Cosmology

leonids meteor shower 2009 The early morning hours of Nov. 17 will be the best time to view the Leonid meteor shower in the United States. How to Watch the Leonid Meteor Shower For those in North America, astronomers are predicting that the best time to view the Leonid meteor shower will be after 1:30 a.m. EST and before sunrise on the early morning of Nov. 17, 2009, explains Michael Bakich of Astronomy.com. The meteor shower can be seen this year from November 13-20. Watchers of... Read Full Story

Astronomers have known for years that something unknown apears to be pulling our Milky Way and tens of thousands of other galaxies toward itself at a breakneck 22 million kilometers (14 million miles) per hour. But they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what, or where it is. A huge volume of space that includes the Milky Way and super-clusters of galaxies is flowing towards a mysterious, gigantic unseen mass named mass astronomers have dubbed "The Great Attractor," some 250 million light years from... Read Full Story

No, it's not a lost Michelangelo masterpiece -it’s a mosaic of the sky 38 x 14 arc minutes across, or about half the size of the full Moon, of the core central region of our 400 million solar-mass galaxy. The bright white spot just to the right of the center behind light years of dust and gas is the monster SagA* -a black hole with four million times the mass of the Sun.  In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories — the Hubble Space... Read Full Story

No, it's not a lost Michelangelo masterpiece -it’s a mosaic of the sky 38 x 14 arc minutes across, or about half the size of the full Moon, of the core central region of our 400 million solar-mass galaxy. The bright white spot just to the right of the center behind light years of dust and gas is the monster SagA* -a black hole with four million times the mass of the Sun.  In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories — the Hubble Space... Read Full Story

Astronomers in Chile and Japan have for the first time seen part of the "cosmic web" of galaxies that permeates the known universe in a gigantic assembly some seven billion light-years from Earth. Viewed through the world's most powerful telescopes, the discovery "is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed," the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said Tuesday in a statement. The... Read Full Story

Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to prospect in Sagittarius B2(N), a giant molecular cloud near the center of our Galaxy, some 25,000 light-years from Earth for new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life. "Clouds like this one are the raw material for new stars and planets. We know that complex chemistry builds prebiotic molecules in such clouds long before the stars and planets are formed. There is a chance that some... Read Full Story

Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to prospect in Sagittarius B2(N), a giant molecular cloud near the center of our Galaxy, some 25,000 light-years from Earth for new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life. "Clouds like this one are the raw material for new stars and planets. We know that complex chemistry builds prebiotic molecules in such clouds long before the stars and planets are formed. There is a chance that some... Read Full Story

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - European astronomers announced they had found 32 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system and said on Monday they believe their find means that 40 percent or more of Sun-like stars have such planets. The planets range in size from about five times the size of Earth to about five times the size of Jupiter, they said. More have been discovered, too, they said, promising more announcements later this year. The latest discoveries bring the total of known... Read Full Story

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY: The meteors will appear to come from Constellation Taurus. Map courtesy of Spaceweather.com Most people have heard of the annual Perseid meteor shower, which reaches its peak during a night-long period every August. But what about the Taurid meteor shower , which occurs when Earth passes through tiny debris shed by Comet 2p/Encke? Are you familiar with it? In many ways, the Taurids, which begins a week-long peak period tonight, is more interesting than the Perseids. As... Read Full Story

Jupiter snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later, astronomers reported on Monday. Data presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, near Berlin, showed that the biggest planet of the Solar System gained a temporary satellite, a comet called 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu, between 1949 and 1961. It is only the fifth captured comet to be identified, a press release said. Comets are lonely wanderers of the Solar System... Read Full Story