News

Few planet hunters stand to gain as much as Michael Brown if our solar system balloons to 12 planets under a new definition. He's spotted more than a dozen objects that might qualify as planets.

In February of this year, amateur astronomers reported that a faint star in the constellation of Ophiuchus had suddenly become clearly visible in the night sky without the aid of a telescope. Records show that this so-called recurrent nova, RS Ophiuchi (RS Oph), has previously reached this level of brightness five times in the last 108 years, most recently in 1985. This latest explosion has been observed in unprecedented detail by an armada of space and ground-based telescopes.

Astronomers are gathering in the Czech capital, Prague, hoping to define exactly what counts as a planet.

"Are We Alone?" is broadcast on Discovery Channel Radio Sirius 119 Wednesdays at 2:00 and 9:00 a.m., and 9:00 p.m. EDT, with a third repeat airing Sundays at 11:00 p.m. EDT. The show is also available as a download from their site for playing in Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Media Player. The show is also podcast as SETI:Science & Skepticism.

National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will develop a concept for a space mission to characterize the mysterious “Dark Energy” that permeates the Universe and causes its expansion to accelerate.

A critically important number that specifies the expansion rate of the Universe, the so-called Hubble constant, has been independently determined using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This new value matches recent measurements using other methods and extends their validity to greater distances, thus allowing astronomers to probe earlier epochs in the evolution of the Universe.

This week's review contest winner compares the Burgess Optics/TMB planetaries to a small box full of other eyepieces...

This week's review contest winner skews the spectrum to the blue side of things with a Calcium-K PST...

Astronomers from the University of California Berkeley, and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii this month snapped high-resolution near-infrared images of the Great Red Spot and a smaller storm, Red Spot Jr., as it breezed by it on its race around the planet.

A team of astronomers using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea has discovered giant, three-dimensional filaments of galaxies extending across 200 million light-years of space. These filaments, which formed a mere 2 billion years after the birth of the universe, are the largest-known structures ever discovered. They are studded with more than 30 large concentrations of gas, each up to ten times as massive as our own galaxy. These giant gas clouds are probably the progenitors of the most massive galaxies that exist in the universe today. Press release courtesy of Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

One of the major goals of NASA's Cassini mission was to find lakes or seas on Saturn's moon Titan.

An ambitious mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to make a new, high resolution map of the universe has just successfully returned its first pictures. The All-Sky Survey at far infra-red wavelengths is producing sharper images with much higher sensitivity than the first IRAS (Infra-Red Astronomical Satellite) mission launched in 1983.

The fact that it may not exist is no bar against trying to find it. This week's review contest winner takes on the challenge and reveals an interesting new contender. It works for him... would it work for you?

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence that dusty disks of planet-forming material tug on and slow down the young, whirling stars they surround.

MIT engineers and scientist colleagues have a new vision for the future of Mars exploration: a swarm of probes, each the size of a baseball, spreading out across the planet in every direction.