Space

COROT-exo-4b: A Jupiter Size Exoplanet Around A Sun-Sized Star

A team of European scientists working with COROT have discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star slightly more massive than the Sun. After just 555 days in orbit, the mission has now observed more than 50 000 stars and is adding significantly to our knowledge ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 25 2008 - 10:14am

Barred Spiral Galaxies Are Universal Newcomers, Says Study

A frequent sign of the maturity of a spiral galaxy is the formation of a ribbon of stars and gas that slices across the nucleus, like the slash across a "no smoking" sign. In a landmark study of more than 2,000 spiral galaxies from the largest ga ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 29 2008 - 9:29am

Ontario Lacus- Titan's Newly Discovered Lake

Titan, which is one-and-a-half times the size of Earth's moon and bigger than either Mercury or Pluto, is one of the most fascinating bodies in the solar system when it comes to exploring environments that may give rise to life. Scientists have confir ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2008 - 10:08pm

August 1 2008 Solar Eclipse Video

On August 1, a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of Canada, northern Greenland, the Arctic, central Russia, Mongolia and China. The eclipse swept across Earth in a narrow path that began in Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut and ended in norther ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 1 2008 - 11:01am

Virgo Cluster Shows The Galactic Cannibalism Of Messier 87

Globular star clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, contain some of the oldest surviving stars in the Universe. A new international study of globular clusters outside our Milky Way Galaxy has found evidence that these hardy pioneers ar ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 5 2008 - 10:37am

Dutch Amateur Astronomer Finds Cosmic 'Ghost'

When Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford University enlisted public support in cataloguing galaxies, they never envisioned the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in archived images of the night sky. The Dutch school teacher, a v ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 5 2008 - 8:59pm

Our Solar System Is Actually Quite Special

Nihilist types, and even prevailing theoretical models, attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way but a new study by Northwestern University astronomers that used recent data from the 300 exoplanets ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 7 2008 - 3:59pm

Universally Speaking, Earth Lives In A Pretty Nice Neighborhood

We don't have spacecraft to take us outside our solar system but astronomers have still been able to develop a good understanding of how our solar system formed and in turn, how others formed. In the last dozen years, the nearly 300 exoplanets have be ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 8 2008 - 9:20am

Annual Perseid Meteor Shower Maximum Is August 12th

Unlike many astronomical phenomena, meteors are best seen with the unaided eye rather than through a telescope or binoculars and are perfectly safe to watch, so be prepared to sleep outside on August 12th, the annual maximum of the Perseid meteor shower. I ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2008 - 1:20pm

The Magnetic Monster Of NGC 1275

NGC 1275 is one of the closest giant elliptical galaxies and lies at the centre of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. It is an active galaxy, hosting a supermassive black hole at its core, which blows bubbles of radio-wave emitting material into the surround ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2008 - 2:16pm