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.

Venus has an Ozone layer

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One of the many robotic spacecraft currently science-ing away in various corners of the Solar System is an orbiter called Venus Express and is run by the European Space Agency (ESA).  One of the instruments it carries to study Venus is a spectroscope, which allows scientists to study the chemical composition of any gas from a distance, by splitting the spectrum of light passing through it.  The spacecraft was recently able to point its spectroscope at a bright star, through … Continue reading →

China launches space station

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A Long March-2FT1 carrier rocket loaded with Tiangong-1 unmanned space lab module blasts off from the launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province, Sept. 29, 2011. (Xinhua/Wang Jianmin) There has been a lot of angst and hand-wringing over the past few years about the America’s diminishing interest in space science.  Year after year, budgets are slashed, spacecraft are mothballed, projects are cancelled.  And yet I’ve never been particularly bothered by this.  I’m not american, … Continue reading →

Earth rests easy – asteroid threat slightly overstated

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Good news!  The odds of a medium-sized asteroid (one about the size of a mountain) impacting Earth and wiping out almost all life are not as bad as we thought.  Previous estimates were that there were about 35,000 of these beasts orbiting near Earth, and it was a little worrying that we didn’t know where most of them were or when the next one would hit.  But that number was always a bit of a guess:  Asteroids are usually quite … Continue reading →

Neutrinos faster than light?

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A team of particle physicists working at CERN have shaken the world of phyiscs by announcing that the neutrinos they have been firing towards Italy have travelled faster than light.  More specifically, they have spent the last three years generating beams of neutrinos at a facility in Geneva, and firing them at the OPERA detector buried deep within Gran Sasso, a mountain in central Italy some 730km away.  The ghostly nature of neutrinos made it possible to avoid the difficulties of … Continue reading →

The Scale of the Solar System

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A view of the largest objects in the solar system (other than the Sun), to scale with each other, everything larger than 400 kilometers in diameter, except that there are only eight trans-Neptunian objects standing in for lots that probably are larger than that. Credit: © 2011 Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society. Images from NASA / JPL & JHUAPL missions, processed by Bjorn Jonsson, Mattias Malmer, Ted Stryk, & Gordan Ugarkovic. TNO art by NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) … Continue reading →