Archive Posts

Look Up's calendar is bursting with space events through the rest of July, including star parties on the Mall, a celebration of Mars, and visits from astronauts. Astronomy Night on the Mall: Gaze through telescopes set up on the National Mall this Thursday night from 6 to 11 p.m. during this free astronomy event held just northeast of the Washington Monument.

View the Moon, Saturn, and even some deep sky objects with the help of volunteers from The National Capital Astronomers and the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. The evening is sponsored by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy and Hofstra University. It's a Star Party for the People!

Mars Day! at the National Air and Space Museum: We know most of you aren't really working that hard on Fridays in the summer, so head down to NASM this week for Mars Day! from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Events, lectures and demonstrations will teach you all about the red planet.

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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope to follow up on a NASA Chandra X-ray telescope observation, the most powerful pair of jets ever seen have been found bursting from a black hole of just a few solar masses. This so-called microquasar, located in the spiral galaxy NGC 7793 12 million light years away, is also blowing out a huge bubble of hot gas stretching 1,000 light years across – twice as large and ten times more powerful than any other known microquasar.

“We have been astonished by how much energy is injected into the gas by the black hole,” says lead author Manfred Pakull, who reports the discovery in this week's issue of the journal Nature. “This black hole is just a few solar masses, but is a real miniature version of the most powerful quasars and radio galaxies, which contain black holes with masses of a few million times that of the Sun.”

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If you ever read Skepchick, you already know of Surly Amy: skeptic, artist, photographer, and all around cool chick. I’m glad to have her as a friend. She also creates wonderful critical thinking jewelry she calls Surlyramics. These are ceramic necklaces and other accouterments with skeptical, scientific, and critical thinking phrases and drawings on them. They’re very cool, and wildly popular at meetings I’ve been to.

She and I have teamed up to create a limited edition Surlyramics Bad Astronomy pendant necklace. Each one is hand-formed and painted, and only 200 will be made. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. The reason we’re doing this is that when you order a Bad Astronomy Surly necklace for $20, half of that will be donated to the American Cancer Society. Our goal is to raise $2000 in honor of my friend Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and really nice guy  he’s the one who named an asteroid after me, as well as others for other skeptics and scientists.

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What do stars, planets and people have in common? According to the theory of electromagnetism, any electrical current gives rise to a magnetic field, which can be found in stars, planets (including Earth), and even human bodies.

Astronomers have found that magnetic fields pervade the universe through a combination of telescopic observations and theoretical modeling An international conference held at Western on May 17-19, entitled “Magnetic Fields: Core Collapse to Young Stellar Objects,” brought together 70 of the world’s leading researchers on magnetism in stars and star-forming regions.

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It's barely July and University of Redlands astronomer Tyler Nordgren is well into his summer book tour. It's not quite the glamorous trip he might have imagined -- swanky hotels with champagne and turn-down service are scarce on his schedule, and Oprah hasn't yet come knocking.

Instead, Nordgren is driving his RAV4 from one park to the next in the western United States. The SUV is loaded with camping gear, camera equipment and five boxes of copies of his book, "Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks."

"I thought once I wrote the book my job was done," Nordgren wrote in an e-mail last week. "I just waited for my publisher to book me on 'Oprah' or 'The Colbert Report,' then watch as the New York Times ran a review and the sales took off."

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A €450 million mission to measure the precise location of stars in the Milky Way may be threatened by bursts of radiation from the Sun, Physics World is reporting.

Gaia, as the spacecraft is known, is the latest in a series of astrometry satellites which will measure the positions of millions of stars in the galaxy. That might sound easy, given that ground-based surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have done the same with around a million galaxies.

But it's not. Stars in the Milky Way are generally too close to be measured using the traditional redshift method used to chart distant galaxies. Instead, Gaia will rely on relative motion, brightness and parallax (the slight change in apparent position of nearby stars at different times of year) to figure out how far away many of these stars are.

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The Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association’s monthly indoor meeting will be at 8 p.m. July 20 in Coykendall Science Building at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Speaker will be Louis J. Suarato, who was the development director for the Astronomy.

India has joined the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project, the next generation astronomical observatory that will be located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. This was announced by Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chauhan in California on Friday.

The observatory is scheduled to begin operations in 2018. Observer statu India has been granted observer status on the TMT Board. This is the first step to becoming a full partner in TMT, which will mean participating in the development and scientific use of what will be the world's most advanced and capable astronomical observatory, according to the press release by the TMT project team.

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In the fall of 2008, a number of institutions announced that their scientists had directly imaged planets orbiting around other stars one of the biggest stories of the past few years of astronomy.

Still, some of the astronomy teams acknowledged that there was a chance the imaged planet and sun were either actually chance alignments or a star and a companion brown dwarf.

One of those groups recently re-imaged their discovered system with the same instrument  the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

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The star in question is Beta Pictoris (or just Beta Pic to its friends), a very young star  it’s only a few million years old, compared to the Sun’s advanced age of 4.56 billion  with about twice the Sun’s mass and 9 times its brightness. As stars go, Beta Pix is pretty close, just 63 light years away, and is easily bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye from the southern hemisphere.

In the above picture, taken using one of the European Southern Observatory’s ginormous 8.2 meter units of the Very Large Telescope, Beta Pic is represented by the dot in the center. The star is so bright its light swamps everything around it, so the star itself has been blocked by a piece of metal inside the camera that took the shot (that’s the reason for the dark circle in the center of the picture). This allows us to see much fainter stuff near the star.

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