Space

V1647 Ori- 3 Telescopes Watch The Beating Heart Of A Newborn Star

V1647 Ori resides 1300 light-years away in McNeil’s Nebula. It is a young Sun-like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super-hot plasma and astronomers have now been able to deduce what might be happening behind the dusty disc cloaking the star.  T ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 3 2012 - 3:00pm

Dark Galaxies: Building Blocks Of Modern, Star-filled Galaxies Spotted

Dark galaxies, theorized but unobserved, may have been spotted.  Dark galaxies are essentially gas-rich galaxies in the early Universe that are very inefficient at forming stars and astronomers think they have detected these elusive objects by observing th ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 11 2012 - 9:23am

13 Billion Year Old Ghost Galaxies Are Fossils Of The Early Universe

Why do some extremely faint galaxies in our backyard contain so few stars? An international team of astronomers has helped solve the mystery of why these galaxies are starved of stars- and why so few of them have been found. Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 10 2012 - 4:04pm

What Would You Name P5, Pluto's New Moon?

For not being a planet, according to 2 percent of astronomers, Pluto sure has a lot of moons. Now it has one more, joining Charon, which was discovered in 1978, Nix and Hydra, discovered in 2006, and P4, found in 2011.  Pluto’s new-found moon, provisionall ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 12 2012 - 4:15pm

UCF 1.01: Earth-Sized Exoplanet- Maybe- Is Only 33 Light Years Away

A newly discovered exoplanet is two-thirds the size of Earth and a relatively close 33 light years away. But is it really a planet? UCF 1.01 is being called an exoplanet candidate. The reason is because  a measured mass is needed to verify that it is a pla ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 18 2012 - 2:34pm

Where Are The Extraterrestrials? The People Speak...

We live in times of extraordinary discovery. Exoplanets appear to be quite common in our galaxy. NASA’s Kepler Telescope has identified over 2,000 planetary candidates orbiting other stars. And yet the universe appears to be silent – at least when it come ...

Article - David Brin - Jul 28 2012 - 10:53pm

Constellation Eridanus And NGC 1187: A Blue Whirlpool In The River

NGC 1187, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus (The River), may look tranquil but it's home to some violent events.  NGC 1187 has hosted two supernova explosions during the last thirty years, the latest on ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 1 2012 - 5:00am

Curiosity lands safely! On a scale from 1 to 17 it was a perfect 20.

The Curiosity rover has landed safely on MARS, we have seen the image of the wheel on the surface.    There were good reasons to doubt the "Sky crane" approach to a landing.  Just one computer glitch, just one wrong calculation, just one strange ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Aug 6 2012 - 4:22am

Carnival Of Cosmology: Bloggers On Dark Energy

The Carnival of Cosmology: Bloggers on Dark Energy is now up and running on Matthew R. Francis' Galileo's Pendulum: In the spirit of blog carnivals, several of us—cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, and writers who just love all these subjects ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Aug 7 2012 - 9:56am

Swimming In The (astro) Pacific

As a newly minted, 1 year old professor, this is the deep end of the astronomy edu cation pool. I am swimming in the insights and experiences of people with more experience than me. I recommend attending an Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting for t ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Aug 8 2012 - 12:04am