The brightest supernovae yet found.
Supernova 2008am is 3.7 billion light-years away. At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the Sun. It emitted enough energy in one second to satisfy the power needs of the United States for one million times longer than the universe has existed.
Get those telescopes out! A asteroid, a quarter-mile in diameter, is going to pass only 200,000 miles from the Earth on November 8, 2011. Key quote:
Although classified as a potentially hazardous object, 2005 YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over at least the next 100 years. However, this will be the closest approach to date by an object this large that we know about in advance and an event of this type.
X-ray stripes in the expanding remnant of a supernova explosion.
Mining and jobs versus radio astronomy.
All systems go! Dawn did a camera and instrument checkout last week, in preparation for its summertime arrival at the asteroid Vesta.
Two stars fusing into one.
The mess from the NASA space war spreads: Three European space science missions are now on their own after the U.S. the space agency pulls funding.
The earthquake moved Japan’s coast eight feet while shifting the Earth’s axis about four inches.
No, the “supermoon” didn’t cause the Japanese earthquake.
An evening pause: The music is beautiful, but the images tell us how far astronomy has changed our perception of the universe in the last few decades.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have taken new images of the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis in an effort to refine their understanding of its orbital path.
A mature galaxy cluster has been found by astronomers at a time when the universe is thought to be only a quarter of its present age.
This discovery could be very significant, since astronomers think mature galaxy clusters need time to form, and shouldn’t exist in the early universe. “If further observations find many more [of these clusters] then this may mean that our understanding of the early Universe needs to be revised.”
Did you hear the news? Scientists have solved the mystery of the missing sunspots!
You didn’t? Well, here’s some headlines and stories that surely prove it:
The trouble is that every one of these headlines is 100 percent wrong. The research, based on computer models, only found that when the plasma flow from the equator to the poles beneath the Sun’s surface slows down, the number of sunspots declines.
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The sponge-like Saturn moon. Key quote:
Hyperion measures about 250kms across; it rotates chaotically and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.
R.I.P. Leif J. Robinson, who served as editor of Sky & Telescope for twenty years, passed away Sunday at the age of 71 at his home in Costa Rica.
Take a gander at this spectacular image of the shuttle approaching ISS, taken by an amateur astronomer from the ground!
More problems for the James Webb Space Telescope: The detector arrays for several instruments are deteriorating, even as they sit on the shelf. And remember, the 2014 launch date is probably going to be delayed until 2016. Key quote:
“As you get further and further out with [the launch date], it really raises questions about how far down the [integration and test] process you go for the instruments … and how long you have to store all that before you actually launch,” [Webb program director Rick Howard] told the NASA Advisory Council’s astrophysics subcommittee during a Feb. 16 public meeting here. “And that just makes everybody even more nervous about this problem than anything else.”
A new record! On January 19, the Pan-Starrs telescope in Hawaii discovered 19 near-earth asteroids, the most for a single night of asteroid-hunting by anyone.
