Latest Astronomy Stories
Pioneering scientists redefine what influences movement in solar system and invite scientists, theorists and solar system experts to comment on the "More than Gravity" thesis LANCASTER, N.Y., Feb. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- A new theory on the forces that control planetary orbit refutes the 400-year old assumptions currently held by the scientific community. Scientific and engineering experts Gerhard and Kevin Neumaier have established a relationship between solar winds and a quantized...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Star Trek fans everywhere have a reason to rejoice today as a contest to name one of Pluto’s two previously unnamed moons ended with one Spock-tacular name reaching, for lack of a better term, warp speed. William Shatner, the man best known for his role as Captain James Tiberius Kirk on the 1960’s television sci-fi classic, which later spawned a large movie franchise and several spin-offs, proposed Vulcan as the name of one of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists are on the hunt to find habitable exoplanets, and a new discovery might mean there are even more candidates out there than previously thought. A new theoretical study suggests even dying stars might be able to have orbiting exoplanets that are hospitable to extraterrestrial life. As a star dies, its outer layers puff off, leaving behind a hot core known as a white dwarf which is typically about the size of Earth. Although...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 27, to announce black hole observations from its newest X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The briefing participants are: -- Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator, California Institute of Technology,...
NASA Many areas of scientific research -- Earth's weather, ocean currents, the outpouring of magnetic energy from the sun -- require mapping out the large scale features of a complex system and its intricate details simultaneously. Describing such systems accurately, relies on numerous kinds of input, beginning with observations of the system, incorporating mathematical equations to approximate those observations, running computer simulations to attempt to replicate observations, and...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Initial reports put last Friday’s (Feb 15) Chebarkul meteorite that exploded over Russia’s Urals region at about 10 tons. But after careful analysis, NASA released new information that puts the meteorite closer to 10,000 tons—1,000 times larger than the estimated size reported by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). “My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the vast stellar halo that envelopes our galaxy have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of cannibalism by our Milky Way. For the first time ever, Hubble was used to gain precise measurements of the sideways motion of a small sample of stars located far from the galaxy's center. The unusual lateral motion of...
Watch the video "Magneto-Spin Alignment Effect Movie (Black Hole Jet)" April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Black holes are voracious monsters at the center of galaxies that shape the growth and death of the stars around them with their tremendous gravitational pull and explosive ejections of energy. "Over its lifetime, a black hole can release more energy than all the stars in a galaxy combined," explains Roger Blandford, Stanford professor, director of the Kavli...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters say they have discovered the reason behind the strange scene when finding an asteroid with a tail. Just ten asteroids to date have been observed to have displayed a tail, similar to a comet, and one of these objects, P/2012 F5, was discovered in March 2012 from the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona. These asteroids are also known as MBCs. Spanish astrophysicists from the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online This March sky gazers will be treated to another special celestial event as comet Pan-STARRS C/2011 L4 becomes visible to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere. According to astronomers from the University of Hawaii, the comet should become visible from about March 7 just above the horizon. In order to see the comet, you will need to find dark skies away from the lights of the city. Scientists say that this comet will have a...
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...
