Astronomy News Archives

ScienceDaily - NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has made the first unambiguous detection of high-energy gamma-rays from an enigmatic binary system known as Cygnus X-3. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a compact object -- either a neutron star or a black hole -- that blasts twin radio-emitting jets of matter into space at more than ...

Astronomers have long wondered which came first, the black hole or the galaxy around it.

Physicists warn that slashing grants for nuclear physics research would undermine plans to build nuclear power stations Plans to decommission nuclear power plants and build new ones could be hit by a lack of expertise in coming years.

ScienceDaily - Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be "building" their own host galaxy.

AN 'out of this world' exhibition featuring portraits showcasing some of astronomy's best known names is showing in Armagh.

This artist's conception shows a disk of gas and dust surrounding the massive young stellar object called Source I. A wind of gas flows toward the surface of the disk and is sculpted into an hourglass shape by magnetic field lines .

Astronomers in Britain have come up with an Internet galaxy game they say will get people to help them figure out the answers to celestial questions.

London, November 28 : Europe's Herschel space telescope has observed the death throes of the biggest star known to science.

If there were a Guinness record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen probably would win it.

ERAU'S ASTRONOMY CLUB INVITED outsiders to explore the starry sky with them on Nov.

Click on the image to enlarge EARTH'S ORBIT is a near-perfect circle. But what if the planet took a more eccentric path? Astronomer Darren Williams has run computer simulations of various orbits.

Andy Boyles, science editor for Boyds Mills Press, noted in a recent email correspondence that the Puget Sound area appears to have a disproportionate number of astronomy organizations and wondered why Seattle seemed to be "above average" in enthusiasm for astronomy.

PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Friday, November 27, 2009 Source: ESA Science & Technology - Comments The European Space Agency has released spectacular new observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, including the UK-led SPIRE instrument.

Galileo Galilei's two fingers and a tooth have been found in an ancient wooden case by a collector who spotted the discarded case at an auction .

If there were a Guinness record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen probably would win it.

Worlds most energy-efficient supercomputer recognized The high-performance computer QPACE has been recognized as the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope has detected bursts of gamma-rays in the binary system Cygnus X-3, which astronomers say are coming from a microquasar.

ANI ANI Universe peppered with blue fuzzies, discover astronomers Australian astronomers have discovered that the universe is peppered with tiny blue dwarf galaxies known as blue fuzzies.

The fossilised remains of Martian bugs have been discovered on a meteorite that crashed into the Antarctic 13,000 years ago.

Back in my college days, I took an introductory class in 20th-century quantum physics and its modern-day philosophical implications, sometimes deridingly referred to as "Physics for Poets." In order to make the materials marginally more approachable, the professor would draw liberally from the Klingons of "Star Trek" fame to make his points.

Dr Alun Salt, an astronomy technician from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science at the University of Leicester, found that out of all the temples he surveyed in Sicily, all but three faced the rising sun.

Like archaeologists who dig through the layers of dirt to unearth crucial pieces of the history of mankind, astronomers have been gazing through the thick layers of interstellar dust obscuring the central bulge of the Milky Way and have unveiled an extraordinary cosmic relic.

This is CCTV footage of the meteor spotted in Gauteng on November 21, 2009, after 11pm, according to Eyewitness News.

Planetarium seeks meteor footage The Johannesburg Planetarium has requested footage captured by members of the public of a meteor that sped over Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Botswana on Saturday.

Join us for a lively chat during the show. "V" returns in Spring 2010, after the Winter Olympics.

The formation process involved two stages, said Mitchell Begelman, a professor and the chair of CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department.

Brown dwarfs are misfits because they fall somewhere between planets and stars in terms of their temperature and mass.

ANI ANI ANI Now, web users can play cosmic slot machine to study colliding galaxies A new website will give everyone the chance to contribute to science by playing a cosmic slot machine and compare images of colliding galaxies with millions of simulated images of galactic pile-ups. Washington, November 24 : A new website will give everyone the ...

Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University in Nanjing, China - Solar coronal seismology based on magnetic field-line stretching model of "EIT waves" is proposed, which is demonstrated to be potentially able to probe the mysterious magnetic field in the solar corona.

The Vatican recently held a "study week" of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials.

A carefully nuanced program intended to exert pressure on the unelected government of the United States to disclose the presence of non-human entities and technology operating in Earth's biosphere took another step forward at the conclusion of a 5 day Study Week on Astrobiology by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican last week.

Not everything in the universe twinkles brightly, and astronomers expect that NASA's next space telescope may find some of these dark cosmic bodies, including nearby asteroids and stars so dim that they've never been observed by humans.

With so many strides having been made in the last couple years in the field of animation , it feel a little bizarre to come face to face with a film that barely seems to be trying to break new ground.

