Featured Posts
SPACE.com
17 Jan 2020, 11:59 UTC
A planet-hunting telescope recently made a new discovery about the Milky Way's past cannibalism. Data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) showed the age of an ancient star in our galaxy that has a curious life story.
Milky Way's cannibalistic past illuminated by ancient star's life story
17 Jan 2020, 11:59 UTC
A planet-hunting telescope recently made a new discovery about the Milky Way's past cannibalism. Data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) showed the age of an ancient star in our galaxy that has a curious life story.
Astro Bob
16 Jan 2020, 18:42 UTC
We’re naturally drawn to the bright and obvious in the night sky. Everyone knows Orion the hunter and many of us can find Sirius in Canis Major the Big Dog. Ditto for the Big Dipper. All this attention-grabbing leaves the lesser constellations to ply the sky with far fewer admirers. Let’s do something to correct that. We’ll start with a surprisingly easy but virtually unknown star group — at least among the general populace — called Canis Minor the Little Dog.
Throw Canis Minor A Bone For Goodness Sake
16 Jan 2020, 18:42 UTC
We’re naturally drawn to the bright and obvious in the night sky. Everyone knows Orion the hunter and many of us can find Sirius in Canis Major the Big Dog. Ditto for the Big Dipper. All this attention-grabbing leaves the lesser constellations to ply the sky with far fewer admirers. Let’s do something to correct that. We’ll start with a surprisingly easy but virtually unknown star group — at least among the general populace — called Canis Minor the Little Dog.
Centauri Dreams
16 Jan 2020, 16:57 UTC
While we continue to labor over the question of planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxima Centauri — that tiny red dwarf with an unusually interesting planet in the habitable zone — remains a robust source of new work. It’s surely going to be an early target for whatever interstellar probes we eventually send, and is the presumptive first destination of Breakthrough Starshot. Now we have news of a possible second planet here, though well outside the habitable zone. Nonetheless, Proxima Centauri c, if it is there, commands the attention.
A Possible Proxima Centauri c
16 Jan 2020, 16:57 UTC
While we continue to labor over the question of planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxima Centauri — that tiny red dwarf with an unusually interesting planet in the habitable zone — remains a robust source of new work. It’s surely going to be an early target for whatever interstellar probes we eventually send, and is the presumptive first destination of Breakthrough Starshot. Now we have news of a possible second planet here, though well outside the habitable zone. Nonetheless, Proxima Centauri c, if it is there, commands the attention.
Bad Astronomy
16 Jan 2020, 14:00 UTC
At the center of our Milky Way galaxy sits a supermassive black hole — which astronomers named Sgr A* — with over 4 million times the Sun's mass. But it's not alone. Lots of other stuff is there, too, orbiting that black hole, including stars, gas, and dust. Over time, we can see these objects move, held sway by the incredible gravity of Sgr A*. In fact, the motions of several stars have told us a lot about the black hole itself.
Weird dust clouds orbiting our galaxy’s central black hole may be weirder than we thought
16 Jan 2020, 14:00 UTC
At the center of our Milky Way galaxy sits a supermassive black hole — which astronomers named Sgr A* — with over 4 million times the Sun's mass. But it's not alone. Lots of other stuff is there, too, orbiting that black hole, including stars, gas, and dust. Over time, we can see these objects move, held sway by the incredible gravity of Sgr A*. In fact, the motions of several stars have told us a lot about the black hole itself.
Universe Today
16 Jan 2020, 10:27 UTC
Astronomers have discovered another candidate exoplanet orbiting our neighbor, Proxima Centauri. A paper announcing these results was just published in the journal Science Advances. If confirmed, it will be the second exoplanet orbiting the star.
A Second Planet May Have been Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri! And it’s a Super Earth.
16 Jan 2020, 10:27 UTC
Astronomers have discovered another candidate exoplanet orbiting our neighbor, Proxima Centauri. A paper announcing these results was just published in the journal Science Advances. If confirmed, it will be the second exoplanet orbiting the star.
Centauri Dreams
15 Jan 2020, 14:25 UTC
We rightly celebrate exoplanet discoveries from dedicated space missions like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), watching the work go from initial concept to first light in space and early results. But let’s not forget the growing usefulness of older data, tapped and analyzed in new ways to reveal hidden gems. Thus recent work out of the Carnegie Institution for Science, where Fabo Feng and Paul Butler have mined the archives of the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph survey of 33 nearby red dwarf stars, a project operational from 2000 to 2007.
New Planets from Old Data
15 Jan 2020, 14:25 UTC
We rightly celebrate exoplanet discoveries from dedicated space missions like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), watching the work go from initial concept to first light in space and early results. But let’s not forget the growing usefulness of older data, tapped and analyzed in new ways to reveal hidden gems. Thus recent work out of the Carnegie Institution for Science, where Fabo Feng and Paul Butler have mined the archives of the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph survey of 33 nearby red dwarf stars, a project operational from 2000 to 2007.
Scientific American
14 Jan 2020, 19:00 UTC
NASA’s TESS spacecraft identified the unusual world around a red dwarf
Astronomers Just Found (Another) Potentially Habitable Exoplanet. What Happens Next?
14 Jan 2020, 19:00 UTC
NASA’s TESS spacecraft identified the unusual world around a red dwarf
Forbes articles by Brian Koberlein
14 Jan 2020, 18:09 UTC
The life of a galaxy can be violent. One day you're happily spinning with your billions of stars, the next you're colliding with another galaxy. Galactic collisions can radically change the structure of a galaxy. They can fuel star production, and leave remnants of the collision that last billions of years. Our galaxy has experienced collisions in the past, but how do we piece together the history of these violent interactions?
A Single Bright Star Tells Us When The Milky Way Turned A Galaxy Into Sausage
14 Jan 2020, 18:09 UTC
The life of a galaxy can be violent. One day you're happily spinning with your billions of stars, the next you're colliding with another galaxy. Galactic collisions can radically change the structure of a galaxy. They can fuel star production, and leave remnants of the collision that last billions of years. Our galaxy has experienced collisions in the past, but how do we piece together the history of these violent interactions?
The Guardian
13 Jan 2020, 20:00 UTC
Stardust that formed more than 5bn years ago, long before the birth of the Earth and the sun, has been discovered in a meteorite that crashed down in Australia, making it the oldest known solid material on the planet.
