Latest Astronomy Stories
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA's Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, scheduled to be launched in 2016, will touch down on an asteroid in 2018. Then, after collecting samples from the surface, the probe will rocket back to Earth, returning its find to be studied by terrestrial scientists by 2023. But project leaders noticed that the asteroid in question, asteroid (101955) 1999...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One challenge of ground-based optical astronomy is that photons in this regime, and nearby infrared and ultraviolet bands, get refracted in our atmosphere. The consequence is that imaging of astronomical objects can be blurred, making it difficult to identify and characterize individual objects. Compensating for these effects can be tricky though, as our atmosphere is not a static system. Rather, it is in a state of...
PHOENIX, May 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IO, the global leader in software-defined data centers, today announced two additions to the Company's Asia-Pacific (APAC) operations. Steve Langley has been appointed the region's Vice President, DCaaS(TM) Operations and Peter Goh has been appointed Vice President, APAC Enterprise Sales. Mr. Langley joins IO from Thomson Reuters where he was responsible for data center management operations and the delivery of mission-critical services and...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A detailed study of an enormous cloud of hot gas that envelops two large, colliding galaxies has been made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This oversized gas reservoir contains as much mass as 10 billion Suns, is 300,000 light years across, and radiates more than 7 million degrees Kelvin. Scientists call this sort of cloud a “halo.” This particular halo is located in the system designated NGC 6240, which astronomers...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For the first time, astronomers have identified discrete sources that account for nearly all of the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. This was achieved by more than 50 hours of observations with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). The researchers found that approximately 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores. The remaining 37 percent...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online At the dawn of our Solar System the planets were very hot, as the energy from their creation lingered. But over time the planets would cool, becoming darker, only occasionally paused in this process by large impacts or radioactive decay. At least that is what we would expect. A mystery that has puzzled scientists for half a century revolves around the appearance of the planet Saturn. The second largest planet in our Solar...
PHOENIX, April 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IO, the leading provider of Data Center 2.0 technology for the world's largest enterprises, governments and service providers, today announced the company will host a team of graduate students from the MIT Sloan School of Management's Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab). Through their S-Lab projects, students apply knowledge from the classroom to solve real-world problems and see firsthand how businesses are tackling the massive challenges of...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The newest addition to our planet-hunting arsenal, the HARPS spectrograph, has characterized two new worlds. Planets KOI-200 b and KOI-889 b are Jupiter-like planets that orbit very close to their host stars. With periods of less than 10 days, the so-called “Hot Jupiters” were originally detected using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. This instrument has documented more than 800 new exoplanets, with thousands more potential...
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Herschel observatory, a European space telescope for which NASA helped build instruments and process data, has stopped making observations after running out of liquid coolant as expected. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The European Space Agency (ESA) mission, launched almost four years ago, revealed the universe's "coolest" secrets by observing the frigid side of planet, star and galaxy...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel observatory has officially run out of liquid coolant, ending its mission. The space observatory launched nearly four years ago with a goal to help reveal some of the cooler sides of the universe, including planet, star and galaxy formation. "Herschel gave us the opportunity to peer into the dark and cold regions of the universe that are invisible to other telescopes," said John Grunsfel,...
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...
