Tag: exoplanets

Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 8/30/2020

Next week’s night sky: Wednesday marks the end of Mars’s forward retrograde motion. If you train a camera on Mars all night, you will notice that it stops moving forward and starts going backward! This effect happens because Mars’s orbit is slower than ours. You can observe this effect when you are neck to neck with another car on the highway, and then pull ahead. Next Thursday is a third-quarter moon. Look extremely closely at the terminator between night and day to see the fine details in […]

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All about exoplanets

An exoplanet is a planet that is not orbiting our star. An exoplanet could look like Earth, Mars, or even Jupiter.  To be classified as an exoplanet, a body must fulfill almost all of the requirements to be a planet: it must be rounded by its own gravity and have cleared its own orbit. Exoplanets are interesting for several reasons. First, they give researchers insights into how other planets might interact with stars. We only have seven planets to study in our solar system. But by looking […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 6/21/2020

Next week’s night sky: The  Boötid meteor shower is active! This shower only rarely produces significant numbers of meteors, usually only at most 1-2 per hour. However, on those rare occasions, when it is extremely active, viewers can see up to one hundred meteors per hour! For observers in the middle of the United States, the best time to watch will be right after nightfall. Because most meteor showers occur at around 2 in the morning, this is an amazing opportunity for most casual watchers to try […]

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