Astronomy News
Timeline of Astronomy
Since prehistoric times our ancestors gazed up at the stars and observed the movements of the Sun and Moon. Not surprisingly, astronomy is probably the oldest science known to man and over the passing centuries our understanding of the Universe has developed gradually to reach the considerable level of knowledge we possess today. What follows are some key dates in the timeline…
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New Galaxies found
This artist s concept depicts the most luminous galaxy known in the universe. The object, which was discovered by NASA’s WISE space telescope, is called WISE J224635.0 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech A newfound galaxy 12.5 billion light-years from Earth is the most luminous one known in the universe, blazing more brightly than 300 trillion suns, a new study reports. The engine behind…
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Astronomy Recent News
Senator Barbara Mikulski (Democrat, Maryland), chairwoman of the government subcommittee that oversees NASA s budget, responded to these requests in June by calling for an independent panel to investigate the causes of the JWST s spiralling cost and delays, and to find a way to bring them to resolution. Building the JWST is an awesome technical challenge,Mikulski says. But…
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Astrophysics News
A new year is a good time to make long-term plans, and NASA has jumped into the deep end of planning. On 20 December the US space agency’s astrophysics division released a wish list of future space missions — looking three decades into the future, and even beyond. The new ‘astrophysics road map’ is notable not because it restates broad and popular themes it thinks scientists…
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New Astronomy News
Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In…
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Galileo Earth round
We find this war advertised in many of the leading atheist tracts such as those by Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Every few months one of the leading newsweeklies does a story on this subject. Little do the peddlers of this paradigm realize that they are victims of nineteenth-century atheist propaganda. About a hundred years ago, two…
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New discoveries in Astronomy
A passenger settles in beside me on the airplane. We chat a bit about our destinations, and then comes the inevitable question: “So, what do you do for a living?” I pause a moment before answering. If I answer “astronomy, ” I know my fellow passenger will perk up, comment that he has always loved stars, and ask a question about a comet or planet that’s been in the news. If…
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Isaac Newton contributions to Astronomy
A painting of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller, dated to 1689. Credit: Sir Godfrey Kneller Newton s life Born to a poor family in Woolsthorpe, England, in 1642, Isaac Newton attended Trinity College in Cambridge, England only after it became apparent that he would never be a successful farmer. While there, he took interest in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy…
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Astronomy News UK
Five monster black holes that were previously hidden by dust and gas have been uncovered by astronomers. High energy X-rays emitted from around the newly identified black holes revealed their presence at the centre of five galaxies. An artist s rendering of two black holes in the globular star cluster M22 The space telescope is designed to pick up extremely high energy X-rays…
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Space and Astronomy News
The brightest supernova ever detected was about 100 times brighter than the flash of typical dying star (Image: iStockphoto) Astronomers analysing the brightest supernova ever detected say the titanic flare has reshaped thinking about the death struggle of gigantic stars. > more Australia may gain a National Space Science Institute and send a spacecraft to a fiery death…
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New Science findings
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of scare quotes to ensure that it s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research challenges . If the research is about a potential…
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Recent News on Space
The recently revealed highly inhomogeneous distribution of lunar resources changes the context of these issues. We illustrate this altered situation by considering the Peaks of Eternal Light. They occupy about one square kilometer of the lunar surface. We consider a thought experiment in which a Solar telescope is placed on one of the Peaks of Eternal Light at the lunar South…
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Latest News on Astronomy
Mike Brown (left) and Konstantin Batygin. LANCE HAYASHIDA/CALTECH Outside scientists say their calculations stack up and express a mixture of caution and excitement about the result. “I could not imagine a bigger deal if—and of course that’s a boldface ‘if’—if it turns out to be right, ” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California (UC), Santa…
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Planet same size as Earth
Artwork depicting the newly discovered Earth-size planet Kepler-186f and its sister planets. Click to embiggen, and you really want to; this is a pretty stunning piece of artwork. Drawing by NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech I have some cautiously exciting exoplanets news: Astronomers have announced the discovery of a planet that is very nearly the same size as Earth and…
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Galaxy News
Nicolas Lehner, left, and J. Christopher Howk University of Notre Dame astrophysicist Nicolas Lehner has led a team of scientists who have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to identify an immense halo of gas surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major galaxy to Earth. The halo stretches about a million light-years from Andromeda, halfway to the Milky Way. The discovery…
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New Earth like planets found 2014
The newly discovered planet, Kepler-186f, is the first Earth-size exoplanet circling in its star’s habitable zone. The media worldwide is gleaming with fantastical headlines, but readers in the know may have an inkling the result is less than it seems. It’s just one more on a long laundry list of exoplanets. But it’s the first on a list of Earth-like exoplanets. Kepler-186f…
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Astronomy articles
One of the wonderful things about astronomy is that it is so different from our everyday experience. Things are not what they might seem at first glance. Who could have guessed that those tiny little specks of light in our night sky are actually “suns” hundreds of times larger than Earth? Who would have suspected that the “evening star” is actually a rocky planet about the…
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NASA New galaxy
NASA has just released a new image captured by the Hubble space telescope, revealing what it looked like moments before galactic clusters - cosmic structures that consist of many galaxies held together by gravity - smashed into each other. The result of this cosmic collision of galaxy clusters was the formation of a new, massive structure called MACS J0416.1-2403 (or simply…
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New planets found 2014
The discovery images of 2012 VP113, which has the most distant orbit known in our Solar System. Three images of the night sky, each taken about 2 hours apart, were combined into one. The first image was artificially colored red, second green and third blue. 2012 VP113 moved between each image as seen by the red, green and blue dots. The background stars and galaxies did not…
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Habitable planets found
After years of observations and painstaking analysis, an international team of astronomers using independent Earth-based instruments has discovered what they believe is a potentially habitable, roughly Earth-size world orbiting the nearest star to the sun, according to a paper in the journal Nature released Wednesday. The team, led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé of Queen Mary University…
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News on Astronomy
More than 2, 300 scientists, teachers and journalists — including Space.com s Calla Cofield and Sarah Lewin — are in Kissimmee, Florida, this week for a conference dubbed The Super Bowl of Astronomy. Researchers will present the latest findings about black holes, alien planets and other cosmic bodies and phenomena at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society…
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