Latest Astronomy Stories
Rayshell Clapper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Earth has one moon, and it is considerably larger than Pluto. In fact, the relative size of Earth’s moon is quite massive compared to the moons of other planets. We have a fascination with our moon on many levels. But what if Earth had two moons as Mars does? According to NASA, unlike Earth’s moon, Mars moons are two of the smallest in the entire solar system. Mars moons also have proper names: Phobos and Deimos. Their...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Just one day after a spectacular meteor exploded over Russian skies, shattering windows and injuring more than a 1,200 people, Cubans were treated to a similar event, albeit on a much smaller scale. Many of Cuba’s citizens watched in wonderment as a small fireball soared across the early evening skies on Friday before exploding. Startled residents described seeing the bright light in the sky just seconds before a thunderous boom...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online A massive asteroid that crashed into Earth left behind a large impact crater in Australia and changed the entire landscape of the planet, scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) and University of Queensland claim in a recently-published study. According to Stuart Gary of ABC News in Australia, the impact zone is centered in the East Warburton Basin in the northeastern part of South Australia. It was created...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As reports continue to stream in through various media outlets on injuries, damages, and the science behind such events, it seems this morning’s (February 15) meteor strike in Russia’s Ural Mountains region has left a pretty big impression far and wide. At last count more than 1,200 people (at least 200 children) are believed to have been injured by the meteor, most from broken glass produced by the exploding object's...
University of Central Florida Students, professors, cooks, amateur and professional astronomers, and children will gather at the University of Central Florida to watch a historic moment – an asteroid the size of a football field buzz by Earth at a mere 17,200 miles away. It’s the closest flyby on record, the range in between the planet’s surface and orbiting communication satellites. While there is no chance asteroid 2012 DA14 will hit the planet this time, it’s a great...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A research collaboration between Case Western University and Weizmann Institute of Science has used modified laws of gravity to closely predict a key property measured in faint dwarf galaxies that are satellites of the nearby giant spiral galaxy Andromeda. The study centers around the property of velocity dispersion, which is the average velocity of objects within a galaxy relative to each other. Velocity dispersion is by used by...
Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Understanding past collisions between celestial bodies, including asteroids, could help researchers better understand the origins of our Solar System. After all, it was through a series of such collisions some four and a half billion years ago that our planetary system was formed. What started as a giant dusty gas cloud combined to form increasingly large clumps, and as these collided and combined, they grew into what we now know to...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A meteor streaked across Russia’s early morning skies on Friday before violently exploding, sending a rain of debris onto the Earth below. The flash and boom shattered windows and meteor particles left damage in its wake, injuring more than 900 people in the Ural Mountains region. Marina Mokvicheva, regional health minister in Chelyabinsk, the Russian city that had felt the brunt of the impact, told the Washington Post that 985...
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Cepheid (Nasdaq: CPHD) today announced that its Board of Directors has elected John Bishop as Chairman of the Board of Directors and named Cristina Kepner as Lead Independent Director, effective February 12, 2013. Mr. Bishop, currently Cepheid's Chief Executive Officer, succeeds Thomas Gutshall, who will continue to serve on Cepheid's board as a director. Mr. Bishop has been Cepheid's Chief Executive Officer and a director since...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study using observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals the first clear-cut evidence the expanding debris of exploded stars produces some of the fastest-moving matter in the universe. This discovery is a major step toward understanding the origin of cosmic rays, one of Fermi's primary mission goals. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Scientists have been trying to find the...
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...
