Latest Leo constellation Stories

The University of Texas McDonald Observatory The best viewing for this year's Leonid meteor shower will be several hours before dawn on November 17, according to the editors of StarDate magazine. The Moon will be below the horizon, so its light will not wash out any meteors. With clear skies, viewers can expect to see about 15 to 20 meteors per hour, though the shower has proved highly variable in recent years. Though the meteors will appear to originate from the constellation Leo,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers say they've witnessed the death of a planet, which found its journey ended by way of its own star. The scientists reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters that BD+48 740 became a red giant at the end of its life, helping it to eventually consume its close-by planet. "A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some 5...

Astronomers studying the galaxy NGC 4151 with ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have detected X-rays emitted and then reflected by ionised iron atoms very close to the supermassive black hole hosted at the galaxy's core. By measuring the time delays occurring in these 'reverberation' events, they were able to map the vicinity of this black hole in unprecedented detail. Supermassive black holes are enormous concentrations of matter, weighing millions to billions of times the mass of the...

CW Leonis, a star some 500 light-years from Earth, has become a recent hot topic for scientists, who have long known it to be surrounded by a shroud of water. The star, twice as massive as our Sun, has been looked on by Europe's Herschel space telescope as an old giant star wallowing in a "˜steam bath'. Herschel's superb ability to track the water molecules in space means it can show that the water lies close in to the star and reaches nearly 1300 degrees F. "Herschel really is the most...

Hubble has snapped a spectacular view of the largest "player" in the Leo Triplet, a galaxy with an unusual anatomy: it displays asymmetric spiral arms and an apparently displaced core. The peculiar anatomy is most likely caused by the gravitational pull of the other two members of the trio.The unusual spiral galaxy, Messier 66, is located at a distance of about 35 million light-years in the constellation of Leo. Together with Messier 65 and NGC 3628, Messier 66 is one third of the...

Many across Asia witnessed Tuesday night's meteor shower, but cloud cover blocked the view of many hopeful stargazers in India and Nepal.Thousands of people stayed up late to camp out underneath the stars in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Leonid meteor shower.One group of 30 amateur astronomers counted 78 Leonids over the course of a four-hour period from the Siriska sanctuary, about 95 miles south of New Delhi."There was no moon in the sky, which is good for observation,"...

Astronomers from Caltech and NASA say a strong shower of Leonid meteors is coming in 2009. Their prediction follows an outburst on Nov. 17, 2008, that broke several years of "Leonid quiet" and heralds even more intense activity next November."On Nov. 17, 2009, we expect the Leonids to produce upwards of 500 meteors per hour," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "That's a very strong display."Forecasters define a meteor storm as 1000 or...

A team of astronomers from Penn State and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland has discovered a new planet that is closely orbiting a red-giant star, HD 102272, which is much older than our own Sun. The planet has a mass that is nearly six times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The team includes Alexander Wolszczan, the discoverer of the first planets ever found outside our solar system, who is an Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the director...

By Bill Kemp BLOOMINGTON - It was one of the greatest natural light shows in recorded human history. During the predawn hours of Nov. 13, 1833, the heavens lit up like a Fourth of July sparkler as tens of thousands of meteors streaked through the darkened sky. Early McLean County settler Robert Dickerson said it was like watching "showers of fiery rain falling to the ground." Reliable accounts of the event boggle the mind. A.C. Twyning of West Point, N.Y., for instance, estimated...

By CLAIR WOOD In his book on the Leonid meteor showers, "The Heavens on Fire," Mark Littmann writes that the Leonid meteor storm of 1833 was so intense, estimated from records to be in excess of 72,000 an hour, that terrified viewers thought the world was coming to an end. Some American Indian tribes called it "the year the stars fell." Approximately every 33 years, the Leonids put on a remarkable display. In 1966 an intense storm gave estimates of 144,000 meteors an hour which led, as 1999...