The Seasons of Saturn - NASA Picture of the Day

Image Credit: R. G. French (Wellesley College) et al., NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Since Saturn's axis is tilted as it orbits the Sun, Saturn has seasons, like those of planet Earth ... but Saturn's seasons last for over seven years. So what season is it on Saturn now? Orbiting the equator, the tilt of the rings of Saturn provides quite a graphic seasonal display. Each year until 2016, Saturn's rings will be increasingly apparent after appearing nearly edge-on in 2009. The ringed planet is also well placed in evening skies providing a grand view as summer comes to Saturn's northern hemisphere and winter to the south. 

The Hubble Space Telescope took the above sequence of images about a year apart, starting on the left in 1996 and ending on the right in 2000. Although they look solid, Saturn's Rings are likely less than 50 meters thick and consist of individually orbiting bits of ice and rock ranging in size from grains of sand to barn-sized boulders.

via Astronomy Picture of the Day NASA

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Explosion on moon visible from earth

I do not know whether the hobbying astronomers watched this or not, but NASA did notice a bright explosion on moon which was visible from the earth.

Explosion on the moon, reported by NASA May 17, was caused by a meteor hitting the surface and was visible on earth to the naked eye

The explosion was caused by a meteoroid that struck the moon surface recently, says NASA on Friday. The impact caused an explosion that was visible on Earth without the aid of a telescope. But don't be alarmed if you didn't see it; it only lasted about a second.

"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," said Bill Cooke, of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

NASA's lunar monitoring program has detected hundreds of meteoroid impacts. The brightest, detected on March 17, 2013, in Mare Imbrium, is marked by the red square

NASA says the meteoroid was about 40 kilograms and less than a meter wide, and it hit the moon's surface at 56,000 mph. It glowed like a 4th magnitude star, NASA says, thanks to an explosion equivalent to 5 tons of TNT.

However there is one question which may or may not have come to your mind. But if you're wondering how there can be an explosion on the moon, without oxygen, NASA has the answer for you. It says the flash of light comes not from any type of combustion - as we typically think of explosions - but rather by the glowing molten rock at the impact site.

So this is the answer which may add to your knowledge if you are a hobbying astronomer. So keep watch moon more  - you may find another explosion too if you are lucky.

(via CNN - NASA )
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Asteroid 2012 DA14 to intrude inside earth's communication satellite orbit - next day of Valentine Day

Breaking news for those whose hobby is astronomy and sky gazing!!

While the world be celebrating the Valentine Day, astronomers and sciencetists would be busy tracking asteroid 2012 DA14 which is to whiz past earth at a distance of 17,200 miles on 15th February- something which is a near miss in space terms.

It may be added that the communication satellites launched from earth orbit at a distance of 22,200 miles above earth - meaning by that the asteroid 2012 DA14 will have an ingress of some 5,000 miles from the communication satellite's orbital range.

Although the asteroid is small, if it were on a collision course with Earth, it would produce the equivalent of 2.5 megatons of TNT and could wipe out a city the size of Greater London.

The best view for astronomers will be from Indonesia, says NASA, while stargazers in Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia should also be able to get a good look at the space rock as it whizzes past us at a speed of 17,400mph.

The asteroid's next very close shave with Earth will be in 2046, when it will squeak by us at a distance of 37,000 miles.

Via Mail Online
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Mysterious object found zipping over the moon

While NASA may have better explanation for this, but a recently uploaded armature  astronomer's video shows a mysterious object zipping over the surface of the moon.

Mysterious Object marked in red circle 

Scroll down for video

The user, danchek2013, has uploaded a video that shows a moving object emerging from the shadowy landscape of the moon's surface and then seemingly accelerating over the craters, before changing direction at breakneck speed and heading towards the bottom of the screen.

Intriguingly, it appears to leave vapour trails, similar to a plane, in its wake.

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User 'King Dennis Jensen' said: 'At first I was like "meh another satellite" and then one more showed up faster than the other and it did all those swift angle movements.. Quite interesting indeed.'
Nathan5638 simply said: 'That's legit people!'

Well what it is - no one for now is very sure to answer. Maybe some clue is found by experienced astronomers or for that matter NASA.

