system for a hell of a long time, 4.6 billion years in fact. This is the length of time that the Murchison Meteorite could have been in existance, even…more info
14/2/2010 Mars Crater Rock Layers Show Environmental Timeline The array of Nasa spacecraft and rovers, or rover (sadly, Spirit is in it’s final resting place) just carry on giving us great pictures and science from the red planet. The razor sharp images we now routinely get from Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are breathtaking, and this time they show Mars giving up yet more…more info
10/2/2010 Stunning New Images of M42 From ESO The famous Orion Nebula (M42) is a favourite with amateur astronomers, being very bright it can even be seen with small binoculars glowing in the sword of Orion. It’s a jewel of the sky, a vast cloud of gas and dust that shines bright from the light of massive and newly formed stars born within it. The Orion Nebula is…more info
5/2/2010 Hubble Sees Pluto Change Colour Pluto, was once classed as the ninth planet of our solar system but was demoted in 2006 to a dwarf planet instead by the International Astronomical Union. This body on the edges of our family of our family of planets is a ball of rock and ice at just 70 % the size of Earth’s Moon, bone shatteringly cold, and takes 248 years to orbit the distant Sun….more info
27/1/2010 Furthest Stellar Mass Black Hole Found Astronomers using the ESO Very Large Telescope have found a black hole called NGC300 X-1 in the spiral galaxy NGC 300 in the constellation Sculptor. This is the furthest stellar mass black hole yet found. Stellar mass black holes have a mass up to 20 times that of the Sun, and are much less massive than super massive black holes …more info
26/1/2010 Nasa’s Mars Rover Spirit is Stuck Fast Nasa’s hugely successful Mars rover Spirit is stuck in sand unable to move, and is now in it’s final resting place. It got into it’s tricky predicament last May and Nasa has been trying to free it ever since. But all efforts have come to nothing and the decision has been finally made to stop trying, and instead concentrate on using the rover…more info
20/1/2010 The Pawprint of a Celestial Cat This is an amazing image recently released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), of a huge area of gas and dust that is a star birth region in the Milky Way. This astronomical object is one of the few that reallydoes look like it’s name, as the three distinct parts of the glowing red cloud look pretty much like a giant cat’s footprint in space….more info
14/1 /2010 Stunning Image of Martian Crater Dunes Sand dunes can often be seen on the floors of Martian craters, trapped in by the crater walls. These dunes can show incredible patterns and formations, sculpted by the Martian winds. In this incredible photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 28th of December 2009, the dunes are very similar to each other, with thin bands of redder…more info
12/1/2010 New Behaviour at Enceladus South Pole Enceladus is Saturn’s mysterious icy moon, at only around the diameter of England, and with an odd terrain at it’s south pole called “Tiger stripes” where eruptions of water rich plumes are known to emanate from. This place is a puzzle to scientists, especially the southern regions where the surface is the youngest, meaning changes…more info
