Astronomy

Giant telescope opens both eyes The world's most powerful optical telescope has opened both of its eyes. Astronomers at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona have released the first images taken using its two giant 8m diameter mirrors. The detailed pictures show a spiral galaxy located 102 million light-years away from the Milky Way. LBT has been 20 years in the making but promises to allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before. "The amount of time and work that was put into this project to reach the point where we are today is ... Read Full Story

Dark matter is the modern fairy dust that makes everything (cosmologically) better.  Upon observing that the universe would need to have several hundred times more mass than we can see to be consistent with modern theories, many scientists apparently thought "Fair enough, there must be several universes worth of invisible magic stuff hiding throughout the entirety of existence".  Rather than the crazy heresy of "Maybe our theories need a little work". Lots of very smart people have come up with a huge variety of explanations for this absentee material, from ultrarelativistic non-baryonic matter (yes those are real words, even though it sounds like they ... Read Full Story

Known until now as a simple number in a catalogue, NGC 134, the 'Island in the Universe' is replete with remarkable attributes, and the VLT has clapped its eyes on them. Just like our own Galaxy, NGC 134 is a barred spiral with its spiral arms loosely wrapped around a bright, bar-shaped central region. One feature that stands out is its warped disc. While a galaxy's disc is often pictured as a flat structure of gas and stars surrounding the galaxy's centre, a warped disc is a structure that, when viewed sideways, resembles a bent record album left out too long in the burning ... Read Full Story

The awesome Sombrero Galaxy M104 discovered in May 1781 by Pierre Méchain is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. In the 1990s, a research team, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, discovered that a supermassive black hole with a mass 1 billion times the mass of the Sun is present at the center of the galaxy's large bulge. This is among the most massive black holes measured in any nearby galaxies. Scientists have long suspected that massive balck holes existed at the centers of most galaxies, beginning with Sir Martin Rees in 1974. But the mystery has deepened. For a brilliant essay ... Read Full Story

The Giant Elliptical Galaxy NGC 4261 is one of the twelve brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, located 45 million light-years away. Photographed in visible light (white) the galaxy appears as a fuzzy disk of hundreds of billions of stars. The  giant disk of cold gas and dust fuels a possible black hole at the galaxy's core of the galaxy. Estimated to be 300 light-years across, the disk is tipped enough (about 60 degrees) to provide astronomers with a clear view of the bright hub, which presumably harbors the black hole. Credit: Wide-Field and Planetary Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope and National Radio ... Read Full Story

« Towleroad Guide to the Tube #294 | Main | Towletech v.105 » 05/23/2008 A third red spot has been observed on Jupiter, joining two others : "Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system. It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. ... Read Full Story

A delightful display of planets and the moon will occur on New Year's Eve for anyone wishing to step outside and look up just after sunset. Venus, brighter than all other planets and stars, will dangle just below the thin crescent moon in the southwestern sky. It'll be visible -- impossible to miss, in fact -- just as the sun goes down, assuming skies are cloud-free. Soon thereafter, Mercury and Jupiter will show up hugging the south-southwestern horizon (just above where the sun went down) and extremely close to each other. Jupiter is very bright and easy to spot; Mercury is faint and harder ... Read Full Story