Space

EV Lacertae- Little Star Packs A Mean Flare

On April 25, NASA’s Swift satellite picked up the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than our Sun. The flare, an explosive release of energy from a star, packed the power of thousands of solar flares. It would have been visible to the naked ...

Article - News Staff - May 19 2008 - 11:29am

Discovery- A Mystery Object That Could Be The 'Missing Link' Between Stars And Planets

Two new exoplanets mean that the COROT mission(1) has now found a total of four new exoplanets in its 510 day journey. COROT started observations of its sixth star field at the beginning of May and, during this observation phase which will last 5 months, w ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2008 - 11:03am

All Eyes Turn To NGC 2770 For A Supernova Birth

Astronomers have seen the aftermath of spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae before, but until now no one has witnessed a star dying in real time. While looking at another object in the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, using NASA’s orbiting Swift teles ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2008 - 1:26pm

Phoenix And Mars Are Alright Tonight (with Apologies To Paul McCartney)

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars Sunday to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander's robotic arm. Radio signals received at 4:53:44 p. ...

Article - News Staff - May 26 2008 - 10:24pm

WOH G64 Is 2000X The Size Of Our Sun, But Still Half Of What Was Thought

ESO's VLT has allowed astronomers to determine that WOH G64, a red supergiant star almost 2,000 times as large as our Sun located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, weighs almost half of what was previously thought, thereby solvin ...

Article - News Staff - May 27 2008 - 10:42am

The Mysterious Ring Of A Soft Gamma Repeater- Magnetar SGR 1900+14

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen. I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before, "said Stephanie Wachter of NASA's ...

Article - News Staff - May 28 2008 - 10:51pm

Stars The Temperature Of Pizza Ovens Get Weighed

Brown dwarfs, "failed stars", are a class of objects that represent the missing link between the lowest-mass stars and the gas-giant planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Brown dwarfs are the faintest and coolest objects that can be directly obser ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 2 2008 - 4:59pm

Pluto Gets Some Respect (Again)

Almost two years after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly introduced the category of dwarf planets, the IAU, as promised, has decided on a name for transneptunian dwarf planets similar to Pluto. The name plutoid was proposed by the ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 12 2008 - 10:18pm

HARPS Discovery- HD 40307 And Its Three Super-Earths

Today, at an international conference, a team of European astronomers announced they have found a triple system of 'super-Earths' around the star HD 40307, called such because they are more massive than the Earth but less massive than Uranus and ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 16 2008 - 11:49am

Orion Nebula Stellar Nursery Gives Birth To Fraternal Twin Stars

Two stars, each with the same mass and in orbit around each other, are twins that one would expect to be identical. So astronomers were surprised when they discovered that twin stars in the Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery 1,500 light years away, ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 18 2008 - 2:11pm