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 is Volcanically Active

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New discoveries put Venus in the exclusive club of volcanically active bodies in the Solar System, joining Earth and Jupiter’s moon Io.  The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express mission, which has been in orbit around Venus since 2006, returned data on the composition of Venus’ atmosphere.  This was combined with data from NASA’s Magellan probe, which mapped the planet in great detail using a combination of Radar and high resolution gravity data to reveal the shape and structure of … Continue reading →

Mystery Object eclipses Epsilon Auriga

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A 175 year old mystery has been solved with the University of Michigan’s discovery of a mysterious disc-shaped object eclipsing a famous variable star.  Epsilon Auriga has always confounded astronomers who study variable stars, as it seemed to be an eclipsing variable, but never behaved the way such the model predicts:  While its brightness dips according to a regular twenty seven year cycle, the variations at the peak of the cycle have never been regular, or predictable. Now though, interferometric … Continue reading →

Apollo 13: Unintended Consequences

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An earlier article talks about how the 13th Apollo mission might have ended, without the heroic efforts of the ground crew.  But as part of the rescue process, Apollo 13’s Saturn IV-B rocket stage was jettisoned, and aimed to crash into the Moon.  The rocket, weighing fourteen tons and travelling at 2.5 kilometres per second, slammed into the moon with the force of ten tons of TNT exploding, and left a crater some 35 meters across.  This new image from … Continue reading →

Your own satellite imagery of Mars

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Have you ever looked at those stunning images of the Martian surface, photographed by the HiRise satellite orbitting Mars, and wished you could control where the cameras would point?  The HiWish programme provides exactly this service, allowing members of the public to log in and request their own images, and a gallery of the eight most popular targets has just been released here.  I’m surprised that nobody seems to have asked for images of the Cydonia region – maybe they’re … Continue reading →

Physicists: 1. Tinfoil-Hats: 0

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An increasingly vocal group of concerned citizens have been raising the alarm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will kill wipe out planet earth and kill everybody ahead of schedule.  In response, the technicians at CERN today cranked up the atom smasher to record high levels – two streams of protons with energies of 3.5TeV (Trillion electron-volts) were smashed headon into each other around lunchtime today.  Luckily, the earth is still here and nobody died.  Looks like every single physicist … Continue reading →