I’ve seen countless images of space, taken from Earth, above it, and many of the spacecraft’s destinations: the Moon, Venus, Mars, asteroids, comets, Jupiter, Saturn … the view is always wonderful, and always some Poetic on the level. But looking at the earth from space is also something profound. Certainly …
Read More »
In a former exoplanetary, astronomers have directly photographed two giant planets orbiting a star that is a virtual twin of the Sun, albeit much younger. The star is called TYC 8998-760-1 (after its identification number in Tycho’s catalog), and it’s about 310 light years away in the constellation Musca. It …
Read More »
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, or SolO, launched in February 2020, beginning a seven-year mission to intensively study the Sun. It is loaded with 10 different scientific instruments to investigate a multitude of solar phenomena, including things that happen on its surface and the inner corona, and it …
Read More »
Astronomers have discovered the second farthest quasar ever found, 13 billion light-years from Earth. It has a supermassive black hole at its heart that tilts the cosmic scale to 1.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, making it the most massive black hole seen at that distance.* *. And …
Read More »
Why was Betelgeuse toned down so dramatically? In October 2019 it began to weaken. It is a variable star, which becomes brighter and weaker in a cycle of about 420 days, so it is not unusual. But this time it started to fade … and then it didn’t stop. Normally …
Read More »