Our solar system is amazing and beautiful and the wondrous discoveries continue. Watch this video from the NY Times on Saturn’s northern storm, shaped like a hexagon and larger than Earth:
This line from the video is inspiring:
“Rings of ice, in a dancing ribbon of Aurora, sitting smack on top of a six-sided hurricaine. Another jewel in the crown of the solar system’s most photogenic planet.”
Click below to see the BBC’s report of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011 winners. Some gorgeous and awe-inspiring images.
Using the prolific planet hunting Kepler spacecraft, astronomers have discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other suns since the Kepler mission’s search for Earth-like worlds began in 2009.
To find them, Kepler monitors a rich star field to identify planetary transits by the slight dimming of starlight caused by a planet crossing the face of its parent star. In this remarkable illustration, all of Kepler’s planet candidates are shown in transit with their parent stars ordered by size from top left to bottom right. Read more
From http://kepler.nasa.gov
From the wonderful Bad Astronomy blog:
This timelapse video shows four of the ALMA microwave antennas in Chile as they scan the night sky, while the starry vault rotates around them. Read more…
From World News Australia
Astronomers said they had snared an image of what may be the oldest galaxy ever seen, a starry cluster that came into being when the universe was still a baby.
The tiny smudge of light captured by the orbiting Hubble telescope took 13.2 thousand million years to reach Earth, which means the galaxy was born some 480 million years after the Big Bang that created the cosmos.
Read more
From New Scientist
18:30 11 January 2011 by David Shiga, Seattle
It would take 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it in its full glory. Astronomers have released the largest digital image of the night sky ever made, to be mined for future discoveries.
It is actually a collection of millions of images taken since 1998 with a 2.5-metre telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The project, called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is now in its third phase, called SDSS-III.
Altogether, the images in the newly released collection contain more than a trillion pixels of data, covering a third of the sky in great detail.
“This is one of the biggest bounties in the history of science,” says SDSS team member Mike Blanton of New York University in New York City. “This data will be a legacy for the ages.”
via Most detailed image of night sky unveiled – space – 11 January 2011 – New Scientist – READ MORE…