Space

Betelgeuse is visible to nighttime viewers as the bright, red star on the shoulder of Orion the Hunter. The star itself is huge, 1,000 times larger than our Sun, but from 650 light years away it is a…

On March 24th, 1993, astronomers David Levy and Carolyn and Eugene M. Shoemaker discovered the first comet observed orbiting a planet rather than the Sun.  Named Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9), it…

Horseback riding hasn't been my favourite activity. Not that I do not like horses, au contraire. I have also tried various kinds of horseback riding; like cowboys on the prairie in Texas and New…

The Kepler mission revealed the existence of potentially habitable planets slightly bigger than Earth.  The spacecraft named for Johannes Kepler was launched in 2009 and now it has found two new…

A new type of exceptionally powerful and long-lived cosmic explosion, powerful blasts of high energy gamma-rays, known as gamma-ray bursts, that lasts hours rather than the more common minute,…

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center is the official U.S Government source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. NASA and NOAA,as well as the US Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA…

Our sun will one day become a faint white dwarf star - but prior to that, for a few tens of thousands of years as its atmosphere is blown away into space  it could be surrounded by spectacular…

A couple of news stories related to NASA. One is that there will be money in the NASA FY14 budget to send astronauts to an asteroid and bring it back to (?) Earth. The other study is that NASA…

A team of astronomers led by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have succeeded in observing the death throws of a giant star in unprecedented detail. In February of 1987…

Most stars do not form in isolation, but are in clusters ranging from dozens to thousands of stars.   Even in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with stars more than 13 billion years old, has a lot of…