Astronomy

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star’s core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the [...]

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium software for your computer. It renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL and displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc., just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. A new update for Stellarium, Ver. 0.10.1, has [...]

Above is an deep new image from Helix Planetary Nebula (NGC 7293), shows a rich background of distant galaxies, usually not seen in other images of this object. This color-composite image of the Helix Nebula was created from images obtained using the the Wide Field Imager (WFI), an astronomical camera attached to the 2.2-meter Max-Planck Society/ESO [...]

Many ancient astronomical texts describe the color of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, as red. These include works by Ptolemy and Lucius Seneca amongst others. The fact has been puzzled Astronomers for many years since Sirius is appears blue with the naked eye. In 1985, German astronomers Wolfhard Schlosser and Werner Bergmann published an [...]

A first-time visitor to the inner solar system which had already spotted with the naked eye from some locales, could make a spectacle of itself when it comes closest to Earth on February 24, 2009 at the distance of 0.41 AU. Current estimates peg the maximum brightness at 4th or 5th magnitude, which means dark [...]

Asteroid Icarus (1566 Icarus) have unusual characteristic is that at perihelion it is closer to the Sun than Mercury. Named after Icarus of Greek mythology, who flew too close to the Sun, the asteroid was discovered in 1949 by Walter Baade. Icarus makes a close approach to Earth at gaps of 9, 19, or 38 years. [...]