The hits just keep on coming out of Austin this week as the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society rolls on. Researchers there have announced the discovery of the first Saturn-like ringed object outside our solar system, documented when researchers were trying to diagnose the cause of a strange eclipsing effect emanating from a nearby star.
Today in pretty space pics: Behold, the Carina nebula - but not as it looks with the naked eye. Astronomers at the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX), unsatisfied with the visible light spectrum images taken of this stunning swirl of blue interstellar dust, decided to begin imaging the region in sub-millimetre light invisible to the eye (represented by the the orange in the image above). Aesthetically speaking, it wasn't a bad idea.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In the basement of a quaintly cramped building on the Harvard University campus, down a set of corkscrew stairs that would make a rollercoaster designer dizzy, the shelves and filing cabinets are spilling over with 100 years of stars. Glass photographic plates shipped from telescopes around the world document the Beehive Cluster as it appeared in 1890, or Cepheid variable stars as they looked in 1908. The glass plates - some 525,000 of them - serve as the only permanent record of the skies as seen by our forebears.
The Parkes Observatory opened on this day back in 1961 after ten years of planning and construction. Thanks to Aussie film The Dish, this radio telescope supplanted the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Springs as the icon of antipodean space-watch hardware. And that's not without some justification.
Today in pretty space pics: a whirling image of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the stars above it circling the southern celestial pole. It's less a space pic than an Earth pic depicting really cool space searching technology. And it's absolutely breathtaking.
When it comes to planetary formation, water is often one of the trickiest questions scientists find themselves trying to answer. Where is space did it come from, and how on earth did it end up on... well, Earth? It seems we might have the glimmering of a solution, after scientists observed a nascent solar system surrounded by a cloud of water vapour – enough to populate several thousand Earths.
Previous
