Space and astronomy news
If you didn’t get a chance to watch the IYA telescope “live” on Galactic TV today, don’t worry. We took a video capture for you. Step inside to enjoy today’s view of Alpha Centauri… Alpha Centauri (alpha Centauri / alpha Cen); (also known as Rigil Kentaurus, Rigil Kent, or Toliman) is the brightest star in …
Continue reading “IYA Live Telescope Today – Alpha Centauri”
[/caption] The constellation of Vela is located south of the ecliptic plane and was once part of the much larger constellation of Argo Navis – now divided into three parts. It is now abbreviated and Vela represents the “sails”. Vela encompasses 500 square degrees of sky, ranking 32nd in constellation size. It has 5 main …
[/caption] The Milky Way is pretty hard to map, given that we live inside of it and have to peer through all of the dust and gas that lie inside the disk. Though we can’t get a picture of our galaxy from outside, we can create images and maps from computer modeling of the stars …
[/caption] The constellation of Musca was originally created by Petrus Plancius from the stellar observations of Dutch sea navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman when exploring the southern hemisphere. Musca’s star patterns became known when it appeared on a celestial globe in 1597 and was considered a constellation named Apis when it was …
[/caption] A new image of Omega Centauri shows the globular cluster glittering away as one of the finest jewels of the southern hemisphere night sky. It contains millions of stars and is located about 17,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus, and sparkles at magnitude 3.7, appearing nearly as large as the full …
[/caption] Located south of the ecliptic plane, the constellation of Lupus was once associated with Centaurus, but was listed as a separate constellation in Ptolemy’s Almagest. It survived to become one of the 88 modern constellations recognized by the International Astronomical Union. Lupus covers around 334 square degrees of sky and contains 9 stars in …
[/caption] Libra is a constellation of the zodiac, positioned on the ecliptic plane between between Virgo to the west and Scorpius to the east. It is a faint group of stars and not easy to recognize. Its two major stars once once represented the claws of Scorpius. How and when it came to be recognized …
The sprawling constellation of Hydra was one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy and endures today to be the largest of the 88 modern constellations adopted by the International Astronomical Union. Spanning an incredible 1303 square degrees of night sky and containing 17 primary stars in the asterism, Hydra contain 75 stars with Bayer/Flamsteed …
Just as unseen dark energy is increasing the rate of expansion of the universe, there’s something else out there causing an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. Scientists believe the cause is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe, and they are calling it “Dark Flow,” in the vein of two …
Continue reading “Scientists Detect “Dark Flow:” Matter From Beyond the Visible Universe”
If you were stuck inside your house, you’d never know what it looks like from the outside. That’s the situation with the Milky Way. We’re inside it, so we don’t really know what its structure looks like. There are other examples of grand spirals that we can see, but this is like seeing other houses …