One of Einstein’s predictions for relativity is the concept of gravity waves; these are emitted whenever massive objects move. The more massive the object the stronger the gravity wave.
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NASA Panel Will Investigate Mars Global Surveyor’s Disappearance
Although it lasted years longer than anyone ever expected, the disappearance of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft is still a mystery the agency wants to investigate. The agency has created an internal review board to review the spacecraft’s final days and recommend any new processes or policies that could improve future spacecraft.
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Podcast: Comets, Our Icy Friends from the Outer Solar System
The sudden brightening of Comet McNaught has reminded us what a treat it can be to see a comet with the unaided eye. A diffuse ball with a long tail stretching across the sky. There’s nothing else in the night sky that can compare to a bright comet. But what are these objects, where do they come from, and what can they tell us about the formation of the Solar System?
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What’s Up this Week: January 15 – January 21, 2007
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! We start the week with a celestial scenery alert just before dawn… Look for the Moon, Antares, Jupiter and Mars! The days ahead are filled with alternative catalog studies and meteor showers. So be sure to look skyward, because…
Here’s what’s up!
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Comet McNaught is Now Visible in the Daytime!
Okay, this is unprecedented. The really bright Comet McNaught that I mentioned a few days ago is now so bright that you can see it in the daytime. It’s extremely close to the Sun, so you need a way that you can block the glare of the Sun, but still see the sky.
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Hubble Sees a Hypergiant Star Nearing Death
VY Canis Majoris, located about 5,000 light-years away, is no ordinary star; it’s a supergiant, containing 30 to 40 times the mass of our own Sun. And it’s so luminous it’s also considered a hypergiant, shining 500,000 times as bright as the Sun. And it’s big… really big. If this star lived in our Solar System, its surface would extend out to the orbit of Saturn.
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Book Review: Astronomical Image Processing Tutorials by Donald P. Waid
Astrophotography is an exhilarating pastime. Thanks to the digital revolution in amateur astronomy, taking deep space images is less of the almost overwhelming challenge it was just a handful of years ago. Today, with a modest telescope and digital camera, thousands of enthusiasts are producing beautiful images of galaxies and nebulas. However, one final hurdle persists- raw images produced through a telescope still require significant enhancement to bring out the secrets hidden within them. This can be a daunting procedure because processing astrophotographs has been, and remains, an essentially self-taught art. However, several imaging experts who have been honing their processing skills for many years have recently begun to reveal their hard learned techniques through books and, in 2006, with DVD tutorials.
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The Milky Way and the Seven Dwarfs
There’s no easy way to put this, our home galaxy is a killer. It’s torn up galaxies in the past, and it’s going to do it again in the future. Each galaxy we consume makes us larger. If you need evidence that this is still going on, you only need to look at the conveyor belt of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way; each of which will eventually get torn apart, its stars assimilated.
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Planets Born to a Dying Star
Young stars and new planets go hand-in-hand. But that might not always be the case. An international team of astronomers have discovered a situation where material shed from a dying star is being captured into a planetary disk around a binary companion.
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Light Echoes from Our Supermassive Black Hole
A new set of images from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show the reflected X-ray emission from a small meal consumed by the supermassive black hole that lurks at the heart of the Milky Way.
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