Space

Tonight you have a chance to contribute to science -namely, the knowledge of our solar system- and have a lot of fun at the same time. Do you want to know how ? Then please read on. Comet Swift-…

It's sharing time.  Here's a cool space mashup map, titled "If extraterrestrial civilizations are monitoring our TV broadcasts, then this is what they are currently watching." It's a plot of…

There are many hypotheses about the early days of black holes.  Researchers writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have undertaken simulations using data taken from observations…

Amateur astronomers fond of visual observation of faint galaxies and other fuzzy treasures of the night sky are always in search of the best observative site, where to drag their large Dobsonian…

One of the current questions for the future of space exploration is whether to return to the moon, or just head to Mars. Should we return somewhere we’ve been before? Or just strike out toward…

Hitler's gift to astronomy? What? Believe it or not, Hitler wanted to give Mussolini and Rome a planetarium*. Rome was among the first in the world to build a planetarium. Italy (and Mussolini) had…

HD 87643, a member of the exotic class of B[e] stars, is in a very rich field of stars towards the Carina (the Keel) arm of the Milky Way. It recently became part of a set of observations that…

Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), is a red supergiant, one of the biggest stars known, and almost 1,000 times larger than our Sun. To put that in…

Electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves, X-rays, and microwaves) contains a varying electric field. When we talk about Polarization of this field, we refer to its direction. A new satellite…

A new study in Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, one of the current puzzles in our understanding of galaxy formation. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are small and…