Posts for 'Lunar Astronomy' Category

Astronomers have discovered a number of planets outside our solar system that orbit the "wrong" way, challenging theories about how planets form. Scientists announced the discovery of nine new planets at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Glasgow on Tuesday.

The planets are all transiting exoplanets, planets that pass between their host star and the Earth, blocking some of the star's light. Because the planets pass in front of their stars, astronomers know which way they're orbiting. The discovery brought the total of known transiting exoplanets to 27. Six of these planets were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction of their host stars' spin, which flies in the face of the prevailing model of how stars and their planets form.

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A star that died in a supernova explosion has been resurrected by a team of forensic astronomers that has built a new 3-D view of the long-dead object using echoes of light.

Astronomers were able to assemble one of the first 3-D perspectives of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A by observing light that is reflected off of interstellar dust scatted throughout the Milky Way.

The supernova explosion that created Cassiopeia A emitted light that reached Earth approximately 330 years ago. But, some of that light encountered celestial traffic, reflecting off clouds of interstellar dust - meaning it is just now reaching us on Earth [how light echoes work].

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A 3-D scan of hundreds of thousands of galaxies has confirmed the view that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, due to a mysterious factor called dark energy. The galaxy survey, described in a study set to be published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, serves as one more line of evidence for dark energy's existence.

The idea behind dark energy cropped up 12 years ago when astronomers carefully measured how quickly supernovas were receding from us - and noticed that the speed was increasing with time. Since then, other types of evidence have piled up, including a survey of 13,000 galaxies conducted using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The latest study kicks it up a notch by drawing upon the Hubble Space Telescope's COSMOS survey of more than 446,000 galaxies. Using ground-based telescopes, researchers were able to determine the distances to 194,000 of those galaxies - and chart the distribution of matter out to about 12 billion light-years.

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An international team of astronomers has confirmed that the universe, at least within a distance of 3.5 billion light years of Earth, obeys Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The study, published this week in Nature, throws cold water on some alternative theories of gravity physicists have advanced that don't require the existence of dark matter.

Astronomers have observed that galaxies and clusters of galaxies move as if they're under the influence of a great amount of mass that doesn't give off light, as stars do.

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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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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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The duration of the eclipse will be approximately around 11 minutes and 8 seconds. The moon will cover the sun’s disc. Annular solar eclipse occurs when the sun and the moon are exactly in line, but the apparent size of the moon’s shadow is smaller than that of the visible disc of the sun.

The covered sun, therefore, appears as a ‘Ring of Fire’, with its rays appearing spread out from the outline of the moon. Last time India saw this ‘Ring of Fire’ was Nov 22, 1965, and it will not be witnessed again before June 21, 2020. In India, the eclipse will start around 11 a.m. and end around 3:15 p.m.

A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star, improving the odds that habitable planets may exist in our cosmic neighbourhood. The planet is nearly three times as large as Earth and made almost entirely of water, forming a global ocean more than 15,000km deep.

Astronomers detected the alien world as it passed in front of its sun, a red dwarf star 40 light years away in a constellation called Ophiuchus, after the Greek for "snake holder". The discovery, made with a network of amateur telescopes, is being hailed as a major step forward in the search for planets beyond our solar system that are hospitable to life as we know it.

Measurements suggest the planet is shrouded in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium that blocks visible light from its sun, plunging the watery surface into permanent darkness. The weight of the atmosphere keeps the water liquid despite it being a searing 120C to 282C.

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Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue  the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor.

A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown. "If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.

The New Year's Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.

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In May 2009, astronomers were jubilant: finally, an extra solar planet had been found by using the method of astrometry.  That’s great, except, they may not have found a planet after all. Researchers from JPL reported they found a Jupiter-like planet around a star smaller than our sun.

But follow-up observations of the star VB10 are coming up empty. “The planet is not there,” said Jacob Bean from the Georg-August University in Gottingen, Germany, who used a different and more successful approach to look for exoplanets, radial velocity.

Astrometry measures the side-to-side motion of a star on the sky to see whether any unseen bodies might be orbiting it. Using this method is difficult and requires very precise measurements over long periods of time. Using astrometry to look for exoplanets has been around for 50 years, but it hadn’t bagged a verified exoplanet – until, astronomers thought, earlier this year.

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