Latest Astronomy Stories
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ET Solar Group Corp. ("ET Solar"), a leading solar one-stop solution provider, today announced that it has introduced its upgraded new product ET Binary Star Series-Castor to the global market. Binary Star Series represents ET's new achievement in terms of enhanced design of the junction box, advanced process technology and improved overall performance. For Castor, the more scientifically designed junction boxes, in accordance with IEC...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One commonly used method in astronomy is to study spectra and light curves from stars and compare the data to known values, allowing researchers to derive information such as chemical composition, size, and surface temperature. The trouble with this method is it only works on stars that are bright enough or close enough to study in detail. Unfortunately, this precludes nearly three-quarters of the stellar population, which...
[ Watch the Video: ScienceCasts: Saturn Close Up ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online This weekend, stargazers should dust-off their telescopes and catch a glimpse of Saturn at its best and brightest. On Sunday, April 28th, Saturn will be making its closest approach to Earth, appearing bigger and brighter than at any other time in 2013. Astronomers refer to this event as "an opposition," because Saturn will be opposite the sun in the skies of Earth. The planet...
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., April 25, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Harry "Hap" McSween, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor who is world-renowned for his research of meteorites and Mars, has been named the Southeastern Conference (SEC) Professor of the Year. McSween is a Chancellor's Professor and distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences. To view a video featuring McSween, visit https://tiny.utk.edu/wjMHD. The SEC Professor of the Year Award honors one SEC faculty...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said on Thursday that its Cassini spacecraft provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids crashing into Saturn's rings. Previously, scientists had only witnessed impacts on Earth, the moon and Jupiter as they occurred. Studying the impact rate of meteorites outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planetary systems in our Solar System formed. The meteoroids that impacted Saturn are...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have found a way to test Einstein's theory of gravity in ways that were not possible before now, thanks to new observations of a very unique system. A team used telescopes around the world to study the most massive neutron star confirmed so far, orbited by a white dwarf. The scientists wrote in the journal Science that so far the new observations match up with Einstein's predictions for general relativity. Einstein's...
WATCH VIDEOS: [Animation of a Starburst Galaxy] | [Probing a Galactic Halo] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers writing in The Astrophysical Journal say they've observed how bursts of star formation have a major impact beyond the boundaries of their host galaxy. When galaxies form new stars, they can create frantic episodes of activity known as starbursts. Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope say these events can affect galactic gas at distances...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A dead star, known as a white dwarf, will eventually cool down and fade away because it has no energy source. A new study led by Professor Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets. The team, which includes Prof. Avi Loeb, Director of Harvard University's Institute for Theory and Computation and a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at TAU,...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have snapped a very detailed image of the outer atmosphere of the red supergiant Betelgeuse. This star is the nearest red supergiant to Earth, easily visible to the unaided eye sitting on the top left shoulder of Orion the Hunter. Betelgeuse is about 1,000 times larger than our Sun and lies about 650 light years away from Earth. Astronomers took a new image with the e-MERLIN radio telescope array operated from the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For those living in the Eastern Hemisphere, the first lunar eclipse of 2013 will be taking place on Thursday during the Pink Moon. This partial eclipse of the Moon will be visible in its entirety from eastern Europe, Africa, central Asia and western Australia. However, it will not be visible in North America unless you watch Slooh's live broadcast. The Slooh Space Camera will be broadcasting live feed of the partial lunar eclipse free...
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...
