Tag: Galaxies

Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 10/25/2020

Next week’s night sky: On November 5, the Southern Taurids Meteor Shower peaks just after midnight! Stay up that late and you will be rewarded with almost 10 colorful meteors an hour! On Saturday, November 7, the moon will not rise for a few hours after sunset. This is a great time for some casual stargazing, as the moon will not ruin the view. Water on the Moon NASA’s flying Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has detected water molecules on the surface of the moon! Researchers […]

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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 9/27/2020

Next week’s night sky: On Monday, October 5, Mars is the closest it will get to earth. This won’t happen again until 2035! The Draconids Meteor Shower will peak overnight on Wednesday, October 7. This shower can deliver up to 15 meteors per hour, or a meteor every 4 minutes. Check out the map below to see where to look. Salty Lakes under the surface of Mars Two years ago, researchers discovered a possible lake on Mars, buried under the surface of Mars. Now, new research adds […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 9/6/2020

Next week’s night sky: On Monday, September 14, an extremely rare double transit of Jupiter will happen. What makes this transit special is that not only are there two transits happening at once, the great red spot will also be visible! To find Jupiter, go to stellarium-web.org.  Thursday is the new moon. This is a great time to go stargazing because the moon doesn’t blot out any stars. The butterfly nebula VLT captured a new image of the butterfly nebula!. But this cosmic bubble of gas, isn’t […]

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Top Astronomy & Astrophysics research from the week of 8/9/2020

Next week’s night sky: There is an exciting planet-related event happening this week! On Saturday, August 22, there will be a rare double shadow transit over Jupiter! A shadow transit occurs when the shadow of a moon passes over a planet. Shadow transits quite regularly to Jupiter, which has a lot of moons. However, these shadow transits last only minutes, making a dual shadow transit extremely rare. This shadow transit will happen at 06:32 GMT on Saturday, August 22. The moon becomes a new moon on August […]

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The top ten coolest things in space

This is a list of what I consider to be the top ten coolest things in space! 1. Thorne-Zytkow object First is a Thorne-Zytkow object. These objects form when a pulsar worms its way into the body of a different star. Although these objects would appear to be almost normal, they would house all sorts of strange elements that would never appear in a regular star. The only one that we know of in the entire universe is called HV 2112. 2. The Fermi Bubbles Second, the […]

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All about Galaxies

What is a galaxy? The scientific definition of a galaxy is a “gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.” In simple terms, this means a large clump of things that you might find in space.  The differece between a galaxy and the universe One of the most common misunderstandings about galaxies is the difference between a galaxy and the universe. Here is how you can tell them apart: First, the universe is everything. Every atom, every star, every black hole, every […]

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