The agreeable but flagrantly unoriginal "Planet 51" belongs to the mix-and-match school of animated moviemaking that operates on the plaintive hope that familiarity is the surest path to the box office.

It was a meteor which lit up the skies over Johannesburg and Pretoria on Saturday night, an astronomer has confirmed.

An Ohio university is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy by displaying never-before-seen photos from NASA space telescopes.

Experts predict this will be a good year for the stars to come out. Shooting stars that is.

A new generation of "green" automobile tires that can boost fuel efficiency without sacrificing safety and durability is rolling their way through the research pipeline.

Sunday, 22 November 2009, 11:56 am Press Release: Royal Astronomical Society Ancient Polynesian astronomers and navigators explored and settled the Pacific a millennium ago using indigenous scientific knowledge and the night sky as their guide.

Many parents think that their always curious and often boisterous kids don't belong in an art museum.

A team of astronomers and engineers at an international astronomy project have made the first observations linking radio signals from two telescopes First observations from telescope link up made A team of astronomers and engineers at an international astronomy project have made the first observations linking radio signals from two telescopes The ...

Home : Movie Reviews : New animated sci-fi comedy 'Planet 51' proves unable to support life New animated sci-fi comedy 'Planet 51' proves unable to support life More on this topic CTV.ca Trailers - Planet 51 Date: Friday Nov.

Just when you thought animated sci-fi couldn't get any worse than "Astro Boy," along comes the insipid "Planet 51" to blow it out of the galaxy.

PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Thursday, November 19, 2009 Source: European Space Agency - Comments The MIRAS instrument on ESA's SMOS satellite, launched earlier this month, has been switched on and is operating normally.

JOHN CUSACK MIGHT SURVIVE the end of the world in the new movie "2012," but if you want the real story of unlocking the Mayan calendar, experience Chabot's new digital full-dome show "Tales of the Maya Skies." Produced by Chabot Space and Science Center, the show explores the cosmology of the ancient Maya, their culture and contributions to ...

This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A. Centaurus A is the nearest giant, elliptical galaxy, at a distance of about 11 million light-years. One of the most studied objects in the southern sky, by 1847 the unique appearance of this galaxy had already caught the attention of ...

NASA's SOFIA infrared observatory 747SP overflies its home, the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif.

Here is a great example of the process leading up to a type 1A supernova. Most of the time when we think of a supernova we think of a massive star collapsing in on itself because it has exhausted all of its fuel and gravity overcomes the force of the nuclear fires and hydrostatic pressure is lost and there is a collapse of titanic proportions.

Astronomers are constructing one of the biggest, most powerful instruments ever built, capable of peering far deeper into the universe and further back in time than ever before.

Astronomers will tie together the largest collection of the world's radio telescopes ever assembled to work as a single observing tool in a project aimed at improving the precision of the reference frame scientists use to measure positions in the sky.

Skyscrapers crumble to the ground, fiery meteorites smash into Earth and a Tibetan monk cowers as a massive tidal wave swamps his mountain retreat.

Published: Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:00 a.m. Last Modified: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:58 a.m. As animated films go, "Planet 51" is like the food purchased at the theater concession stand: Empty calories, consumed by people barely aware of what they're stuffing in their faces, and soon forgotten.

People flooded the phone lines Tuesday night as they called 911 trying to figure out what flashed in the middle of the night.

Still an astrophysical mystery, the evolution of the bulges in spiral galaxies led astronomers to the edge-on galaxy NGC4710.

Share + Nov 18, 2009 4:34 pm US/Mountain MIKE STARK, Associated Press Writer SALT LAKE CITY A streaking meteor the size of an oven briefly illuminated parts of the Utah sky to daylight-level conditions early Wednesday, surveillance footage shows.

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form.

Chinese astronomers have signed on to participate in the development of the world's largest telescope that will be built atop a Hawaii volcano, a group said Tuesday.

NASA said last week that the world was not ending - at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN , the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery.

German amateur astronomer Bernhard Christ was in the right place at the right time - due to very careful planning and foresight - and captured this astonishing scene: [Click to embiggen.] That's the International Space Station crossing the face of the Moon, what astronomers call a transit .

Visit SPACE.com to explore a new Science feature each Tuesday. The IMaX instrument on the SUNRISE telescope not only depicts the solar surface, it also makes magnetic fields visible; these appear as black or white structures in the polarised light.

Galloway Forest Park in Scotland is the first place in the UK to be named a Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association .

Type Ia supernovae are a mystery because no one can predict when or where one might occur.

The first two Alma antennas have been linked up as an "interferometer" A team working on the Alma observatory in Chile have made their first measurements from the telescope's site, located 5,300m up in the Andes.

