Pulse. JSC Digital Image Collection. Exploring the Universe. Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light. It may be hard to imagine a planet blacker than coal, but that's what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA's Kepler space telescope.
Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study. "Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint—this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said. "If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets," added Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Related: "Earth Farthest From Sun on Fourth of July—So Why So Hot?
") NASA's Planet Detector. Asteroid near miss: Too close for comfort. It is called 2012 KT42.
It was discovered on Monday. It passed by Earth on Tuesday. It is a new asteroid. Paranal, zodiacal light and Milky Way. Watching asteroids and comets to avoid impact. Dangers posed by asteroids are among the issues discussed during the third international meeting of the top-level representatives in charge security currently underway in Saint-Petersburg.
The report on countering asteroid and meteorites threats is to be made by Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) representative. Space strikes back… and again While today asteroids do not bother Earthlings as they did only a few billions of years ago, encounters still occur. Thanks to their tiny dimensions, the impact is almost always a short flash in the upper atmosphere. A comet comes calling. Internet helps to discover stars.
A supernova has been discovered in a remote galaxy by an amateur astronomer.
Project Share has expanded to include news from the galaxies. Sites/default/files/StarDate_sample_issue.pdf. Dark Matter: Seeing the Invisible. Svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003900/a003916/MultiYr_seaIce_1980_Lg.0130.tif. HubbleSite - The James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's next orbiting observatory and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
A tennis court-sized telescope orbiting far beyond Earth's moon, Webb will detect infrared radiation and be capable of seeing in that wavelength as well as Hubble sees in visible light. Infrared vision is vital to our understanding of the universe. The furthest objects we can detect are seen in infrared light, cooler objects that would otherwise be invisible emit infrared, and infrared light pierces clouds of dust, allowing us to see into their depths. Cubic-paranal-gegenschein-guisard - Panorama of the Chilean night sky. This Quicktime interactive panorama movie shows the night sky over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile and reveals its incredible richness and beauty.
To launch the panorama please click the link on the right under QuickTime VR. To navigate this dual landscape and starscape, left-click on the image and continue pressing the button as you drag the mouse in the direction you would like to see. To zoom in and out, press "shift" or "ctrl". Black Holes: Stranger Than Fiction. Tiny Planet, Tiny Moons. The Solar System: Pluto. After 76 years of glory, the small ball of rock and ice known as Pluto was relegated to the solar system backwaters in 2006 when astronomers dropped it from the list of planets.
Instead, it's simply the most famous member of the Kuiper Belt, a broad doughnut-shaped ring of objects that extends outward from just inside the orbit of Neptune, the most distant planet. Because it is so far from the Sun, astronomers had a hard time measuring Pluto's size. Astronomers finally got it right in the 1980s, after James Christy discovered a companion object. By watching Pluto and the companion, named Charon, eclipse each other, they measured Pluto's diameter at about 1,400 miles -- about one-third less than the diameter of Earth's Moon. Pluto is basically a ball of frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide wrapped around a small core of rock.
Dwarf planet Eris reveals its secrets. Milky Way to inevitably merge with Andromeda Nebula – NASA. Northern hemisphere gets ready to Moon-gaze. New type of supernova found. Chile telescope yields Omega pictures. Unknown comet may threaten Earth. Astronomers discover "diamond planet" New black hole spotted. Open Tree of Life Project Draws In Every Twig and Leaf. New Data on Higgs Boson Is Shrouded in Secrecy at CERN. What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? Www.astrosociety.org/uitc No. 6 - Fall 1986 © 1986, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94112.
Electric Moon Pushes The Solar Wind.
Mysterious Radiation Burst Recorded in Tree Rings. ©Nasa Auroras are seen when bursts of charged particles hit Earth's atmosphere — but there is no record of these occurring at the same time as the 14C increase in tree rings.
Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between ad 774 and ad 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the ad 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation. Their study is published online in Nature today1. Deep Impact: Small Telescope Science Program (STSP)
Deep Impact's comet-watching telescope is blurred. Deep Impact (spacecraft) Deep Impact was a NASA space probe launched on January 12, 2005.
What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? Giant black hole kicked out of home galaxy. (Phys.org) -- Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation.