Space

Have you ever looked up to a clear sky on a moonless night, in a place away from large cities? If you have, you will remember seeing hundreds of bright stars, and maybe even the faint collective…

An international research team has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting each other - and not a star. They are planet-like because they look like…

In what is a once-in-a-few-lifetimes experience, I witnessed today the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the evening sky (with a crescent moon thrown in to boot). While every sixteen years or so…

Meteor showers are a spectacular phenomenon that takes place when the Earth intersects the path along which periodic comets (or less frequently, asteroidal bodies) orbit the Sun. Comets lose debris…

This winter solstice, Dec. 21st, you'll be able to see something no one has seen since the Middle Ages; Jupiter and Saturn will appear so close together in Earth’s night sky they will look like a…

Arecibo while no longer unique in design since China built a similar and larger telescope was special. What should replace it is something that will exceed what it is able to do. There is already a…

Have you ever looked at the moon through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars? Our satellite is really beautiful to look at - it is full of detail you can get lost in: craters, mountain ridges,…

In a classic "Charlie Brown" Halloween tale, one character believes in the pumpkin equivalent of an Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy, but NGC  2292 and NGC  2293 are real. At 109,000 light-years across,…

Like with kids, when it comes to galaxies adolescent blemishes disappear over time. Exponential disks, common in spiral galaxies, dwarf elliptical galaxies and some irregular galaxies, appear smooth…

Marco Fulvio Barozzi (b. 1955), a former Maths teacher and scientific blogger (https://keespopinga.blogspot.com), as well as a humorous poet, is a regular contributor to scientific and mathematics…