Archive for the 'Astronomy' Category
A colossal black hole nestled in the center of a distant galaxy controls its own growth and the growth of surrounding stars by pumping out energy at regular intervals, a new study says.
“It looks like a beating heart,” said study team member Mateusz Ruszkowski, an astronomer at the University of Michigan.
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Astronomers were able to capture, for the first time ever, planets that were outside the solar system.
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San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, the new $20 million dollar facility that’s a part of the recently reopened California Academy of Sciences, is a technological marvel.
The Morrison Planetarium allows “astronomers not only to show traditional star charts, but to guide visitors through an immersive fly-through of our universe – realistically rendered in real-time. ”
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A new color-coded image represents the first visual evidence of the existence of dark energy, a mysterious force that astronomers think is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.”This is the first time when we actually see the effect of dark energy in a picture,” said study leader István Szapudi of the University […]
Hanny van Arkel, a 25 year old school teacher, was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet last August when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky: a bright, gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle.
Van Arkel posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project, […]
Mercury’s surface is seen in an image taken by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft during a January 2008 flyby—the first close-up examination of the solar system’s innermost planet in decades.
Detailed analyses of the pictures, released in July 2008, revealed that the planet has volcanoes, may contain a liquid core, and has suffered dramatic geologic collapses in the […]
Pavilion Lake in Marble Canyon, British Columbia, is considered a “spiritual place” by the native Tskwaylaxw people of Pavilion. Overlooking the lake is a limestone formation that they believe is a “Transformer Stone” meaning that in First Nations legend it was created by the actions of the “Transformers”, a group of supernatural beings who traveled […]
By listening to the “ringing” of a nearby planet-harboring star, astronomers have for the first time identified the birthplace of one of our galaxy’s many drifting stars.
The yellow-orange star Iota Horologii, located 56 light-years away near the southern-sky constellation Horologium (”The Clock”), was discovered to harbor a planet about two times the size of Jupiter […]
Did you miss firewords on new year’s eve? Fear not, something better in store for you:
The annual Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in the early morning of Jan. 4. The cold may be brutal, but the celestial display often is the year’s best, with more than 100 shooting stars visible per hour if viewing conditions are […]