Tag: ASTRONOMY

Nerds, kids and kids-at-heart love to assemble LEGO duplications of modern objects, particularly items that possess technological relevance. Despite that interwoven relationship between the tiny plastic toys and complex scientific creations, LEGO engineers have apparently ignored one seminal machine that might be the oldest computer ever crafted by human hands. Well, Apple engineer and ...

Hey, amateur astronomers, listen to this: A couple of at-home space nuts recently discovered a pulsar with a screensaver that uses idle PC time to process data collected from telescopes. By using Einstein@Home to 'donate' a PC's processors to the pursuit of science, the program harnesses thousands of willing computers, rather than one supercomputer, to analyze data. This helps on-the-clock ...

It's not much to look at. This photo from the Gemini Observatory in 2008 lacks the "wow" factor of the Hubble Deep Field, but tihs may be just as important. This image, primarily of the star 1RSX J160929.1-210524, is the first confirmed photograph of an extra-solar planet (or exoplanet) orbiting a sun-like star. Normally, exoplanets are detected through indirect methods, such as the ...

When scientists need to research a frigid, barren wasteland so inhospitable that humans stand no chance of survival, what do they do? Dispatch enslaved, persecuted, and voiceless robots, of course. With its excessively dry climate, low wind, and low atmospheric turbulence, Antarctica provides ideal star-gazing opportunities, but its negative-130-degree temperatures and geographical ...

If nine-year-olds can work for Microsoft and become feared professional gamers, why can't a 14-year-old leave her mark on the world of astronomy? Oh, wait, she can -- as proven by Caroline Moore, a student from upstate New York who discovered an exploding star that occurred in a galaxy roughly 70 million light years away. All the way back in November, Caroline spotted the faint glow in the sky ...

It's called Hanny's Voorwerp, after its discoverer Hanny Van Arkel and the Dutch word for object. Van Arkel noticed the green blob while using the Web site Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers pour over images of galaxies and other cosmic objects and help scientists categorize them. Scientists believe that the Voorwerp was lit up by a powerful quasar (a massive black hole that blasts light and radio ...

Last week, astronomers announced that they had discovered a solar system that was "like our own" about 5,000 light years away. And, of course, by like our own they mean that it might be... potentially... kinda-sorta... similar in some respects... to our own solar system. The new system has a red star at the center about half the mass of our own sun and is orbited by at least two planets. The two ...

As recently as 1995, we had no evidence that planets existed around other stars. It was just a logical assumption that extra-solar planets must exist. Since then, we have found hundreds of planets orbiting other stars, most of them gas giants like Jupiter. But recently a smaller planet has been found orbiting Gliese 581 about 20 light-years away. What makes this planet even more interesting is ...