Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius invented Canes Venatici in 1687 to honor the two hounds of Bootes the Herdsman, which he uses to drive Ursa Major the Great Bear away from his flock. To create the constellation, Hevelius used a scattering of stars “floating” between Bootes and Ursa Major. […]
Last month, we star-hopped around the constellation Leo and explored some of the Lions most prominent galaxies. This time, we test our galaxy-hunting skills with a plunge into the heart of the Virgo galaxy cluster, some 55 million light-years away. […]
The Sun’s radiative interior extends to about two-thirds of the solar radius and is the source of our star’s rotation; photons and other particles carry heat in this region of the solar interior. This, in turn, feeds convection, which stirs the plasma under the Sun’s visible surface (called the photosphere). […]
A STAR THAT has mimicked two supernova explosions since 2009 has finally blown itself apart for real. The discovery should clarify how massive stars behave in the years before their violent deaths. […]
When you think of the name Herschel, the first person who probably springs to mind is Friedrich Wilhelm — more commonly known as William Herschel, the famous German-born musician and self-taught astronomer who arrived in the United Kingdom as a penniless refugee in 1757. […]
Scientists have known for nearly a century that matter is composed of atoms, which are various combinations of electrons, protons, and neutrons. In the 1960s, physicists uncovered a deeper level to matter when they found that protons and neutrons in turn are composed of particles whimsically called quarks. […]
Wolf-Rayet stars are among the rarest objects in the Galaxy, with only 500 examples known in the whole of the Milky Way. These massive stars, observed en route to their destruction in powerful supernovae, are the subjects of an exciting new paper from a team of European and US astronomers, who have captured the first ever high-resolution X-ray spectrum of just such a star. […]
By Tiffany Naylor – In 2012, the annual star count SHrvey revealed no real improvement in the level of light pollution in Britain’s skies. When asked how many stars could be seen in Orion, just 10 per cent of the 1,000 location reports submitted reported seeing 21-30 stars and dark skies, while only two per’cent saw 31 or more stars in truly dark skies. […]
Along with the celestial equator, the ecliptic is one of two important lines that astronomers use to divide up the night sky.
Up until the early 1600s, the idea that the Sun orbited the Earth was perfectly acceptable to a lot of people. The reason our ancestors believed in this geocentric (Earth-centred) model was, of course, because that’s what we see happening in the sky. Or so it appears. […]
Venus is a rocky world that is similar in size to Earth, but it’s also a world that remains mysterious because it’s permanently shrouded in cloud. In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan mission used radar to pierce the clouds and map the planet’s surface, revealing a landscape covered with volcanoes. […]