Watch the video below and see the mysterious object zipping over the moon surface:

via Mail Online
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Mysterious zombie planet found orbiting the 'Eye of Sauron'

'Breaking News' for Atronomy lovers!!

Astronomers have found a mysterious 'zombie' planet circling a vast debris disc inside the 'Eye of Sauron' star system, reports Mail Online quoting NASA.

Chronological movement of the zombie planet Fomalhaut as tracked by NASA [Photo: NASA]

The newly released NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the eye shaped star, officially called Fomalhaut, and a mysterious planet, called Fomalhaut b, may provide forensic evidence of a titanic planetary disruption in the system.

The planet, called Fomalhaut b, swings as close to its star as 4.6 billion miles, and the outermost point of its orbit is 27 billion miles away from the star.

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Astronomers were surprised to find the debris belt is wider than previously known, spanning a section of space from 14 to nearly 20 billion miles from the star.

Watch video of the chronoligcal move of the zombie planet:

via Mail Online
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Black holes weighing 40 billion suns discovered

How big is the universe  - one would never know. But recently scientists have discovered black holes weighing 40 billion suns - and mind you these are just one set of God knows how many black holes 'out there.'

This NASA image shows a new image of a ring - not of jewels - but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STSc (AFP Photo / NASA)

However, the present discovery is the largest ever black holes discovered so far. These giants, all located in far-off galaxies about 1.3 billion light years from Earth, are more common than scientists originally thought.

Scientists refer to them as ‘ultramassive’ black holes, not to confuse them with ‘supermassive’ holes, with only a few confirmed examples.

A survey, conducted by author Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of Stanford University and her team, showed that at least ten out of 18 galaxies they studied had black holes that may weigh up to 40 billion times the mass of the sun.

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"Ultramassive black holes – that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses – are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist," said Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, the study's lead author.

To estimate the size of these ultramassive holes, Hlavacek-Larrondo and her colleagues analyzed the X-rays and radio waves generated by black holes when they destroy the gas, dust, and stars near them. The black holes they found turned out to be roughly 10 times larger than expected, given the size of their respective host galaxies.

Read more about the discovery of these black holes at RT

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Horse-head shaped Nebula

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Horse-head shaped Nebula

Credit & Copyright: Nigel Sharp (NOAO), KPNO, AURA, NSF

Don't you think it really looks like a horse head? Well to me it does - what an amazing creation of the Nature.

Horse-head Nebula  is one of the most identifiable nebulae in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. Also known as Barnard 33, the unusual shape was first discovered on a photographic plate in the late 1800s. The red glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. 

The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust, although the lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left. Streams of gas leaving the nebula are funneled by a strong magnetic field. Bright spots in the Horsehead Nebula's base are young stars just in the process of forming. Light takes about 1,500 years to reach us from the Horsehead Nebula. The above image was taken with the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Shared via NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (21 October 2012)

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Planet with four suns discovered by astronomers

It has been a while that I wrote something about astronomy for the astronomy lovers. But today I have a news for the sky gazers both naked eye and telescopes. But the discovery I am going to talk about is far beyond normal telescopes.

I came across this news in the Business Recorder, which quoting AFP says that an international team of amateur and professional astronomers has discovered a planet whose skies are lit up by four suns -- the first known case of such a phenomenon.

The planet, located about 5,000 light years from Earth, has been dubbed PH1 in honor of Planet Hunters, a programme led by Yale University in the United States, which enlists volunteers to look for signs of new planets.

PH1 is orbiting two suns, and in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars. Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, researchers say, and none of those are orbited by other distant stars.

Interesting, isn't it?

Read more about it at the Business Recorder

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The last Venus Transit of the Century

6th June was a rare day of the century and all astronomers and astronomy lovers as the planet Venus transited between the earth and the sun for the last time of the present century. Almost everyone who has some love for astronomy was there watching for the rare phenomenon on Wednesday to preserve the moment as that was last time they saw it in their life times as the next transit would occur after 105 years.

