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... 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... 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... 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... 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... Read Full Story
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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... Read Full Story
We already knew that the planet Jupiter was hit by a comet the other day. What we did NOT know, however, was that this comet smashed a hole in Jupiter…and that hole is about the size of the planet Earth!
What’s even more impressive is that this hole was discovered by an amateur astronomer.
Australian Anthony Wesley was using a home-made telescope in the yard of his home in Murrumbateman, near Canberra, when he noticed that a dark scar had suddenly appeared on the side... Read Full Story
Astronomers say that the planet Jupiter has likely been struck by a comet.
Pictures taken early on Monday morning by NASA ’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii reveal a dark scar in Jupiter’s atmosphere near the south pole of the planet.
The images also show bright upwelling particles in the atmosphere, detected in near-infrared wavelengths.
“We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour,
the right side of Jupiter to witness... 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... Read Full Story
Something may be out there. Way out there. On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says. Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow. The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger —a... Read Full Story
