Tag archives for planets
The lunar wall comes into view, three planets huddle, and the moon joins the Leo constellation in this week’s best sky events.
National Geographic’s Top 10 Tweets of 2012
Posted by Ted Chamberlain on December 13, 2012 
What did National Geographic Twitter followers retweet most in 2012? Intriguing transmissions on strange emissions—from the sun as well as wombats—subatomic science, and stargazing. Lots of stargazing.
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Armchair astronomers take note: This space atlas is for you. Yes, that kind of atlas—a series of maps and charts that evokes the ability to navigate a place, usually by ship or some sort of vehicle. The maps are remarkably detailed—Mercury’s surface incorporates the latest data from the orbiting Messenger spacecraft and the crater names might surprise you (Mark Twain, Botticelli, Dali, Shakespeare). On Venus nearly every feature is named after goddesses or famous women.
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Rocks from South Africa hint that our planet once had periods of thick organic haze akin to what exists today on Saturn’s biggest moon.
Night Sky News: Tiny Mercury Easy to See This Week
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on March 14, 2011 Of the eight planets in our solar system, five are visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Known since ancient times, these naked-eye planets appear similar to stars, but they “wander” across the sky instead of staying in fixed positions relative to each other. Knowing where a planet will pop up…
Yesterday—Superbowl *Sun*day—NASA released the first global view of our sun, courtesy of a pair of space probes collectively called Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, or STEREO. Launched in October 2006, the two probes left Earth together but then separated and headed for opposite sides of the solar orb. On February 6, STEREO-A and STEREO-B finally reached…
UPDATE: In Wednesday’s press conference, the Kepler team announced the new public data includes readings on several hundred new planetary candidates. The findings increase the number of planet candidates Kepler’s found to 1,235. Of these, 68 are roughly Earth-size, 288 are super Earth-size, 662 are Neptune-size, 165 are Jupiter-size, and 19 are larger than Jupiter.…
I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of the Journal of Cosmology until today, maybe because it only started in 2009. According to the “About” page, the Journal of Cosmology is a peer-reviewed, free, open-access, online publication that gets roughly 50,000 readers a month. The editorial board includes names from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,…
Your Breaking Orbit blogger is back from vacation, and I’ll be bringing you highlights direct from the 42nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California. It’s a cold, drizzly day outside the convention center, but inside it’s raining hot new finds about planets, dwarf planets, exoplanets, minor planets, and…
The conversation in the latest xkcd seems eerily familiar to me: [click here to get the punchline] At least I can guess with some degree of accuracy what type of news feeds the artist must be reading … Exhibit A and Exhibit B, both widely covered by the scientific press, from just last week.
It sounds like the start of a fairy tale: There’s a unicorn in outer space that holds a rose and a star that rings like a bell. What I’m actually talking about is the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, a grouping of relatively faint stars huddled between Orion, Gemini, and Canis Major. In addition to the…
About 127 light-years away there’s a star like our sun that hosts at least five planets, each roughly the same mass as Uranus or Neptune, astronomers announced today. A closeup of the sky around HD 10180 —Image courtesy ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin The planets were found via what’s called…
Hot on the heels of The Planets in HD, I see the folks at SEED magazine have a nifty interview with One Ring Zero about their new album, PLANETS, an astronomy-themed rock symphony. We’re still a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Holst’s astrology ode, written between 1914 and 1916. But the…
OK. If this headline makes you cringe rather than snicker, just stop reading this post right now. Good? Great. On to the news. An artist’s impression of a Jupiter-like exoplanet. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech Late last month astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced the discovery of four new extrasolar planets, two each around the…
As mentioned in a previous post, this past Saturday I was a guest of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia for their presentation of The Planets in HD. The show combines the music of Gustav Holst’s The Planets—played live by the National Symphony Orchestra—with some amazing high-definition imagery and animations from…
It’s been four years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ruled that Pluto is no longer a planet, and the subject remains almost as divisive as the political rumble over climate change. But it turns out that Pluto was creating kerfuffles almost from the moment it was discovered—even among world-reknowned composers. If [like me] you’re…
Take a drop of seawater and look at it under the microscope, and you’ll see some pretty amazing stuff: That tiny splash of the vast ocean is brimming with plants, baby animals, bacteria—a veritable cornucopia of life. Now take a “drop” of the night sky, maybe a section of that seeming void about the size…
To the human eye, the Rosette nebula appears as a vague ghost of a cloud around a bright star cluster in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. But to the infrared eye of the Herschel Space Observatory, this cosmic rose lights up with astonishing color: —Image courtesy ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia More precisely,…
In real life, humankind may be taking its sweet time to get to the Red Planet, but in the movies, we’ve been there hundreds of times. The latest iteration in the voyage to our planet’s red sibling comes in the form of Mars, an indie animated romantic comedy from Austin, Tx-based director, animator, and writer…
“That’s no moon. Oh, wait, yes it is!” —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute When Luke said that TIE fighter was headed toward a “small moon,” he must have had Mimas on his mind. Since the 1980s this small Saturn moon has been likened to the fictional Death Star, thanks to its most noticeable blemish, the…
First, allow me to extend a warm welcome to the 3,500+ astronomers, astronomy buffs, writers, friends, and family now in Washington, D.C., for the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Welcome to my home town, and thanks for bringing the meeting to me for a change! —Image courtesy NASA Day One of the conference…
It’s kind of like a wool sweater that’s been put through the dryer. Except the sweater is a hurricane-like storm as wide as three Earths, and the dryer is Jovian climate change. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona From 1996 to 2006, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot shrank by about 15 percent, according to researchers at the…
If you [heart] space, you probably know by now that this Thursday, April 2, marks the start of 100 Hours of Astronomy. The event will feature live Web casts, sidewalk astronomy, a literal “Sun Day” for solar science, and scads of other public outreach activities around the world. Kicking off the whole shebang is the…
Being sick is a real drag, especially when it leaves you too physically and mentally weak to do much more than lie on the couch and wonder whether it’s possible to create a playlist of good songs with planets for titles. Sometime during my fevered haze I started playing around on the ol’ laptop searching…
All eyes swiveled toward me when the tie-breaker question was asked at last week’s pub quiz: How many times Earth’s mass is that of Uranus? [insert suppressed giggle here] Think you know? Think carefully. This is pub quiz after all, not Jeopardy—who’s to say the question writers knew the difference between size and mass? On…
