Most people know Edwin Hubble as a famed astronomer, but he also starred as a forward on the University of Chicago Maroons’ Big Ten champion basketball teams of 1907–08 and 1908–09.
And as fellow Chicago alumnus John Grunsfeld has prepared for his fifth space shuttle flight since 1995, he’s been pondered how best to deflate a [...]
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Milky Way Dwarf Galaxies Thwart Newtonian Gravity?
Here at Universe Today, the subject of Newtonian gravity always seems to lead to vigorous debate. Now, there’s new research to stoke it.
Manuel Metz, and astrophysicist at the German Aero-space Center, and his colleagues say dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way are arranged in a way that precludes the existence of dark matter — but also [...]
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Lunatic Fringe - Stereo Moon by Jukka Metsavainio
“I was lying in a burned out basement… With the Full Moon in my eyes…” Hey, welcome to my world. You, know, the Full Moon has been credited to many things over the years… werewolves, disasters, fertility, accidents and even crime, suicide and mental illness. Farmers plant their crops by lunar phases and (strangely [...]
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Final Pretty Picture for Hubble Camera
Last week we looked back at some of the greatest images and discoveries produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, the workhorse optical camera that will be replaced with the new and improved WFPC3 during the Hubble servicing mission this week. Now, in tribute to the legacy of WFPC2, [...]
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Caltech Observatory Dismantled So Others Can Rise
Caltech has announced it will begin decommissioning the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) in Hawaii starting in 2016.
Caltech says the 23-year-old telescope is being replaced by the next generation of radio telescope, the Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope (CCAT), to be located in Chile.
“The timing of this works very nicely,” says Tom Phillips, director of the CSO [...]
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Kid’s Astronomy - Finding The Summer Triangle
The seasons and the constellations are changing - and so are the times that many of us go to bed! If you’re up late tonight, this would be a great time for you to spot some very special things going on in the night sky. You won’t need any special equipment - just [...]
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Weekend SkyWatcher’s Forecast - May 8-10, 2009
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Are you ready for the weekend? Then step outside and see if you’re able to spot Mercury as it begins retrograde. Celebrate the “Full Flower Moon” and Mother’s Day with some very special insights into a very special mother. Maybe you can give your mother the “String of [...]
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‘Astro-comb’ Will Aid Search for Extra-terrestrial Planets
As the race ramps up to find Earth-like planets around other stars, lasers are a viable option.
That according to researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who have created an “astro-comb,” a sort of calibration tool based on wavelengths of light, to pick up minute variations in a star’s motion caused by [...]
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NASA is Running Out of Plutonium
Decommissioning nuclear weapons is a good thing. But when our boldest space missions depend on surplus nuclear isotopes derived from weapons built at the height of the Cold War, there is an obvious problem.
If we’re not manufacturing any more nuclear bombs, and we are slowly decommissioning the ones we do have, where will NASA’s [...]
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Did a Russian Home Get Hit by Progress Space Debris?
The Russian supply ship for the International Space Station successfully launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:37 pm EDT (10:37 pm Moscow time) on Thursday to carry 2.5 tonnes of supplies to the orbiting crew. Progress 33 will take over from Progress 32 that was filled with rubbish and unwanted instrumentation and de-orbited on [...]
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Astronomers Closing in on Dark Energy with Refined Hubble Constant
The name “dark energy” is just a placeholder for the force — whatever it is — that is causing the Universe to expand. But astronomers are perhaps getting closer to understanding this force. New observations of several Cepheid variable stars by the Hubble Space Telescope has refined the measurement of the Universe’s [...]
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‘Dalmatian’ Volcano, Opportunity Rover and Other New Images from HiRISE
Malea Patera isn’t the name of one of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but it is the designation of an ancient volcano on Mars located on the outskirts of the Hellas impact basin. This isn’t your typical Martian landscape — just where are the red rocks and soil? — but is reminiscent [...]
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This Week’s Where In The Universe Challenge
It’s time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Test your visual knowledge of the cosmos by naming where in the Universe this image was taken and give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this picture. Post your guesses in the comments section, and check back on [...]
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Was Mars’ Magnetic Field Blasted Away?
Spacecraft orbiting Mars have found only weak magnetic fields present in various regions of the Red Planet. These fields are probably remnants of an earlier global field that has since disappeared. But how and why did the global field vanish? Recent studies have proposed that giant asteroids slamming into Mars may have [...]
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Neutrons Stars Have Crusts of Super-Steel
Neutron stars are dying stars that are seemingly ‘off the charts’ in almost every category. They are small and extremely dense; about 20 km in diameter with masses of about 1.4 times that of our Sun, meaning that on Earth, one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about 100 million tons. They [...]
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Panspermia Flower Power
Panspermia is a hypothesis that suggests life isn’t an Earth-only affair. The seeds of life may have spread throughout the Solar System and beyond via chunks of rock or comets, encountering planetary bodies, transporting spores or bacteria to other worlds. In short, we could be living in a cosmic ecosystem linked through simple interplanetary vagabond [...]
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End of an Era: The Hubble WFPC2’s Greatest Hits
For 15 years, the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) has been churning out amazing and breathtaking images of our universe. But during the upcoming HST servicing mission, a new and improved version of Hubble’s main camera will replace the optical workhorse that has provided so many memorable and awe-inspiring images. [...]
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25-Year Mystery of X-ray Emissions Solved
25 years ago, astronomers discovered diffuse X-ray emissions coming from the plane of the Milky Way, but were puzzled by the source of those emissions. The mystery has now been solved by an international team of astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These diffuse emissions do not originate from one single source but [...]
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Obama to Re-examine Constellation Program
The White House is expected to announce on Thursday that they will order a full review of the NASA’s Constellation program. The reason for the review is to determine whether the Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule are the best options for replacing the space shuttle. According to the Orlando Sentinel, [...]
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IYA Live Telescope Today - 30 Doradus: “The Tarantula Nebula”
Wow… If you had a chance to watch our live remote telescope today, then you were in for an awesome view of the Tarantula Nebula! Although it didn’t last very long before the dew and clouds chased us out, we were still able to take some great images and run some video footage for [...]
