A few weeks ago, Astronomy Editor David J. Eicher visited the astronomy and equestrian village at Rancho Hidalgo near Animas, New Mexico.

While Dave was there, developer Gene Turner surprised him by unveiling a second Astronomy Magazine Observatory, just to the east of the first one (both pictured below).

The goal is to stream images from the observatory (or observatories!) to our web site. As fiber-optic Internet lines become operational and as Rancho Hidalgo acquires new equipment for the process, images are beginning to flow our way. The solar image you see here is one example.

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Starting tonight on the BBC, a new series premiers called "Wonders of the Solar System". The host is some guy named Brian Cox. He’s a particle physicist! I don’t see the BBC hiring me to do a show on the Large Hadron Collider, so this doesn’t seem fair. And I’m a little concerned about how much Brian knows about the LHC, anyway.
 

When Charlottesville broke a 116-year-old record Feb. 10 with the winter's 55th inch of snow, Ricky Patterson was there to record it. He is Charlottesville's official volunteer weather observer for the National Weather Service. "We got 3.8 inches that day, which put us over the previous record of 54.7 inches set during the winter of 1995-96," he said.

As of March 3, the total stands at 56.8 inches. This is also the 10th-coldest winter on record. Nearly every morning at 8 o'clock for the past eight years, Patterson, a University of Virginia astronomer by profession, has "trudged" from his University-owned house on Observatory Hill to the McCormick weather station to record the day's minimum and maximum temperatures and the precipitation – snowfall, rainfall, or any mix between.

"News reporters tend to describe me as 'trudging'" he said, "but it's really just a hundred-yard walk. I don't think I've ever trudged." Patterson records the data and e-mails it to the weather service. The service then merges that information with data from about 11,000 other sites around the country to create a big-picture view of the nation's climate. Over the span of time, years and decades and, ultimately, centuries, clear patterns emerge, indicating warming or cooling trends and seasonal averages.

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Today, astronomers around the world are making new discoveries studying the vastness of space. One such astronomer teaching at the University of Alabama has made major progress in studying black holes and has documented for the first time, a star being torn apart by a black hole.  That black hole is a thousand times more massive than our sun.

Are black holes dangerous?  Should we worry about what is out there?  Should we care that black holes exist? Talk about looking at the big picture!  By doing research millions of light years into space. A hunger for knowledge is what made Galileo look to the stars with an early telescope.  It’s what made Copernicus challenge his church’s view that the earth was the center of the universe.

Dr. Jimmy Irwin is an astronomer, a researcher, one of only a handful of scientists who study black holes.  He said, “People love black holes, they want to talk about them all the time.  They have almost a natural fear of black holes.  They have the assumption that a black hole’s gonna suck them in.”

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First described in 2008, the extrasolar planet or exoplanet WASP-12b is a Jupiter-like world that orbits its host star so tightly a year lasts just 26 hours.

This closeness means that a combination of heat from the star and from.

A gravitational tug-of-war called tidal heating brings the surface temperature to more than 4,700 degrees Fahrenheit (2,600 degrees Celsius).

New data show that WASP-12b's atmosphere is also being puffed up by the star's heat to the point that some of its gases are escaping.

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A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other space instruments has discovered that a collection of small, ancient galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 31 (HCG 31), finally is coming together into one larger galaxy after 10 billion years.

The images the team recorded offer a window into the universe's early years, when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller building blocks was common.According to Jane Charlton, a Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics and one of the team's leaders, the late-blooming galaxy is in its final stage of development.

"Most other small galaxies in the universe came together into larger galaxies billions of years ago," said Charlton, "but the galaxies within HCG 31 have been interacting for only a few hundred million years, which is just a blink of an eye in cosmic history."

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A huge planet which is six times the mass of Jupiter has been discovered lately. It is the youngest extra-solar planet weighing about 1.9x1027 kg, is only 35 million years old and revolves around a young active central star at a very close distance. Dr. Maria Cruz Galvez-Ortiz and Dr. John Barnes from University of Hertfordshire, who led a team of astronomers, discovered the fact.

It is said to be the youngest planet orbiting a star of a similar size to our sun. As a matter of fact, it is situated 83 light years away from the earth. It is three times younger to the one which was discovered earlier, told the astronomers. Though, young stars are usually not a part of planet searches as they have powerful magnetic fields that produce phenomena known as stellar activity, which includes flares and spots.

It can copy the presence of a companion, thereby making it really difficult to untie the signals of planets and activity. Galvez-Ortiz said, "The planet was detected by searching for very small variations in the velocity of the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of the planet as it orbits -- the so-called 'Doppler wobble technique".

The discovery and characterisation of a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere is a step closer thanks to a new observation technique, developed by astronomers at NASA and UCL, using small ground-based telescopes.Jupiter-sized planet nearly 63 light years away. Rather than using a high performance space telescope, like Hubble, they have made the breakthrough using a relatively small 30-year-old telescope in Hawaii.

The surprising new finding was made using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii – a 3-metre diameter telescope that ranks just 40th among ground-based instruments. The new technique promises to speed up the work of studying planet atmospheres by enabling many other ground-based telescopes to focus on known exoplanets – planets that orbit stars beyond our solar system.

''The final goal is to observe the atmosphere of a planet with the capability to support life. We're not there yet, but this technique will make it much easier and faster to characterise exoplanet atmospheres,'' said Dr Giovanna Tinetti, co-author of the study at UCL Physics and Astronomy.

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Researchers say the giant planet, named BD+20 1790b, is 35 million years old and six times the mass of Jupiter. It is situated 83 light years away from Earth and is the youngest planet orbiting a star of a similar size to the sun, the astronomers said. Only one young planet, aged 100 million years, was previously known but the newly-discovered planet is about three times younger, said the research published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

Dr Maria-Cruz Gálvez-Ortiz, a University of Hertfordshire astronomer, described it as ''an exciting discovery''. ''There are still very few extrasolar planets that have been discovered – only about 420," said Dr Gálvez-Ortiz, who was among the international team which identified the planet.

Young stars are usually excluded from planet searches because they have intense magnetic fields that generate a range of phenomena known collectively as stellar activity, including flares and spots. This can make it difficult to disentangle the signals of planets and activity.

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Supernovas have long been used as “cosmic mile markers” to measure the expansion of the universe, but NASA scientists now claim that they have finally discovered what actually sparks the massive stellar explosions. A team of astronomers led by Marat Gilfanov used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray laboratory to study supernovas in five nearby elliptical galaxies and the central region of the Andromeda galaxy — a spiral galaxy closest to our own, the Milky Way.

They found that most Type 1a supernovas are sparked by the merging of two white dwarf stars, or the collapsed remnant of old stars. The stars become unstable when they exceed their weight limit which causes a stellar explosion, the Telegraph reported.

“It was a major embarrassment that we did not know how they (supernovas) worked. Now we are beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions, said Gilfanov, an astronomer from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany.

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