Latest Observational astronomy Stories
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....
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...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers have developed an app for smartphones powered by Google's Android operating system capable of measuring night sky brightness. The new application, called "Loss of the Night," will gather data so scientists can better understand light pollution on a worldwide scale. "In natural areas you can see several thousand stars with the naked eye" says Dr. Christopher Kyba, physicist at the Freie Universität. "In Berlin, we can...
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...
[ 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...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers say they have discovered a star factory in a galaxy so distant that they see it when the Universe was only six percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years old. The team wrote in the journal Nature that HFLS3 sits at about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. They said the distant galaxy is producing about 3,000 Suns per year, which is more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way galaxy. "This is the most...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers report in The Astrophysical Journal that they have determined the positions of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. The group used the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope during their observations. This telescope can capture just as many observations of this group of galaxies in just a few hours as similar telescopes can in more than a decade. [ Video:...
WASHINGTON, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Researchers using the airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) have captured the most detailed mid-infrared images yet of a massive star condensing within a dense cocoon of dust and gas. (Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The star is G35.20-0.74, commonly known as G35. It is one of the most massive known protostars and is located relatively close to Earth at a distance of...
[ Watch the Video: The Sounds of the Big Bang in High Fidelity ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online "If the Universe started with a bang, and no one was alive yet to observe it, would it still make a sound?" It sounds like the start of a really cliché joke, but the answer, surprisingly, is yes. Scientists believe the expanding early Universe produced waves of sound that echoed through the dense plasma and hydrogen that filled it at the time. Obviously, these...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online International Dark Sky Week (IDSW) is kicking off this weekend in an attempt to show the world just how dark our skies can be without light pollution. The International Dark-Sky Association’s (IDA) week long festivities began on April 5 and continue through April 11. The week is designed to promote ways to help put a dent in light pollution, such as directing light downward instead of up towards the sky, which washes out the stars at...
Latest Observational astronomy Reference Libraries
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...
Radio telescopes, used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes, are a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. They operate on the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum where they detect radio sources. Radio telescopes are large parabolic antennas used singly or in an array and are located far from major centers of population in order to avoid electromagnetic interference. Karl Guthe Jansky built the first radio antenna used to...
A telescope, designed to aid the observation of remote objects, collects some form of electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light). The Netherlands developed the first known practical telescope in the 17th century. The term "telescope" was termed in order to describe Galileo's instruments in 1611. However, Galileo was not the inventor of the telescope. It was Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen, and Jacob Metius who are credited with the creation of the telescope. In 1668, Isaac Newton...
Sample Entry: Astronomy is the scientific study of stars, planets, comets, galaxies, and other phenomena that occur outside Earth's atmosphere (e.g. cosmic radiation). Astronomy deals with the evolution, physics, chemical makeup, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, and also the formation of the universe. The word Astronomy comes from the Greek words astron (meaning "star") and nomos (meaning "law"). Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. Since the dawn of man, people always...
Sky -- Although almost everyone have seen it, sky is hard to be defined precisely. Generally, sky is the space seen when one looks upward from the surface of a planet. Some people define sky as the denser gaseous zone of a planet's atmosphere. Clouds, rainbows and weather all occur amongst a planet's sky. In astronomy, the sky is divided into many regions, called constellations. The blue colour of the daytime sky results from the selective scattering of light rays. When the sunlight...
![NASA\](/media/gallery/fermi-gamma-ray-space-telescope/thumbs/thumbs_746305main_swift_xrt.jpg "NASA\")
![NASA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_741421main_ed13-0099-1_full.jpg "NASA\")