Muslims in many countries are increasingly rejecting Darwin's theory of evolution, under the influence of conservative elements in Islam, a science conference was told yesterday.

A different kind of star helped the Planetarium at Raritan Valley Community College celebrate a scientific milestone this summer.

The glowing gas of the Nebula is powered by a group of young massive stars, but behind it is a cluster of younger stars and clumps of gas.

If you haven't heard already, some believe the world is coming to an end on Dec.

If forecasters are correct, the shower should produce a mild but pretty sprinkling of meteors over North America followed by a more intense outburst over Asia.

A vast stretch of forest in south-west Scotland which boasts unrivalled views of the millions of stars in the galaxy, was today named as one of the best places in the world to stargaze.

Sony's entry in the crowded animation field this holiday season is "Planet 51," a perky though not terribly imaginative feature aimed primarily at youngsters.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory, will give a free public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 3600 Bay Area Blvd.

A scientist has finished a two-year, 26,000-mile mission to assemble a panoramic photo image of the night sky.

An artist's concept of a quasar embedded in the center of a galaxy Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle Many of us have been rescued from unfamiliar territory by directions from a Global Positioning System navigator.

Judaism Jews pray at the Mount of Olives, matzoh is baked in Brooklyn, and thousands of rabbis pose for a group photo.

Sony Pictures' $200 million blockbuster "2012," opening nationwide today, hopes to horrify moviegoers with the destruction of the world's iconic monuments in an apocalypse allegedly predicted by ancient Mayans.

LOS ANGELES: A NASA scientist has condemned the doomsday film "2012" and launched a web site, "Ask an Astrobiologist," to quell the fears it is raising.

One person not singing its praises is Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, who says he's tired of the whole idea of a 'Mayan apocalypse,' and suggests that doomsday theories actually spring from Western rather than Mayan ideas.

Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

NASA identifies best case for middleweight black hole Astronomers at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have found that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

The song "Stars Fell on Alabama" has deep roots in astronomy as well as state history.

Lunar colonists may one day enjoy a view of Earth similar to the one scene in this famous photo, "Earthrise," taken on Dec.

The moon is wet, say NASA scientists Friday, reporting the results of daring impact probe of lunar polar craters.

" Rosetta passed over the ocean, just south of the Indonesian island of Java, at exactly 08:45:40 CET ," the European Space Agency announced.

Article:Space agency eyes Amazon cloud for star data:/g/a/2009/11/12/urnidgns852573C4006938800025766C007D1137.DTL Article:Space agency eyes Amazon cloud for star data:/g/a/2009/11/12/urnidgns852573C4006938800025766C007D1137.DTL 14:57 PST -- The European Space Agency plans to launch a new scanning satellite to map the stars in our galaxy in more ...

Maybe you don't have to worry about those car payments or your 30-year mortgage after all.

U.S. and Japanese astronomers say they've discovered 22 galaxies, and confirmed one galaxy formed as early as 787 million years after the Big Bang.

End-of-the-world movie 2012 hits cinemas today. The world is not coming to an end on December 21, 2012, US space agency NASA insists.

November 10, 2009: This year's Leonid meteor shower peaks on Tuesday, Nov. 17th. If forecasters are correct, the shower should produce a mild but pretty sprinkling of meteors over North America followed by a more intense outburst over Asia.

A a 1bn European spacecraft designed to rendezvous with a comet will skim past Earth on Friday on a final, eagerly-awaited swing by, enabling it to gain speed for a date in deep space in 2014.

Although no one noticed at the time, the Earth was almost hit by an asteroid last Friday.

A 6-foot-by-3-foot image of the Milky Way galaxy and other large-scale images as seen by NASA telescopes are being unveiled at New Hampshire's McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.

Using ESO's successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than "planet-free" stars.

Astronomers may have found a way to identify those Sun-like stars most likely to harbour orbiting planets.

The findings show that "stellar nurseries" within the first galaxies gave birth to stars at a much more rapid rate than previously expected, the researchers from Durham's Institute for Computational Cosmology revealed.

Is there life on other planets? The Vatican has asked that age-old question over the past five days during a "study week" on astrobiology gathering leading scientists from around the world.

All we can say is, "Wow!" In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories - the Hubble Space Telescope , the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory - have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy .

The latest big screen offering from Sony Pictures, "2012," arrives in theatres on Friday , with a $200 million production about the end of the world supposedly based on theories backed by the Mayan calendar.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this infrared image of a giant halo of very fine dust around the young star HR 8799, located 129 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

Vitaly Ginzburg, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian physicist and one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, died Sunday in Moscow.

