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.

Military spaceplane lands

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The secretive X-37B spaceplane recently completed it’s first ever test mission, landing succesfully at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.  It had been in space for just over seven months, confounding amateur satellite spotters with it’s ability to frequently move to completely different orbits. There has been a great deal of speculation as to the purpose of the X-37B.  Like the space shuttle, it was originally a military project designed for maneuvaribility in space and the atmosphere, so that foreign … Continue reading →

All the planets in the galaxy

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Regular readers will have known for some time that astronomers have found and classified many hundreds of exoplanets.  But as is usual in Astronomy, the sheer scale of things, the vast number of amazing facts, can desensitize a person quite quickly.  We hear the facts and nod sagely, but seldom stop to really think about what we’re hearing.  Randall Munroe from xkcd.com presents this infographic which deals with that problem quite neatly:  He shows us every single planet known, to … Continue reading →

Two space telescopes donated to NASA

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This should put NASA’s budget into perspective:  The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has just raided its spares bin and donated two space telescopes to NASA that were surplus to requirements.  Understand that these instruments are both the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but are equipped with a faster mirror and more flexible optical arrangement (They were designed as spy satellites, after all).  NASA spent almost 20 years and billions of dollars building the HST, and launching it … Continue reading →

New Zealand claims worlds largest Dark Sky Reserve

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The Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park and the Mackenzie Basin, coming in together at 4100 square kilometers, have recently been declared by the International Dark Sky Association as their fourth Dark Sky Reserve.  These reserves are areas where the natural night sky is kept clear of artificial light, allowing local wildlife to live a completely natural diurnal cycle, and visitors to see the stars in their full glory as our ancestors did.  The Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve (IDSR) is … Continue reading →

Neutrinos NOT faster than light – confirmed

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It’s official:  The OPERA experiment  did not break Special Relativity, and neutrino’s do not travel faster than light.  In one of the most attention-grabbing experiments of recent times, a beam of neutrinos generated at the Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva was beamed downwards, through the Earth’s crust, towards the OPERA neutrino detector buried in a mountain at San Grasso, Italy.  The neutrino’s were timed very precisely and the shocking result was that they took about 50 nanoseconds less time … Continue reading →