Latest Astronomy Stories
[ Watch the Video: Bright Explosion on the Moon ] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online If you take a good look at the Moon it isn’t too difficult to paint a pretty clear picture of the lunar surface’s violent past. Our neighboring natural satellite is pock-marked with thousands upon thousands of craters from meteors and asteroids that have been pelting its surface for more than a billion years. Over the past eight years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Predicting the weather is difficult. With varying pressures, planetary rotation and various other factors, weather systems on Earth border on chaos. But, believe it or not, predicting the weather on the third rock from the sun is rather straightforward compared to predicting the atmospheric motions of the gas giants that lay beyond the asteroid belt. The primary reason is that, unlike Earth, the Jovian worlds do not have...
[WATCH VIDEO: OSIRIS-REx To Investigate Asteroid Bennu] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said it is moving forward with its plan to send a spacecraft to an asteroid to bring back a sample to Earth. The space agency's Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to sample asteroid Bennu is moving ahead in preparation for its launch in 2016. After launch, OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the asteroid in...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA announced yesterday that its Kepler space telescope is stuck in standby mode, but one professor is already coming up with ideas to try and revive the observatory. Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics, helped guide the Kepler mission when he served as director of NASA Ames Research Center. He has devised a few plans for the space agency that could potentially help bring the planet-hunting spacecraft...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers using the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa have revealed giant outbursts from X-ray binary star system Circinus X-1. The team watched as the double star system fired off energetic matter from its core into the surrounding system in extensive, compact jets that flared brightly. Circinus X-1 is a neutron star system where the two stars orbit each other every 16.5 days in an elliptical orbit. When the two stars...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online How did life begin? This question has been the focus of intense research for centuries, and while we have made significant strides, the answer still eludes us. Understanding how the first proteins, amino acids, and other organic compounds came together to form the first living cells is vital in our search for finding potential life on other worlds. And we have long thought that the key to life, here on Earth anyway, is the...
The Planetary Society NASA's asteroid mission could represent a new milestone in humanity's presence in and influence on the Solar System. For the first time in history, we would capture an entire object in orbit around the Sun and move it to a place of our choosing. We would evolve from mere observers of the motions of the heavens to participants in determining them. The Planetary Society conditionally supports NASA's plan to capture a small asteroid and place it in lunar orbit. In the...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomy is more than merely using optical telescopes to take pretty pictures of distant nebulae and galaxies. Researchers also seek to understand complex systems in the universe by observing how objects interact and what types of radiation are produced. To do this requires telescopes capable of observing over several energy bands, working together to construct a complete physical picture of the object of interest. This is...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA announced on Wednesday that its Kepler spacecraft was sitting in safe mode once again, possibly putting an end to its high-accuracy observations. Kepler went into a Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode earlier in May, and NASA said its spacecraft is sitting in the same position again. The space agency said the root cause of Kepler putting itself into safe mode is unknown, but the possible cause "appears to be an altitude error."...
WASHINGTON, May 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT, today, May 15, to discuss the status of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Launched...
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...
![An Astronomer\](/media/gallery/spitzer-space-telescope-sirtf/thumbs/thumbs_746643main_pia17008_full.jpg "An Astronomer\")
