Astronomy

Scientists have found evidence that another object has bombarded Jupiter, exactly 15 years after the first impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 — a comet that had been seen to break into many pieces before the pieces hit Jupiter in 1994. First discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on July 19, the Pacific Ocean-sized [...]

The longest total solar eclipse during the 21st century, not to be surpassed until June 2132 has took place on 22 July 2009. It lasted a maximum of 6 minutes and 39 seconds off the coast of Southeast Asia,causing tourist interest in eastern China, Japan, India and Nepal. This was the second in the series [...]

Over the past 19 years Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies going “bump in the night” as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind. Just when you thought these interactions couldn’t look any stranger, this image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp [...]

The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all. Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and [...]

Sometimes objects in the sky that appear strange, or different from normal, have a story to tell and prove scientifically very rewarding. This was the idea behind Halton Arp’s catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies that appeared in the 1960s. One of the oddballs listed there is Arp 261, which has now been imaged in more detail [...]

On Oct. 5, 2008, just after coming within 25 kilometers (15.6 miles) of the surface of Enceladus, NASA’s Cassini captured this stunning mosaic as the spacecraft sped away from this geologically active moon of Saturn. Craters and cratered terrains are rare in this view of the southern region of the moon’s Saturn-facing hemisphere. Instead, the surface [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This color composite image of Centaurus A reveals the lobes and jets emanating from the active galaxy’s central black hole. Centaurus A is our nearest giant galaxy, at a distance of about 13 million light-years in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It is an elliptical galaxy, currently merging with a companion spiral galaxy, resulting in [...]

The festive season has arrived for astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in the form of this dramatic new image. It shows the swirling gas around the region known as NGC 2264 — an area of sky that includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster. This region lies about 2600 light-years [...]