Astronomy

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is Shrinking

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Astronomers first spotted—and drew pictures of—Jupiter's "Great Red Spot" some 300 years ago. It's that "eye of Sauron" spot on the Southern Hemisphere. In reality, it's a very large, very ancient storm, and as the weather on Close up cropped image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and the newer smaller red spot.Jupiter changes, so does the Spot. The Spot really is properly called "Great"; it is so far the largest known storm in our Solar System, with a diameter of 15,400 miles. In other words, just the area covered by the storm on Jupiter is almost twice the size of Earth (and about one-sixth of Jupiter’s diameter). We've been watching the spot long enough now that we can see it is definitely shrinking. What's more, as currents and weather patterns shift, we've witnessed, albeit at a very great distance, new storms and smaller spots appearing in Jupiter's images. Read more

Comet Lulin Visible Tonight

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Comet Lulin, a beautiful green comet with a double tail is fast approaching Earth. Tonight, and the wee hours of Tuesday morning, right around 1 AM, are you best bets for a view. You'll be able to spot Lulin, with the naked eye, barely, in rural areas without light pollution, but a decent pair of binoculars or a backyard telescope will work just fine for a great view. You'll want to look in the southwestern sky about 40 degrees above the horizon near Saturn, which should be fairly bright and easy to spot. Jack Newton's photograph of comet LulinThe diagram here has a circled X to show the relative position of Lulin at about ten pm in North America on the Monday night, February 23, tonight. Read more

M51 Whirlpool and Friend

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This is another of my favorite Hubble images, taken in January of 2005. It's an image Image taken by the Hubble telescope of galaxy M51.of the Whirlpool Galaxy, NGC 1594, better known as M51, and, just to its right, its much smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195. Sometimes the two galaxies are referred to as M51a and b.Technically, the image to the right is a four-color mosaic, composed of 96 slightly overlapping images taken with four different filters (hence the lovely colors). The Whirlpool galaxy, as its name and image suggests, is a spiral galaxy, like Earth's own Milky Way. Read more

Corot Exo 7b Discovered

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A French team of astronomers have recently announced the discovery of a new planet. Spotted by their exo-planet hunter, the Corot Satellite, which was launched back in 2006, the new planet has been dubbed Corot Exo 7b. There have been more than 300 so-called exo-planets discovered in our solar system since 1995 but 7b sticks out because the majority of them are gas giants and it appears to be just 1.75 times the width of Earth and is believed to have a similar mass.

Speculators have suggested it may be made of rock or water although it may also be composed of liquid lava. Best not to start booking holidays there just yet since the planet is extremely close to its parent star which would put the temperature on the surface at between 1000 and 1500 degrees Celsius. It also orbits the star once every 20 hours and it is 457 light years away from us. Some experts have suggested that it may have begun life as an ice planet and become a water world as it approached the star and began to heat up.

The Corot satellite managed to detect the planet by looking for dimming light as it crossed in front of the star, so they basically saw a small silhouette. Read more

400th Anniversary of Galileo's Discoveries

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2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's cosmos-destroying observations and discoveries. They include the fact that Venus has phases, that Jupiter has moons, and Galileo's Copernican diagram.a number of other observations that helped create modern astronomy and encouraged Galileo to support a solar-centric Copernican view, which, of course, did not make him BFF with the Inquisition, or the Catholic church, who favored the inaccurate but comforting geocentric view, which believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Read more

Milky Way Galaxy: Movin' on Up

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The most distant object easily visible to the human eye is the Andromeda Galaxy, roughly two Robert Gendlermillion light-years away, our nearest neighbor galaxy, and very very large. Without a telescope Andromeda looks like a faint, gassy cloud in the constellation Andromeda. Conventional astronomical reasoning for years has held that Andromeda, also known as M31, was larger and denser than our own Milky Way galaxy. Using a high-end telescope, and multiple digital images, Andromeda looks like the image embedded to the left. Read more

Dark Skies in 2009

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Wired News reports that scientists and astronomers have formed the Dark Skies Awareness group, which as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy is going to lobby for people to turn out the lights. The group reports that a fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way because of light pollution.

Light pollution is a serious problem for astronomers. At the Palomar observatory in California, city lights are now directly observable through a gap in the mountains. Read more

Stephen Hawking On The Possibility Of Alien Life

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Bad news for all who have put stock in the tales and theories revolving around Alien abduction: Steven Hawking, while commenting upon the 50th anniversary of NASA, called such stories the product of "weirdos." Even I will admit to feeling a tad heartbroken at such a remark coming from the revered physicist, thinking at first that he was dismissing the very thought of alien life itself. Not that I have piled all of my chips in said claims, but there have been times in my life when I desperately wanted them to be true.

I grew up in space, not literally of course but in grand works of fiction, both literary and cinematic, that regaled the swashbuckling tales of futuristic heroes and heroines. Now, I also had enough legitimate astronomy texts and an elementary grasp on the physics of space travel to know that tales such as those would likely never happen within my life-time, if ever at all. But I had always hoped that at some point, I'd be able to witness some sort of 'First Contact,' no matter how small it was. Read more

Liquid Photographed on Titan?

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In 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Saturn's moon, Titan. It snapped pictures for an hour before its power ran out. Wired News is reporting that one of the images has been announced as proof that methane exists in liquid form on the moon.

Astronomers have cause to believe that there might be a full environmental cycle of liquids on Titan, similar to what we have on Earth. Except where Earth's cycle involves water, Titan's cycle would involve methane. Methane would evaporate from the surface, form into methane clouds, fall back to land as methane rain, and gather in methane lakes. Titan has observable clouds and lakes, so the question is whether methane mingles between the two.

If so, Titan may be supporting life at the microscopic level. On earth, microbes that live off methane do quite well for themselves. Read more

What is Machholz 1 and Why is It Interesting?

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In the field of cosmology, some chunks of gas and dust are fascinating enough to be named. One in particular has been of interest to scientists since its discovery in 1986. It is an unusual comet called Machholz 1.

Unusual is Relative

Our solar system has its fair share of comets. Until recently, all of them have been classified into two categories. The majority of the comets observed in our solar system have a chemical composition that favors water ice. The estimated average H2O content of the first class of comets is 10^13 of ice. The second class of comets are distinguished by the notable presence of carbon molecule depletions, giving them the title "Carbon-Chain Depletion Comets". Why the difference? The current consensus is that comets develop different chemical composition based on where they typically reside. Class 1 comets are believed to have formed in the vicinity of our system's gas giants and subsequently traveled to the Oort Cloud where many of them remain. Read more

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