Tag: Asteroids

Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 8/15/2021

Next week’s night sky: From Saturday onward, the night is prime milky-way viewing. Go out at around 2 hours after sunset to look at the beautiful band of bright stars snaking across the sky! Martian Images Images of knobbly rocks and rounded hills are delighting scientists as NASA’s Curiosity rover climbs Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall mountain within the 96-mile-wide basin of Mars’ Gale Crater. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, highlights those features in a panorama captured on the 3,167th Martian day,. This location is particularly exciting: […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 10/18/2020

Next week’s night sky: This week, Mars will be extraordinarily easy to stop. From October 28-30, about an hour after sunset, simply locate the moon. The reddish dot above it will be Mars! Halloween is a full moon! This is the perfect time to look at the moon for a great socially distanced holiday. Are non-spherical planets possible? Some of the planetary systems researchers have found experience extreme conditions. These large, gassy planets orbiting very close to their stars are called hot Jupiters. One of these hot […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 10/4/2020

Next week’s night sky: Friday is the new moon. This means that the stars will be extra bright Friday evening, giving stargazers a great chance to look at the stars. This is also a great time to take photos of the stars because the moon will not ruin your photos. On Saturday, there is a rare double shadow transit of Jupiter, with the great red spot visible! A shadow transit happens when the shadows of moons cross a planet’s surface. The transit starts at 5:25 EDT and […]

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All about comets, meteorites, and asteroids

So what really are the differences between a comet, a meteorite, and an asteroid? What is a comet? A comet is a collection of gas and dust that is frozen together in deep space. These objects spend most of their lives in clouds with other comets. However, sometimes a stray comet gets pulled into a closer orbit around the sun. When that happens, something spectacular happens! The comet starts to melt, shooting off two enormous tails: one made of dust, the other, gas. Most of the time […]

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