I was up too, but due to clouds I could not see rare Venus transit of my lifetime. However, I am sharing one shot as shared from the TIME magazine:

The above photo was taken in New Delhi and Venus can be clearly seen as a black dot on the top left corner of the sun [Photo Courtesy: TIME]

TIME magazine has also shared a number of other photos of the Venus transit and arranged these in a slide show which can be seen here

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Milky Way Destined for Head-On Collision

News for astronomy lovers and hobbyists!! Our Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision

The U.S. space agency, NASA, says our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy will crash into each other in 4 billion years in a head-on collision.

NASA scientists say the new findings end nearly 100 years of speculation about whether Andromeda would directly plow into our galaxy, or merely deliver a glancing blow as it continued moving through the cosmos.  

The study co-authors say the Earth and the other seven planets in the solar system likely will not be destroyed in the titanic pile-up, but the Sun - just like many other stars - will be flung into a different part of the galaxy. In all likelihood, the Sun will complete its stellar life-cycle in an area even farther away from the galactic core than it is now.

The NASA scientists say their findings indicate that Andromeda and the Milky Way will take about 2 billion years to completely merge into a single elliptical-shaped galaxy.

Read details: VOA

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NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory looks at sun differently

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory is an 'eye' in space focused on the sun - but its scientists have found an all-new way of looking at the star that gives our planet heat and life.

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory is an 'eye' in space focused on the sun - but its scientists have found an all-new way of looking at the star that gives our planet heat and life

Don't be deceived by the calming blues and browns - the boiling surface of the star is around 600,000 degrees centigrade, just viewed through a wavelength that highlights the constant activity.

'There's no science behind it,' says Scott Wiesinger of Goddard Space Flight Centre, 'But it looks very pretty.'

Read more / watch Video: Mail Online

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Solar Tornado That's Five Times Wider Than Earth [Video]

The armature astronomers may not have noticed this phenomenon with their not too much powerful astronomical gadgets, but a group of astronomers at a Welsh University have filmed a solar tornado on the face of the sun which is said to be five times as wide as the Earth.

Scientists Xing Li and Huw Morgan recorded the event by placing a telescope on board the Solar Discovery Observatory satellite. They hope that the recording of this event and others will help them to understand weather in space and the causes of the space storms which can cause damage to satellites in space, The Telegraph reports.

Watch the video below:

Source: Business Insider / YouTube 

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Closest pairing of Venus and Jupiter coming up

Good news for the astronomers and astronomy lovers !!

Pairing of Venus and Jupiter [ Photo: 2012 Sky and Telescope ]

You may be able to see Jupiter and Venus in the sky very close to each other and  reach to their  closest point in the coming days.

Despite being vastly far from one another in space, the conjunction will make them appear just a few degrees apart in the sky - about the width of a pair of fingers held at arm's length.

The pair can be seen to the west-southwest, shortly after sunset.

Venus is the brighter of the two, and Jupiter will appear to move in a line past it for the rest of the month.

Another anticipated planetary event for 2012 will be the transit of Venus in early June, when it will appear from some locations on Earth to pass in front of the Sun.

Shared from: BBC News

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Flying Over the Earth at Night - Time-lapse footage of the Earth as seen from the ISS

Many wonders are visible when flying over the Earth at night. A compilation of such visual spectacles was captured recently from the International Space Station (ISS) and set to rousing music. Passing below are white clouds, orange city lights, lightning flashes in thunderstorms, and dark blue seas. On the horizon is the golden haze of Earth's thin atmosphere, frequently decorated by dancing auroras as the video progresses. 

The green parts of auroras typically remain below the space station, but the station flies right through the red and purple auroral peaks. Solar panels of the ISS are seen around the frame edges. The ominous wave of approaching brightness at the end of each sequence is just the dawn of the sunlit half of Earth, a dawn that occurs every 90 minutes.

Watch this amazing video:

Video Credit: Gateway to Astronaut Photography, NASA ; Compilation: Bitmeizer (YouTube); 
Music: Freedom Fighters (Two Steps from Hell)

Shared from:

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

YouTube

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The other side of the moon [ captured for the first time ]

Good news for the Astronomers!! Here is the far side of the moon - captured fro the first time.

