All sorts of Astronomy Stuff – since 2002
Mars is known to have had lots of surface water in the past. No doubt some of it evaporated into space, but the rest? Only one way to go – down. Now scientists using data from older data from the InSight lander have found evidence for cracks in the Martian surface filled with water. The…
Note: A post from my work blog – original here. There’s something strange going on with the planets on the outer edge of the Solar System…. For centuries, astronomers have been using slight oddities in the motion of known planets to uncover other planets. Probably the most famous of these was the discovery of the…
Newborn stars are surrounded only by a featureless disk. Debris disks persist for hundreds of millions of years. So when do planets form? And do planets form around all stars. When we look at the planets in our Solar System, including our own planet Earth, we find that they formed nearly at the same time…
Famed physicist who lent his name to the Higgs boson has passed away. One of the major triumphs in particle physics of recent years was the search for the Higgs Boson – the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. A…
A new study published in Nature Geoscience provides the first evidence of fresh water and dry land on Earth by 4 billion years ago – pushing back the conditions for life to have existed on our planet hundreds of millions of years. More here.
Another article I’ve written for BINTEL – 23rd Feb 2023: What we see in the night sky seem timeless and eternal – things change on the timescale of millions or billions or years. Even the rare, fleeting or transient events like supernova will often take hundreds of years for the remnants to be seen. But….. Back…
26th Jan – 2024 – New research published Friday offers hope that the sediment samples picked up by the Mars rover Perseverance could reveal traces of life — if it ever existed on the Red Planet. The rover already has confirmed an ancient lake on Mars. The new research published in Science Advances shows the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance…
A team of astronomers including those from the University of Tokyo have created the first-ever map of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Previous studies on galactic magnetic fields only gave a very general picture, but the new study reveals that magnetic fields in the spiral arms of our…
Is this the faintest galaxy ever found? 350 unique galaxies were studied for this survey, and astronomers used several major radio telescopes around the world, including the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope, the Arecibo Telescope, and the Nançay Radio Telescope. “The goal was to determine the gas and dynamic masses of these ultra-diffuse galaxies.…
My new blog article over at BINTEL! 10th Jan 2024: Some amazing new products launch in recent days at the CES event in the USA – and they’ll be arriving at BINTEL in the near future! Here’s an overview of two new “Smart” Gizmos – the Celestron Origin Smart Telescope and the Swarovski AX Visio 10X32…
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a hazy blob in the night sky easily visible to people in the Southern Hemisphere, has long been considered a lone dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way. But a study posted online this month, and accepted by The Astronomical Journal, suggests the familiar site is not a single body,…
Italian scientists investigated the arrangement of incisions in a stone disk discovered at the ancient site of Lupine Piccolo and concluded that the object could be a star map. The researchers thought that the 28 dots might correspond to stars in the constellations Scorpius, Orion, Taurus, and Cassiopeia. The exact age of this artifact is…