The world is not coming to an end on December 21, 2012, the US space agency insisted Monday in a rare campaign to dispel widespread rumors fueled by the Internet and a new Hollywood movie.

Four years after its first solar sail ended up in the ocean instead of orbit, The Planetary Society announced Monday that by the end of 2010 it will try again to launch a spacecraft that will be propelled by the subtle pressure of sunlight.

PROFESSOR John C Brown, the 10th man since 1834 to hold the title Astronomer Royal for Scotland, is standing on the balcony outside his office on the top floor of Glasgow University's Kelvin Building.

More than a million Galileo moments, and counting! As the International Year of Astronomy draws to a close, Canadians are reporting a new appreciation for the beauty and mysteries of our universe.

A scene from Columbia Pictures' 2012. The action film will be released November 13, 2009.

The current golden age for gamma ray astronomy is creating more questions than answers.

The UW-Whitewater physics department is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy 2009 with a lecture series and exhibits.

Astronomers from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics have been heading out into the streets of Manchester to show passers-by close-up views of the Moon and the planet Jupiter.

Abstract Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens of petabytes in the next decade.

What is the source of cosmic rays? Seems like an easy enough question. Cosmic rays are little subatomic particles zipping across the Universe.

A new type of supernova a ' the explosive death of a star a ' has been discovered in which helium detonates on the surface of a white dwarf star.

This is a composite of false color images of the galaxies found at the early epoch around 800 million years after the Big Bang.

A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains -- Mount St.

An unusual supernova rediscovered in seven-year-old data may be the first example of a new type of exploding star, possibly from a binary star system where helium flows from one white dwarf onto another and detonates in a thermonuclear explosion.

A new class of supernova was discovered by scientists at Berkeley and may be the first example of a new type of exploding star.

The image at right is Hubble's close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy's core, the bright whitish region at far right.

The environmental education program at Lake James State Park is offering an astronomy program on Saturday evening November 7, 2009.

Prominent astronomer and astro-historian Dr. E.C. Krupp has urged film fans not to panic after watching John Cusack 's upcoming disaster movie 2012 because there's no way the end of the world will come so soon.

A gigantic galactic graveyard lurks in the distant universe, and the death toll is growing.

New evidence from Chandra suggests that the neutron star at the center of the Cas A supernova remnant has an ultra-thin carbon atmosphere.

Anthony Bragalia continues his research in to the Socorro UFO incident in 1964 which now seems more like a prank than a genuine encounter thanks to material clues and physical evidence found at the site.

This morning, Benedict XVI received participants in the conference sponsored by the Specola Vaticana for the International Year of Astronomy accompanied by Giovanni Cardinal Lajolo, President of the Governorate of Vatican City.

Astronomers in Chile and Japan have for the first time seen part of the "cosmic web" of galaxies that permeates the known universe in a gigantic assembly some seven billion light-years from Earth.

NASA's Kepler mission is unlikely to detect any Earth-like exoplanets before 2011 due to an electronic glitch Kepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team.

Following the launch of ESA's SMOS satellite on 2 November, the French space agency CNES, which is responsible for operating the satellite, has confirmed that the instrument's three antenna arms have deployed as planned, and that the instrument is in good health.

Dr. Eric Klumpe will discuss a oe400 Years after Galileo: How Our View of the Universe Changeda during the Friday, Nov.

Two so-called "starburst" galaxies, plus a satellite of our own Milky Way galaxy, represent a new category of gamma-ray-emitting objects detected both by Fermi and ground-based observatories.

"Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe," says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study.

Photograph: Mike Hutchings/Reuters It can see to the edge of the observable universe.

The QUaD collaboration uses the 2.6-meter telescope shown here to view the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background, a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe.

What accelerates cosmic rays to nearly the speed of light ? Astronomer have pondered that question for nearly 100 years, and now new evidence supports a theory held for two decades that cosmic rays likely are powered by exploding stars and stellar winds.

Darth Vader's Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris? Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years.

Seen from our planet, the view of Saturn's rings during equinox is extremely foreshortened and limited.

In the latest episode of their continuing efforts to embrace and understand the dark side of creation, astronomers sifting data from a new satellite say they have discerned the existence of a mysterious haze of high-energy particles surrounding the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

In her column of Oct. 23, Globe Editor Carol Stark mentioned the Chinese concept of the conflict between the yin and the yang producing harmony in the world.

Every month, Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay fires her 20-foot gun in the basement of Harvard's Hoffman Lab, sending shivers through the concrete and steel structure that can be picked up by seismometers upstairs.

As an astronomer as well as a Jesuit priest, Brother Guy Consolmagno has fielded some pretty odd questions.

Look for "The Starry Messenger" to arrive off-Broadway later than originally planned.