Tag: Quasar

Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 4/25/2021

Next week’s night sky: The annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower is produced by particles of material left behind by repeated passages of Halley’s Comet. The shower, which runs from April 19 to May 28, will peak in intensity before dawn on Thursday, May 6. Aquarids meteors will appear to be travelling away from a radiant point in Aquarius. That spot will lie near the southeastern horizon, not far from Jupiter. The southerly radiant makes this shower better for observers at low latitudes. On the peak night, watch […]

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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 11/29/2020

Next week’s night sky: Tuesday is the last quarter moon. This is a great time to focus on the terminator to see minuscule detail in the surface of the moon. The terminator is the line that divides light from dark. 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 whoer should be a terrific finishing point for the astronomy of 2020. […]

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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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Top Astronomy & Astrophysics research from the week of 8/16/2020

Next week’s night sky Tuesday this week is the first quarter moon. It will be in the sky all evening, making for some great casual observing. If you have a camera attached to a high powered telescope, you may be able to catch a time-lapse of the terminator (the line dividing day and night) sweeping across the surface of the moon! On Friday about 45 minutes after sunset, Jupiter is just a few degrees away from the moon. If you look around the moon for a big […]

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All about neutron stars and pulsars

You might have heard about neutron stars and pulsars referred to as exotic deep space objects, but what actually are they? Neutron stars Let’s start with neutron stars. Neutron stars are formed from the stars in the universe that are almost the heaviest, but not quite. When these massive stars collapse, the product is called a neutron star. To learn more about the process of collapsing, click here: https://theastroenthusiast.com/all-about-black-holes/. Usually, the stars that make neutron stars are 400 Million miles across, but these stars are squished into […]

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