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.

Huge Slow Fireball over Tel Aviv

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A few nights ago, on 7 December 2011, a camera mounted on the roof of the Kaplun building in Tel Aviv University captured this incredible meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere.  It is surprising for both its brightness and how slowly it crossed the sky.  Watch the attached recording on the left. The camera belongs to ILAN, and is actually intended to record lightning and related phenomena – a browse through their archives will reveal a number of videos of TLE’s … Continue reading →

Voyager 1 poised at edge of Solar System

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The human race’s first ever interstellar space craft is about to leave the Solar System.  With over 34 years and almost 18 million kilometres on the clock, Voyager 1 is busy passing through a stagnation layer marking the very edge of the Sun’s influence, which is turning out to be a rather strange place.  The Sun has a powerful magnetic field, and pumps out a stream of energetic charged particles called the Solar Wind.  But interstellar space has its own … Continue reading →

South African involvement with Curiosity Mars rover

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Two weeks ago, the 900kg nuclear-powered Curiosity rover was hoisted into the sky and sent on its year-long journey to Mars, where it will explore the planet’s surface and try to determine whether Mars is, or ever has been, capable of hosting life.  The Atlas V rocket flew flawlessly in a textbook launch, and the departing spacecraft was even visible to amateur astronomers in East Asia and Australia. But did you know that the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) … Continue reading →

Kepler discovers most earth-like exoplanet yet

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NASA’s Kepler mission recently announced that they have come one step closer to finding an Earth-like world by identifying their first exoplanet which both orbits a star similar to our own Sun, and does so within the so-called “habitable zone”.  This is pretty amazing, considering what it takes to see something as small as a planet from so far away.  The Kepler space telescope keeps an unblinking eye on a region of our galaxy packed with hundreds of thousands of … Continue reading →

Darker cities have less crime: Official

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  Dark Sky activists, campaigning to reduce light pollution by reducing useage of artificial lighting at night, have long scorned the common-sense idea that the easiest way to reduce crime in an area is to light it up.  Now the city of Bristol, which cut back the number of street lights to save energy and reduce the carbon footprint, has proven them right, with night-time crime dropping by up to 50% in some areas.  Why?  Because it turns out that, … Continue reading →