Herschel update

The newest ESA satellite, Herschel is slowly but surely turning on its main scientific instruments. Go here to learn more.

Measuring the atmosphere of another planet...

... is easy using current technology - if the planet is in our Solar System. Around another star, well, that is something else entirely. Go here to read how this was recently accomplished for a planet orbiting a nearby star. Impressive.

Rotating Saturn's Moon

Moons, like planets, rotate. And Cassini has taken this wonderful view of Enceladus, the peculiar moon of Saturn producing those weird ice and dust jets. Enjoy!

The Amazing Flying Telescope

NASA is currently working on a telescope called SOFIA designed to operate inside a flying Boeing 747. Why? To get above as much of the atmosphere as possible to detect mid-infrared light, which is absorbed by water. How? With great difficulty, as you can read about here.

NASA's next satellite

NuStar is (hopefully) going to do something no satellite has ever done before - focus very high-energy photons. By doing so, it might be able to shed important light (pun quasi-intended) on how massive stars explode. Read this article for more information. Enjoy!

WISE beyond its years

I (somewhat) apologize for the bad pun, but here is the first-light image from WISE telescope, recently launched to survey the sky in the mid-infrared for the first time in 20 years. Definitely a promising start to an important mission.

Picture Book of Galaxy Evolution

Go here to see the result of a deep, multi-wavelength survey of one patch of sky designed to study how galaxies evolve with time. It is more than just a very pretty picture, honest.

Galactic Building Blocks

Go here to read how, thanks to its new instruments, Hubble is now able to image the building blocks of galaxies like our own Milky Way. Enjoy!

Galactic GPS?

The Global Positioning System, GPS, works by comparing the delay in signals received from clocks located in different places - specifically on satellites orbiting the Earth. The most accurate clocks in the universe are these, but millisecond pulsars - notable for the regular pulses of radio emission ~1 ms apart and their gamma-ray emission. Using data from the Fermi telescope, astronomer identified some possible milli-second pulsars which were then confirmed using radio observations. Now, they are being monitored not to determine the location of Earth in the Milky Way, but to see if they are correlated changes in the arrival time of their radio pulsars which might indicate the passage of a gravitational wave passing between us and them. Go here for more information. Enjoy!

Astronomy at the Winter Olympics

Go here to read how artwork inspired by the Spitzer Space Telescope is making its Olympics debut in Vancouver. Enjoy!