Space

51 Pegasi B Is First Exoplanet Detected In The Visible Light Spectrum

51 Pegasi b, about 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus, was discovered in 1995 and was the the first confirmed exoplanet to be found orbiting an ordinary star like our Sun. It is the archetypal Hot Jupiter-- a class of planets simila ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 22 2015 - 7:58am

Sorry Star Trek Fans, Tau Ceti Is Not The Next Earth

As the search continues for Earth-size planets orbiting at just the right distance from their star, a region termed the habitable zone, the number of potentially life-supporting planets grows. In two decades we have progressed from having no extrasolar pl ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 26 2015 - 10:04am

Pictures Of March 20th Eclipse From Svalbard

I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of Athens, where at the top floor is housed a nice 40cm Cas ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 25 2015 - 5:31am

Polar Caps On Pluto?

For not being a planet, Pluto certainly has some intriguing features of one.  NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back images of bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto as it gets closer to flyby in mid-July.  The images were captured u ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2015 - 4:52pm

The Pillars Of Creation Visualized In 3-D

The original NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the famous Pillars of Creation- in the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16- was taken two decades ago and immediately became its most famous picture. Since then, these billowing clouds, which extend over a few li ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 30 2015 - 5:25pm

High School Scientist Discovers Pulsar With Widest Orbit Ever Detected

A team of high school students analyzed data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and discovered a never-before-seen pulsar which has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star- one among only a ha ...

Article - News Staff - May 3 2015 - 10:06am

Interview with Italian Space Agency President Roberto Battiston

Italy, one of the key players of the European Space Agency (ESA), is continuously building up its important role in human spaceflight and in international space cooperation. ...

Blog Post - Tomasz Nowakowski - May 3 2015 - 1:06pm

Galaxy EGS-zs8-1- 13 Billion Years Old

Astronomers have reported an exceptionally luminous galaxy from when the universe was only 5% of its present age- more than 13 billion years in the past. The galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, was originally identified based on its particular colors in images from NASA&# ...

Article - News Staff - May 5 2015 - 2:50pm

Proof That HL Tau Image Shows Forming Planets

A recent and famous image of HL Tau in deep space marks the first time we've seen a forming planetary system, according to a team of astrophysicists who found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in f ...

Article - News Staff - May 5 2015 - 3:30pm

Giant Halo Around The Andromeda Galaxy Found

The Andromeda galaxy is our nearest galactic neighbor in space. Though it is 2.5 million light-years away, its spiral of over 100 billion stars makes it visible as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn sky. But there is also something that take ...

Article - News Staff - May 7 2015 - 1:02pm