Ars Technica has had a couple of very nice articles on exoplanet detection in the last week:
Matthew Francis, Tiny Exoplanet Is Smaller Than Mercury (And Probably Hotter, Too), Ars Technica (Feb. 20, 2013) (”[R]esearchers may have found the smallest exoplanet yet, a world with a diameter about 80 percent of Mercury’s. This planet candidate, named [...]
I would love to go, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it this Friday:
On the morning of Friday, Sept. 21, 2012, space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to visit northern California with a low-level flyover of NASA Ames Research Center before flying to Los Angeles to be permanently installed at [...]
The International Astronomical Union has recommended that the Astronomical Unit (au) be defined as exactly 149 597 870 700 m, instead of being based on the Sun’s mass, which is constantly decreasing:
XVIII General Assembly of International Astronomical Union, noting [] that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) 1976 System of Astronomical Constants specifies the units for the dynamics of [...]
The transit of Venus occurs tomorrow:
The San Jose Astronomical Association has view stations setup tomorrow, June 5, 2012, at Houge Park in Campbell from 2:30-6 PM.
“[A] diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel” would be nothing compared to this:
Neutron stars form from the core of a collapsing star and, as the supernova dissipates, often rotate rapidly, creating a pulsar. In less than a million years, however, their strong magnetic fields act as a brake, slowing them [...]
The little planet that wasn’t now has a fourth moon:
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope [have] discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite—temporarily designated P4—was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. [...]
[An anomaly among the closest companions to our Galaxy is that the LMC [Large Magellanic Cloud] is so extraordinarily luminous for a magellanic irregular galaxy. In nearby regions of the Universe there are only two Ir galaxies (NGC 4214 and NGC 4449) that even come close to rivaling the LMC in luminosity. In other words [...]
New research on a 2,400 year old star table shows that the Ancient Egyptians kept close tabs on the Big Dipper, monitoring changes in the constellation’s orientation throughout the course of an entire year.
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Professor Sarah Symons, of McMaster University in Hamilton Canada, carried out the new research. She presented her results on Sunday [...]
R136a1 … sits toward the centre of RMC 137a, a crowded cluster of hot young stars some 165,000 light years away in the Large Magellenic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbours. … [It] is about 265 times the mass of the sun, making it the most massive star [...]
A team of astronomers has found that in the dusty environment around a white dwarf star lying about 6500 light years from Earth, a few per cent of the carbon is in the form of buckyballs. The astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to detect the distinctive infrared spectrum of buckyballs made of 60 and [...]