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What is light?
Posted on October 1, 2010 | 4 CommentsWhat is light? Here’s an easy introduction to the electromagnetic spectrum all the way from radio waves to gamma rays. Before the modern era of technological astronomy, to know anything […] -
Dark matter and dark energy: the deepest mysteries in astronomy
Posted on October 1, 2010 | 2 CommentsIn, say 1975, there was only one kind of ‘stuff’ in the Universe, matter made of protons and neutrons. By 1985 there was a consensus that this was not enough, […] -
Elliptical galaxies: everything you need to know
Posted on October 1, 2010 | No CommentsWe all love bright and showy spiral galaxies! So much so, that we tend to overlook the elliptical galaxies which make up about 30% of the galaxies out there. Smaller […] -
What would you see flying through a nebula?
Posted on October 1, 2010 | 2 CommentsIt is difficult to look at this Hubble Space Telescope image of the nebula NGC 2467 without thinking about what it would be like to fly through it. It is […] -
Why is this nebula so shocking pink?
Posted on October 1, 2010 | 1 CommentThis fluffy pink blob is the star-forming region LHA-120-N 11 in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 170 000 light years from the Sun. N 11 (occasionally called the Bean Nebula) […] -
Hubble shows us a spectacular star cluster
Posted on October 1, 2010 | No CommentsImagine that once the Sun sets, rather than a dark sky sprinkled with a few thousand dim stars, we had a sky blazing with ten thousand or so stars blazing […] -
How you can leave your name on other worlds!
Posted on October 1, 2010 | No CommentsI’d like to tell you that I’m on the surface of an asteroid called Itokawa. I travelled there on a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency mission called Hayabusa and was left […] -
Hooray for Hayabusa: Japan’s asteroid pioneer
Posted on October 1, 2010 | No CommentsThe team at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency deserve congratulations for the amazing (and hopefully record-breaking) Hayabusa mission to asteroid 25143 Itokawa. Launched in 2003 (the spacecraft was called MUSES-C […]