Latest Astronomy Stories
BENTON HARBOR, Mich., March 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE: WHR) announced today that it will participate in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2013 Consumer & Retail Conference and the 3rd Annual International Strategy & Investment Group (ISI) Retail Summit. The company will be reaffirming its full-year 2013 outlook during these presentations. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20040202/DETU004LOGO ) Whirlpool Corporation will be presenting at...
New video combines carefully-selected celestial images, many never before available on digital disc, with music and narration to create breathtaking works of art SEATTLE, March 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, the public has been fascinated by the beauty of newly released cosmic images recorded by advanced orbiting and ground based telescopes. Now the new "Art of the Universe" DVDs and Blu-ray Discs enable viewers to fully appreciate the gorgeous colors and intricate formations of...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using data obtained from a NASA satellite, a Pennsylvania State University astronomer has identified the closest solar system to be found within the past 97 years. According to astronomer Kevin Luhman’s report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the newly identified system is a pair of brown dwarf stars and the third-closest system to the Sun. “The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light years -- so close that Earth's...
AlphaGalileo Foundation A comet discovered by a Queen’s University Belfast supported project will be visible in UK and Irish skies from tomorrow evening (Tuesday 12 March) onwards. Comet PANSTARRS was discovered in June 2011, by a team including astronomers from the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s, using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii, when it was still 1.2 billion kilometers from the Sun. The comet will be visible by eye low-down in the Western sky from roughly...
South African scientists to develop rugged microservers to handle the harsh desert conditions, explore new computer architectures and develop advanced algorithms for radio astronomy imaging PRETORIA, South Africa, March 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country's National Research Foundation is joining ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) in a four-year collaboration to research extremely...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An asteroid about the size of a city block will be making its way past Earth later today, and Slooh plans on giving the world access to its tools to view the near-Earth object (NEO). Slooh, a leader in live, celestial event programming, said in a statement earlier this week that it will be broadcasting the asteroid 2013 ET on Saturday (Mar 9) as the it passes by Earth at about 2.5 times the Moon's distance from us. 2013 ET was...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online On Friday, February 15, a massive meteor exploded in the sky over Russia's Ural Mountains region, injuring more than 1,500 people and at least 200 children. Now, a lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southampton has released the results of a simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor using high-tech software called NEOImpactor. Professor of engineering and environment Dr. Hugh Lewis was able to use the simulation tool to...
NASA Science Using data from an aging NASA spacecraft, researchers have found signs of an energy source in the solar wind that has caught the attention of fusion researchers. NASA will be able to test the theory later this decade when it sends a new probe into the sun for a closer look. The discovery was made by a group of astronomers trying to solve a decades-old mystery: What heats and accelerates the solar wind? The solar wind is a hot and fast flow of magnetized gas that streams...
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Comets visible to the naked eye are a rare delicacy in the celestial smorgasbord of objects in the nighttime sky. Scientists estimate that the opportunity to see one of these icy dirtballs advertising their cosmic presence so brilliantly they can be seen without the aid of a telescope or binoculars happens only once every five to 10 years. That said, there may be two naked-eye comets available for your viewing pleasure this year. "You might have heard of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The ink is drying on a brand new birth certificate for a star that's been around for a very long time. New calculations using NASA'S Hubble Space Telescope have enabled a group of astronomers to take an important step closer to reconciling the age of this star, and the age of the Universe. "We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age," said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University...
Latest Astronomy Reference Libraries
The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy. Observational Planetary Astronomy Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Image Caption: NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 56,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years distant. Credit: NASA/ESA/Wikipedia What is Astrophysics? For much of the modern age the term Astrophysics has been used synonymously with Astronomy. This interchange is so common that many textbooks even offer the two as having the same meaning. However, from a strictly historical perspective there are differences...
The Tropic of Capricorn, alternately called the Southern Tropic, is a marker of the most southerly latitude on the Earth at which the Sun can be directly overhead. This occurs at the December solstice, when the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun at its maximum degree. It is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. It presently lies 23 degrees 26’ 16’’ south of the Equator. Currently, the Tropic of Capricorn is drifting towards the north at...
