Space

Waves from Daphnis Undulations mark both sides of the path of Saturn's moon Daphnis through the A ring.  Daphnis may be small at only 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, but the moon's gravity is…

"Kepler is like Field of Dreams meets Cosmos" says Padi Boyd, a scientist with the Kepler planet-hunting mission. This set the stage for an enjoyable short interview. Earlier I wrote why Kepler is…

A team of astronomers from University College London (UCL) have discovered that an exotic world passes directly in front of the Sun-like star it orbits, revealing for the first time that it is about…

Exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, Gliese 581 e, in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our…

Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, the IRAM Millimetre-wave Telescope in Spain, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in orbit above the Earth, have completed the…

An international team  have discovered one of the coolest sub-stellar bodies ever found outside our own solar system, orbiting the red dwarf star Wolf 940, some 40 light years from Earth. The…

'Sigmoids' are S-shaped structures found in the outer atmosphere of the Sun (the corona), seen with X-ray telescopes and thought to be a crucial part of explosive events like solar flares. Now a…

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found that at least 1 in 100 white dwarf stars show evidence of orbiting asteroids and rocky planets, suggesting these…

Astronomers have announced plans to build an ultra-stable, high-precision spectrograph for the Science and Technology Facilities Council's 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT - part of the Isaac…

Kepler has First Light. It is On! Team is a Go! Photons are Arriving! This provocativly-titled NASA release states "NASA's Kepler Captures First Views of Planet-Hunting Territory", and has a good…