Space and astronomy news
Greetings, Fellow SkyWatchers! Have you missed me? All you have to do is take a look around the web for the retailer of your choice and you’ll find The Night Sky Companion. Thanks to the great folks at Springer Press (and Sir Patrick Moore), this incredible 674 page, full-color glossy book filled with astronomy pictures, …
An asteroid between 150-160 meters in diameter will pass within 540,000 kilometers (334,000 miles) of Earth on January 29 at 08:33 UT (3:33 EST). Hopefully this news won’t cause any alarmist cries of doom, as the asteroid has no chance of hitting Earth. But there is one reason to get excited about this close approach …
Continue reading “Near Earth Asteroid 2007 TU24 Will Make a Close Approach on January 29, 2008”
2008 will be a busy year throughout the world and our solar system as various robotic and human missions are slated to begin their journeys of exploration and science. One of the most exciting and nail biting times of a mission is the launch, and following is a list of mission launches that will occur …
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”