Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

Scopex 2013

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This years ScopeX telesope and astronomy expo is fast approaching, and if you’re anywhere near Johannesburg, South Africa on 20 July, I’d strongly recommend you join us there.  This year they have a full line-up of speakers, including repeats of some of the more popular presentations from last year’s ASSA symposium.  A full program of talks can be found at the official ScopeX website.  There will also be demonstrations of rocketry and telescope making, science shows by Experilab, and a … Continue reading →

Welcome, Styx and Kerberos

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Earlier today, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted on names for the two most recently discovered moons of Pluto.  The larger of the two, formerly designated P4 will now be known as Kerberos, while P5 has been named Styx.  The decision was a slight departure from the results predicted by a public poll, because those chosen names were already being used to describe other bodies.  While the results of that poll (Vulcan and Cerberus) were widely reported as definitive, it … Continue reading →

Age of Universe refined by Spitzer Space Telescope

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Spitzer seen against the infrared sky. The band of light is the glowing dust emission from the Milky Way galaxy seen at 100 microns (as seen by the IRAS/COBE missions). Astronomers using the Spitzer infrared space telescope have managed to refine current estimates of the Hubble constant, a measure of the rate at which the universe is expanding, down to an error of only 3%. The new value is 74.3 ± 2.1 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This means that … Continue reading →

Chandra measures new top speed for gas around Black Hole

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NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope recently observed the disk of gas around a black hole and found it to be orbiting orbiting at the record-breaking speed of 30 million kilometers per hour.  This speed is three percent of the speed of light, and is some ten times faster than any other accretion disk observed so far.  The gas is spinning so fast that it is throwing out a lot of material, possibly even more than the black hole manages to … Continue reading →

Magnetar near Black Hole to provide another test for General Relativity

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Astronomers waiting for their first chance to watch a supermassive black hole (SMBH) consume a vast cloud of in-falling gas have discovered a magnetar near the core of the Milky Way galaxy. By observing the magnetar’s behaviour as it orbits the SMBH, they will be able to test some of the more interesting consequences of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity under more exotic conditions than ever before. Several years ago, astronomers discovered a vast cloud of gas and dust, containing several … Continue reading →