Space

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…