Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 1/10/2021

Next Week’s Night Sky: Wednesday is the first quarter moon.  The evenings surrounding the first quarter are the best for seeing the lunar terrain when it is dramatically lit by low-angle sunlight.  Planet Nine An exoplanet circling two stars 336 light-years away may provide clues about where a long-sought world may be hiding in our own solar system. This strange exoplanet, HD106906 b, was first discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. But in order to determine its […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 12/6/2020

Next week’s night sky: On Monday, December 14, the Geminids meteor shower peaks! This is usually the most spectacular meteor shower in December. Meteor rates can reach up to 120 meteors an hour! Combined with the new moon, this shower should be a terrific finishing point for the astronomy of 2020. Two young planetary systems Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered two new young planetary systems. They found that two stars not older than 320 million years, namely TOI-251 and TOI-942, are orbited […]

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