Space and astronomy news
[/caption] A new X-ray emitting object in the Milky Way has been recently announced by the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) team and the Swift satellite astronomers. MAXI, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency supported instrument, monitors the entire sky in the X-ray portion of the spectrum from its perch on the International Space Station …
Continue reading “Another X-ray Nova Detected by ISS, Swift”
[/caption] Polar jets are often found around objects with spinning accretion disks – anything from newly forming stars to ageing neutron stars. And some of the most powerful polar jets arise from accretion disks around black holes, be they of stellar or supermassive size. In the latter case, jets emerging from active galaxies such as …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – Blazar Jets”
[/caption] How do massive stars form? This has been one of the more hotly debated questions in astronomy. Do big stars form by accretion like low-mass stars or do they form through the merging of low mass protostars? Since massive stars tend to be quite far away and usually are surrounded by a shroud of …
Continue reading “Big or Small, All Stars Form the Same Way”
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Hopefully the rains have passed in your area and you’re ready for some dark skies and a double-dip… Double stars that is! This weekend we’ll take a look at some of the most colorful and interesting binary stars of the summer. Need more? Then hang tight as we take a look at …
Continue reading “Weekend SkyWatcher’s Forecast: July 2-4, 2010”
Here are some beautiful galaxy pics. You can even use these as desktop background wallpapers if you like. Just click on an image to see a larger version and then right-click and choose “Set as Desktop Background”. [/caption] This is a picture of a cluster of stars in the nearby satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic …
This question was posed in an Astronomy Cast episode a while back. It offers an interesting thought experiment, although a reasonably definitive answer to the question can be arrived at. Imagine a scenario where a spacecraft gains relativistic mass as it approaches the speed of light, while at the same time its volume is reduced …
Continue reading “Can a Really, Really Fast Spacecraft Turn Into A Black Hole?”
Here’s this week’s image for the Where In The Universe Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the instrument responsible …
While astronomers have studied both big and little black holes for decades, evidence for those middle-sized black holes has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black …
[/caption] Unfortunately, the Universe isn’t equipped with any three-panel dressing room mirrors, so we can’t see what our own Milky Way Galaxy looks like face on, or even from the side. But here’s a great new edge-on image of Galaxy NGC 4945, and many astronomers think this hive of stars closely resembles our own spiral …
[/caption] Astronomers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific Research Organization (CSRIO) have revealed the hidden face of an enormous galaxy called Centaurus A, which emits a radio glow covering an area 200 times bigger than the full Moon. The galaxy’s radio waves have been painstakingly transformed into a highly detailed image, which is being unveiled to the …
Continue reading “Australian Astronomers Reveal Image of A Cosmic “Blue Whale””