News

Jets of fine, icy particles streaming from Saturn's moon Enceladus were captured in recent images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images provide unambiguous visual evidence the moon is geologically active. <b>NOTE: French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations follow...</b>

The Hubble pulls another fuzzy rabbit out of it's amazing hat...

This little scope get a little more scrutiny from this week's review contest winner.

Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered evidence of energetic plumes -- particles that extend 300,000 light years into a massive cluster of galaxies. The plumes are due to explosive venting from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, and they provide dramatic new evidence of the influence a black hole can have over intergalactic distances. <b>NOTE: French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations follow...</b>

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and other ground-based observatories have discovered a failed star, less than one-hundredth the mass of the Sun, possibly in the process of forming a solar system. <b>NOTE: French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations follow...</b>

This week's review winner is all about Meade's Big Bubba - the LX200 16" SCT...

Radio Astronomers have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter - the first ever detected. A dark matter galaxy contains a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but has no stars. Dark matter galaxies are thought to form when the density of matter in a galaxy is too low to create the conditions for star ignition and star formation. Finding a dark matter galaxy is an important breakthrough because, according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than ordinary matter. If this dark matter galaxy was an ordinary galaxy with stars, it would be a bright spiral galaxy in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies that would be visible with a good amateur telescope.

A powerful Gamma-Ray Burst (marking the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole) at a distance of 13 billion light years from Earth been detected by NASA's space-based SWIFT Observatory. The universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old, making this the most distant explosion ever recorded.

An international team of astrophysicists using a variety of instruments, including some of the largest telescopes on earth, are studying distant supernovae to better understand the effects of the mysterious "dark energy" that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.

The 8” f/6 ED Travel Star Refractor gets taken for a little trip by this week's review winner.

New Images from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile Depict the Violent Surroundings of a Super-massive Black Hole at the center of NGC 1097.

Object DEM L316: Supernova Remnants Deconstructed <b>NOTE: French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations follow...</b>

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to identify 19 new "Gravitationally Lensed" galaxies. Among these 19, they have found eight new "Einstein rings" -- the most elegant manifestation of the lensing phenomenon.

The European Space Agency's INTEGRAL(International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) has discovered a new class of X-ray Fast ‘Transient’ binary stars, undetected in previous observations.

Jupiter's powerful winds continually circle the planet, and have changed very little in the 300 years that scientists have studied them. Massive east-west winds in Jupiter's equatorial region reach approximately 340 miles per hour — twice as fast as winds generated by strong hurricanes on Earth.