Astronomy

A telescope in Chile recently imaged one of the brightest spots at the core of the Milky Way, beautifully illustrating a star cluster and its neighboring dark nebula. The latter offers a stunning contrast for the billions of stars present in this patch of our galaxy. This fantastic view was made possible using the Wide Field [...]

As the Sun is entering its active period from the 11-year cycle, more and more such events are being reported. A long-lasting solar flare erupted from the sun early Saturday, triggering a huge solar flare aimed at our planet. But there’s nothing really to be feared, astronomers explain: it should not endanger satellites or astronauts [...]

Our galaxy is teeming with billions of planets very much like our own, a new research suggests – many of them circling a star similar to our Sun. Earlier research suggested that if you want to find planets like our own, you must first find stars like our own; but a fresh analysis from the [...]

It was a mystery that kept astronomers scratching their heads for years, but now, it finally seems to be cracked: particles from inside the solar system bounce off a “ribbon” of energy boundary and neutral atoms from that collision stream inward. Why and how this happens remained a mystery for quite a while. Basically, this strange [...]

As our search for alien planets improves and intensifies, astronomers are starting to pay more and more attention to one crucial aspect of alien planets:  whether they fit into the ‘habitable zone‘ – the so-called Goldilocks area in which a planet is not too close and not too far from its star – just perfectly [...]

Close, but not too close – an asteroid like that can crash on our planet every 1200 years, but there’s no reason to worry, even though it will make a flyby on February 15, passing at a distance of only 26.780 km. For comparison, the distance to the Moon varies from around 356,400 km to [...]

Astronomers are baffled by a pulsar heavier than the Sun and smaller than New York which alternatively switches on and off between radio and X-ray emissions. Small and heavy Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars, with a radius in the order of about 10 km, made up of neutrons. It is the result of [...]

Researchers from Leicester University have shown that auroras (similar to Earth’s aurora borealis) occur on other bodies outside our solar system. Aurora borealis Aurora borealis is a natural light display occuring in high latitude areas (both north and south), caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere. Here’s [...]

The most powerful explosion in the Universe – a gamma-ray burst-  might have hit Earth during the middle ages. Luckily enough for our ancestors the event had its origin thousands of light years away and its effects went by unnoticed. Last year, scientists found  unusual levels of radioactive carbon-14 in cedar trees in Japan and spikes [...]

The first sample from underground Mars will come from a rockbed that showcases unexpected mineral veins of gypsum. A Martian candy store Astronomers and geologists are now in the equivalent of a Martian candy store of scientific objectives: the lowest point of Gale crater, called Yellowknife Bay is literally teeming with minerals that could only [...]