Space and astronomy news
Enough of this small stuff, let’s look at the big picture. The really really big picture. In this case, one of the largest patches of the sky ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A new detailed survey was released today that combines 80 separate Hubble images together. In addition to a framework of galaxy …
Continue reading “Supercluster Ruled By the Pull of Dark Matter”
Our early Solar System was a violent place. For hundreds of millions of years, large planetoids smashed together, forming larger and larger planets. This same process is happening in other star systems right now. In fact, astronomers have discovered a system where a Neptune-sized object and a Jupiter-sized object might have just smashed together. Ouch. …
Continue reading “If You Crashed Neptune and Jupiter Together…”
It’s too bad. Life evolved here on Earth after the Universe’s big parties already ended. Sure, there’s the occasional galaxy merger, and we’ve got a few regions of furious star formation here in the Milky Way. But billions of years ago, galaxies were banging and crashing together, leading to vast eras of star formation. In …
Continue reading “The Universe Held a Party, and We Missed It”
Here’s the traditional thinking. The grand spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way took a long time to come together through a series of mergers between smaller galaxies. But what what if that’s totally wrong? Instead of evolving slowly over time, some of the largest galaxies came together quickly, forming all at once when enormous …
Continue reading “Massive Disk Galaxies Collapsed From a Single Cloud of Gas”
If your New Year’s resolutions include trying something new, expanding your horizons, or doing something to benefit humanity, this is for you: SETI@home needs more volunteers to help crunch data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And the easy part is that your desktop computer does all the work. SETI uses radio telescopes to …
Please note that this is going to be the last edition of the What’s Up series of articles on Universe Today. From here on out, Tammy’s daily skywatching guide will be published in a book called the Night Sky Companion. Tammy is still writing for Universe Today, and will be posting articles about skywatching and …
Continue reading “What’s Up this Week: December 24 – December 31, 2007”
Blinking spots of intense light are being observed all over the lower atmosphere of the Sun. Not just in the active regions, but in polar regions, quiet regions, sunspots, coronal holes and loops. These small explosions fire elegant jets of hot solar matter into space, generating X-rays as they go. Although X-ray jets are known …
Continue reading “Hinode Discovers the Sun’s Hidden Sparkle”
Okay, now you can tell your friends and family that Mars is making its closest approach, and not August like that annual hoax email that goes around. This image of Mars, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, was captured when the planet was only 88 million km (55 million miles) away from Earth. Their closest …
Monday, December 17 – Tonight there are craters galore to explore: Plato, Aristotle, Eudoxus, Archimedes… But let’s head to the north of Sinus Medii and have a look at a pair we’ve not yet encountered on our lunar travels – Agrippa and Godin. The larger of the two, Agrippa, measures around 46 kilometers in diameter …
Continue reading “What’s Up this Week: December 17 – December 23, 2007”
Monday, December 10 – If you are out stargazing until the morning hours, look for the peak of the Monocerid meteor shower. Its fall rate is around one per hour and its radiant point is near Gemini. Tonight let’s go north for a mid-size scope challenge about two fingerwidths east-northeast of the beautiful double star …
Continue reading “What’s Up this Week: December 10 – December 16, 2007”