Astronomy

– 201007284361main kepler target region galaxy 946 710

Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]

– 201007starburst cluster fireworks

The above photo was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope around mid last year, proving excellent practice for Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. Captioned is the by now famous  NGC 3603 nebula, located in the Carina spiral arm – it’s by far one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky […]

– 201004hot jupiter 4

The discovery of 9 new planets raises some serious questions on the matter of how planets are formed. Two astronomers from the University of California, Santa Barbara reported the discovery, and of them, two are spinning in the opposite direction the planets in our solar system are spinning. This, along with other recent studies of […]

– 201003ice moon

Employing the help of the Mini-SAR instrument (a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar), NASA managed to find more than 40 craters covered with ice. Despite the fact that the craters are relatively small, it’s estimated that there is about 600 million metric tons in that area. “The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data […]

– 201002pluto2

Pluto is so upset that it’s no longer a planet, that it’s turning all red with anger ! No, seriously. There’s been a whole lot of “Pluto-related news” these days including the 2006 chalking off of the planet list, and naming it a “dwarf planet”, and the news just gets better and better. Recently, astronomers […]