Astronomy

Venus is the sixth largest planet. Its orbit is almost circular and varies only 1%. It has the most perfect orbit of all of the planets. It is the second planet from the sun. Also, Venus’ rotation is the slowest of all planets. It takes 243 Earth days for it to rotate. The center of [...]

Physicist John Wheeler is widely credited with coining the term black hole in his 1967 public lecture Our Universe: the Known and Unknown. He used the term to avoid him repeatedly using sentence “gravitationally completely collapsed star” on his lecture. However, Wheeler insisted that someone else at the conference had coined the term and he [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Have you ever heard the sound of stars? Scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our Sun using France’s Corot space telescope. A team writing in Science journal says the sounds have enabled them to get information about processes deep within stars for the first time. If you listen closely to the sounds [...]

Names of asteroids were originally taken from God’s and Godesses, but these ran out long ago. Now, there are asteroids called Lennon, McCartney, Edna, Bertha, Geranium, Petunia, Chicago, Granule, Gogol, Laputa, Mark Twain, Karl Marx, NORC, Libya, Atlantis, Utopia, Transyvania, Paradise, Rumpelstilz, Evita, Fanatica, Fanny, Piccolo, Requiem, Lucifer, Tolkein, Echo, Dali, Retsina, Zulu, Limpopo, Bach, [...]

The moon is only 1/4 the size of the earth, and its gravity is only 1/6 of that on earth. This made the U.S. astronauts, during their moon walks, 5/6 lighter than they were on earth. A person who weighed 90 kg on earth would weigh only 15 kg on the moon. Because of this [...]

On June 30th, NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft will reach the end of its four-year prime mission. The spacecraft is now begins its extended mission, which was approved in April of this year. On the next two-year mission, the spacecraft will address new questions and brings it closer to two of its most intriguing target: Titan and [...]

Pictured here is a Hubble Space Telescope image on Stingray Nebula. Located in constellation Ara (The Altar) at the distance of 18.000 light years, this beautiful object considered as the youngest planetary nebula ever observed!

Magnetars are dense neutron stars a type of stellar corpse with magnetic fields billions of times stronger than any magnet on Earth. They release flashes of X-rays about every 10 seconds with an occasional gamma-ray burst. They weren’t classified as a distinct star type until 1998, nearly two decades after their telltale light shows were first [...]