400 Years of the Telescope

on PBS in the New York area tonight at 10 PM. Read more about it here. Sounds interesting to me, hope you enjoy it.

A Human Trip to Mars

While the technical challenges of sending people to Mars (and returning them) are certainly formidable, possibly the most difficult aspect is the human one - can a small number of people survive being cooped together in a very small space for more than a year while they travel from Earth to Mars. ESA is trying to find out, as described here. Enjoy the article, though I'm not sure how much the human test subjects will enjoy the simulation...

Distant Star Formation

By using the magnification resulting from gravitational lensing caused by a massive galaxy cluster coincidentally sitting between us and distant galaxy SMM J2135-0102, astronomers were able to map out where stars are forming in this galaxy - which happens to be forming ~250 new stars every year! Go here for more details. Interesting.

Most misleading Astronomy press release...

.... I've seen in a while. Go here to read it. The planet that was discovered is interesting, but all the speculation at the end? Ugh. It just really annoyed me for whatever reason. Feel free to disagree with me below. Of course, I am posting about it, which is probably all they wanted....

Young Supermassive Black Holes?

Astronomers believed that at the center of essentially every galaxy is a supermassive black hole (supermassive = more material than a million Suns. Some are believed to have a mass more than a billion times that of the Sun). Where these black holes come from, no one really knows, but they gain mass by accreting (think swallowing) the surrounding gas. This gas forms a disk as it falls into the black hole, in which gas particles can stick together to form molecules - which astronomers call "dust." The older the disk, the more dust that should be there - or so goes the current thinking. By this logic, using Spitzer astronomers just found a couple supermassive black holes with very young disks. Go here to read more. Not necessarily the most convincing argument, but interesting nevertheless.

The dusty Milky Way

Even though it was launched to study the Cosmic Microwave Background, Planck also detected emission from warm dust since they emit light at the similar wavelengths. Go here to check out an amazing image it has made of "nearby" dust in the Milky Way. Enjoy!

The Glowing Great Red Spot of Jupiter

Temperature maps of literally, the largest planetary storm in the Solar System. Enjoy!.

"I'm ready for my close-up...

... Mars Express"? (Yeah, I know, the jokes are getting lamer by the post. Sorry. There is a very good reason why I'm an astronomer and not a comedian). Well, even if it wasn't, the ESA space craft Mars Express passed within 70 km (!!!) of Mars's moon Phobos, and took these wonderful pictures as a result. Enjoy!

The ring of fire

It's not just a Johnny Cash song. Inside the Sun, very hot, ionized gas (plasma, which is essentially the same thing as fire), circulates deep below the layer that produces most of the optical light we see (called the photosphere). However, we can infer its properties based on its observable effects when it happens to skim the Sun's "surface." Go here to read how it might be responsible for the very few Sun spots being detected over the last few years.

Earthquakes and Earth Spin

When I first saw this headline "Did the Chilean Quake Shift Earth's Axis?", my first response was "Um, no." Turns out, not surprisingly, I was wrong. Go here to read more. Very interesting stuff. Enjoy!