While William Herschel officially discovered Uranus in 1781, he wasn’t the first to observe it. Others thought it was a star and Herschel himself called it a ‘comet’ before deciding that it was, in fact, a planet – and the first one discovered by telescope. Although Uranus can be seen from Earth with the naked …
Uranus has 13 rings and 27 moons, but we could continue to find more! Major moons: Miranda – The innermost and smallest of Uranus’s five major moons has a diameter of just 472km (290 miles). Ariel – The fourth-largest moon, Ariel also has the third-greatest mass. Voyager 2 imaged about 35 per cent of its …
What makes this famous cluster of stars in the night sky so interesting? The Pleiades or Seven Sisters has been observed for millennia, with its proximity to Earth and large stars making it observable to the naked eye and also an important tool for astronomers. Over 1,000 stars are contained within the cluster, and its …
Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology was the lead discoverer of Eris. He knew that this world was about the same size or larger than Pluto and he realized that he would be hailed as the discoverer of the tenth planet. However, he didn’t agree that Eris, or even Pluto, were big enough …
Finding your way around the sky when you are looking through binoculars or a telescope can be a nightmare, as you are looking at a very small part of the sky. If you’re searching for a particular object, a star cluster for example, it can seem nigh on impossible. But if you use a traditional …
We take a closer look at the highest peaks on Venus! Maxwell Montes is a giant mountain range located on Ishtar Terra, which is the most northern of the two major highlands on Venus. It is a part of the Lakshmi Planum, a large plain that likely resulted from smooth lava
Find out what can escape from black holes, the universe’s ultimate prisons. According to quantum physics, throughout the universe there are endless pairs of subatomic particles that appear from nothingness and almost immediately disappear again.
Is the universe expanding and, if so, what will become of it? The expansion of the universe was first theorized by Alexander Friedmann in 1922, who derived the Friedmann equations to show that the cosmos could be getting bigger. His theory was confirmed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble
Planet hunting is a very new and exciting field of astronomy. In fact, the first planet outside our solar system was not discovered until the mid-Nineties, as the telescopes and methods needed to find planets were simply not advanced enough before then. Today there are thousands of known planetary candidates and potentially trillions more In …
From 1973 to 1978, the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) conducted a study – Project Daedalus – into the plausibility of an unmanned interstellar spacecraft. It was the first study to propose such a mission, but ultimately proved that it could be done.