The far side of Earth’s only natural satellite has been photographed before (by Apollo 16, for example), but there has been no ground exploration there and no video was ever taken.

Now, one of NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecrafts has captured a video of Moon’s far side for the first time.

In the 30-second video, you can see Moon’s heavily cratered, rough surface; notable sights include Moon’s north pole, the 560-mile-wide Mare Orientale impact basin and, near the bottom of the screen, the 93-mile-wide Drygalski crater.

Video credit: NASA

[shared via Mashable ]

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Space Race Blastoff: A new Game on Facebook by NASA

We have so far been accustomed to NASA's release of images of the space and frontiers beyond our galaxy.

But now NASA has side stepped and has a game for us on Facebook. The 'Space Race Blastoff ' is however not like the games gamers are accustomed to playing. The game is in fact a sort of quiz to test 'gamers' knowledge about space. The game includes questions like, who launched the first liquid-fueled rocket? — that cover a range of space-related topics including history, technology and science. There’s even a pop culture category.

Why introduce this innovation through Facebook? NASA says that due to social network’s massive audience, it will both provide fun and knowledge sharing among those who choose to play it.

Read more: Mashable or Play it at Facebook: Space Race Blastoff 

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NASA Releases High Definition Image Of Earth

NASA on Wednesday released "Blue Marble 2012," a view of the home planet that the agency calls the "most amazing high definition image of Earth."

"Blue Marble 2012" High Definition Image of Earth

Unlike the original Blue Marble -- the iconic 1972 photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew while they were on their way to the moon -- this composite image is made from data collected by the Suomi NPP satellite.

Read more: Huffington Post

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Solar Eruption Triggers Strongest Radiation Storm in 7 Years

Those who hobby astronomy and the celestial world, must have by now heard about the strongest radiation storm by the sun since 2005. Here is more to it, as reported by Mashable.

A huge eruption on the Sun has caused the strongest radiation storm since 2005, which is due to hit Earth on Tuesday, Jan 24, possibly causing widespread communications interference.

The eruption occurred late on January 22, 2012 sending a burst of energized solar particles towards Earth at about 5 million miles an hour (2,000 km per second).

SpaceWeather.com ranks this geomagnetic storm “strong” or S3, meaning it may expose passengers in high-flying aircraft to radiation risk, disrupt satellite operations and degrade HF radio communications.

There is no risk to people on Earth, but polar flights are expected to be re-routed as a precaution measure. Furthermore, NASA expects “no adverse effects” for the six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Read more: Mashable

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NASA discover 'Three Alien Planets' smaller than Earth

Last November, I shared a post from a discovery by NASA about a planet Kepler-21b, a new planet that's close to the size of earth and is only about 352 light years away. Then there was an armature astronomer, who with the use of his 'homely gadgets' found a new solar system - something that even baffled the people at NASA.
Now the news is that NASA has discovered not one and not even two, but three alien planets, smaller than our earth.

Using the data from NASA’s Kepler mission, astronomers have found three alien planets smaller than Earth, orbiting a star much smaller than our Sun.

The planets, which are orbiting a red dwarf star known as KOI-961, are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the diameter of Earth, making them the smallest alien planets discovered so far.

The KOI-961 is located 120 light-years away, in the Constellation Cygnus (The Swan). It’s approximately one-sixth the size of our sun, which made it possible for scientists to watch for dips in the star’s brightness and thus discover the orbiting planets.

Read full details: Mashable

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Live Streaming: The Quadrantids Meteor Shower

If you’re a fan of stargazing, tonight’s your night. The Quadrantids meteor shower, potentially the best natural lightshow of the year, will be visible Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. If you live in the Eastern United States, viewing conditions should be ideal, if a bit frigid.

The Quadrantids meteors should start to appear late tonight, but will only be visible for about six hours. The peak is predicted to be somewhere around 2:30 to 3 a.m., though io9 reports that the Quadrantids meteors are “notoriously unpredictable” in terms of intensity. NASA says it will be a “brief, beautiful” show.

NASA has set up a live video feed, via Ustream, at the organization’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL:

[ via Imposing Headlines ]

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