Latest Astronomy Stories
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Holy Grail in the search for planets outside our solar system is finding one that could potentially support life. Traditionally, this means finding a planet with features similar to Earth, which is just the right distance from its host star that liquid water could be supported on the surface. Scientists believe the presence of liquid water on the surface is a necessary component for the proliferation of life. And a...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA's Cassini spacecraft has helped shed light on one way the bubble of charged particles around Saturn changes with the planet's seasons. Earth has a magnetosphere like Saturn, and the latest results may help scientists better understand variations in it and the Van Allen radiation belts, which both affect things from space flight safety to satellite and cell phone communications. Researchers wrote in the Journal of Geophysical...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Uwingu announced on Wednesday the launch of the world's first "Adopt-a-Planet" campaign, allowing the public an opportunity to adopt planets. The space company's new open-ended campaign allows the public to adopt exoplanets in astronomical databases through Uwingu's website. The campaign coincides with its other campaign aimed at naming a planet. Uwingu has asked participants to vote on names for exoplanets, which costs money....
WASHINGTON, May 2, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA astrophysicist Chryssa Kouveliotou, a senior scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has been selected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original scientific research. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Kouveliotou, a longtime leading researcher in NASA's space science mission, conducts...
Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Currently, if scientists want to study meteorites that had originated from the red planet, they have to rely upon celestial travelers that arrived on this planet so long ago they now possess characteristics that tell of their time on Earth. This masks most clues that might offer information about the meteorites' time on Mars. However, a team of scientists has examined a meteorite that formed on Mars more than a billion years ago in...
WATCH VIDEOS: [Panning Across NGC 6559] | [Zooming In On NGC 6559] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Danish 1.54-metre telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has released a new image of the star-forming region NGC 6559. Located relatively nearby, a mere 5000 light-years from Earth, NGC 6559 is found in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The nebula is only a few light years across, a stark contrast to its more well-known...
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...
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\")
