Author Archives: Allen Versfeld

About Allen Versfeld

Allen is an amateur astronomer, an IT professional, a podcaster, a father of five growing kids, a barely competent chess player, and the owner and publisher of the Urban Astronomer podcast and website. He has formerly served as Director of the Astrophotography and Citizen Science sections of the Astronomical Society of South Africa. You can find his personal social media feed on Mastodon!

Carnival of Space #338

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Welcome to the 338th Carnival of Space! Every week space science and astronomy bloggers from around the world submit their best work to the Carnival of Space curator, whose job it is to collect their articles into one easy-to-parse summary of what’s new and relevant in the field. This week’s carnival curator is me, and you will find the submissions below:First up is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today, with exciting news from the Herschell orbital observatory about the discovery of … Continue reading →

Ultra-compact galaxy M60-UCD1 discovered

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Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra Xray Observatory have discovered a nearby galaxy which crams an incredible number of stars into a very small space.  The galaxy, named M60-UCD1, is classed as an Ultra-Compact Dwarf Galaxy and spans only 160 light years across.  The Milky Way, by contrast, is almost a thousand times larger than this.M60-UCD1 was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, and lies along a line of site very close to the more famous … Continue reading →

No methane on Mars

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Planetary scientists can tell a lot about a planet by studying the light reflected off its surface, and filtered through its atmosphere.  One of the things that these techniques had taught them about Mars was that the planet contains a lot of methane in its atmosphere.  This was very exciting, since once of the best sources of methane is the exretions of living organisms.  But a few months ago, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), more commonly known as the Curiosity … Continue reading →

Deep Impact: a retrospective

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Back in January 2005, NASA launched the Deep Impact spacecraft on a trajectory to study comets. Four months later, on July 4, as it approached comet Tempel 1, it fired a 370kg impactor from a distance of 864,000 km – more than that double the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 24 hours later, the impactor collided with the comet at a speed of over 10 kilometers per second, carving out a crater with the force of 4.8 tons … Continue reading →

Hubble Space Telescope Discovers Swarm of Globular Clusters

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While following up on an earlier discovery, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have spotted over 10,000 globular clusters lurking in a vast swarm near the heart of a giant cluster of galaxies.  At 2.5 billion light years away, these globulars are so far away that even the hubble can only see the brightest of them, and astronomers estimate that there as many as 160,000 waiting to be found.  By comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy has only 150.  … Continue reading →