12.06.10: Refurbished Hubble Catches Interstellar Speedster.

 
     New instruments installed aboard the Hubble Space Telescope on the final repair mission are now starting to really show their stuff. Recently, astronomers revealed a new find; a massive star speeding away from the Tarantula Nebula. Located 170,000 light years distant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, this nebula is also sometimes referred to as 30 [...]

07.06.10: Mega-Scope Site Selected.

 
   The dawn of the mega-scopes is almost upon us… earlier last month, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) consortium announced a site selection for their whopping 42 meter monster; the E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) which will be perched atop Cerro Armazones in central Chile. The 10,020 foot high summit beat out four other possible [...]

04.06.10- “Hot Jupiters” in Retrograde.

 
   A unique battery of telescopes is revealing an unusual feature in many exoplanetary systems. Earlier this year, the Royal Astronomical Society unveiled nine new exoplanets, transiting “hot Jupiters” that cross the face of their parent star as seen from Earth. No big deal nowadays, as the exoplanet count sits at 455 and climbing, and at [...]

30.05.10: The Faces of Gum 19.

(Credit: ESO/Sofia/Digitized Sky Survey).
   Take a look at the Nebula pictured above. This is the current visual state of affairs of the nebula known as Gum 19, 22,000 light-years distant in the southern constellation Vela. This rich star forming region is pictured in the Digitized Sky Survey above, and the seemingly non-descript Gum 19 Nebula [...]

15.04.10- Do We Know the Future of our Sun?

  You Are Here!
    Our modern understanding of stellar evolution states that our Sun is a middle-aged main sequence star, destined to bellow up into a Red Giant in a few billion years and eventually wind up as a degenerate white dwarf embedded in a shroud of a planetary nebula. Looking out at the stars in [...]

19.10.09: 32 New Exoplanets Revealed!

Anybody notice the exoplanet tally on our front page hop up to 402 this morning? That’s because the European Southern Observatory (ESO) revealed a stunning 32 (count em!) new exoplanets identified this morning at their conference at Porto, Portugal. The discoveries were thanks to HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, a sensitive spectrograph [...]

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