Space

Pictures Of March 20th Eclipse From Svalbard

I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of Athens, where at the top floor is housed a nice 40cm Cas ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 25 2015 - 5:31am

Polar Caps On Pluto?

For not being a planet, Pluto certainly has some intriguing features of one.  NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back images of bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto as it gets closer to flyby in mid-July.  The images were captured u ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2015 - 4:52pm

The Pillars Of Creation Visualized In 3-D

The original NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the famous Pillars of Creation- in the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16- was taken two decades ago and immediately became its most famous picture. Since then, these billowing clouds, which extend over a few li ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 30 2015 - 5:25pm

High School Scientist Discovers Pulsar With Widest Orbit Ever Detected

A team of high school students analyzed data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and discovered a never-before-seen pulsar which has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star- one among only a ha ...

Article - News Staff - May 3 2015 - 10:06am

Interview with Italian Space Agency President Roberto Battiston

Italy, one of the key players of the European Space Agency (ESA), is continuously building up its important role in human spaceflight and in international space cooperation. ...

Blog Post - Tomasz Nowakowski - May 3 2015 - 1:06pm

Galaxy EGS-zs8-1- 13 Billion Years Old

Astronomers have reported an exceptionally luminous galaxy from when the universe was only 5% of its present age- more than 13 billion years in the past. The galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, was originally identified based on its particular colors in images from NASA&# ...

Article - News Staff - May 5 2015 - 2:50pm

Proof That HL Tau Image Shows Forming Planets

A recent and famous image of HL Tau in deep space marks the first time we've seen a forming planetary system, according to a team of astrophysicists who found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in f ...

Article - News Staff - May 5 2015 - 3:30pm

Giant Halo Around The Andromeda Galaxy Found

The Andromeda galaxy is our nearest galactic neighbor in space. Though it is 2.5 million light-years away, its spiral of over 100 billion stars makes it visible as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn sky. But there is also something that take ...

Article - News Staff - May 7 2015 - 1:02pm

So You Thought You Knew What Spinning Planets Look Like?... Surprising Shapes Of Rapidly Spinning Planets

So, you think you know what a planet looks like? A sphere, perhaps flattened at the poles? But if you've been following recent discoveries of dwarf planets, you may know that rapidly spinning dwarf planets like Haumea typically are rugby ball shaped ...

Article - Robert Walker - Jan 3 2019 - 7:07pm

Can A Planet's Moon Be As Bright As Its Sun?

This is a question which was asked recently on quora: Is it possible to have a moon so reflective that when it reflects the light of the sun, it will be as if it is daylight? Anyway it is a rather fun problem, easy to work out by "back of the envelop ...

Article - Robert Walker - Apr 12 2016 - 8:51am