... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Star Atlas . ... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... The planet has extreme temperature swings and perhaps active lava flows. ... A digital supplement to Astronomy magazine. ... Join TravelQuest International with Astronomy and Discover magazines on one of three great tour options surrounding this celestial spectacle . ... Astronomy Magazine . ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... Risks Comparable to NEOs . ... The Increasing Rate of Discovery of Asteroids . ... Comet and Asteroid Collision Probabilities . ... Extreme albedo comets and the impact hazard (PDF Format) . ... Asteroid Impact Animations . ... Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids - 2002 . ... The Spaceguard Survey Report, 1992 (PDF) . Tsunami from Asteroid/Comet Impacts . ...

... NASA , NSF Explanation: Is our Earth unique? In continuing efforts to answer this question, astronomers have now discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant normal star. ... Slight, fast, but regular wobbles of nearby small M - dwarf star Gliese 876 showed evidence for a planet with a likely mass slightly higher than a minimum six times the mass of Earth. ... Publications with keywords: planets - Earth - Gliese 876 . Publications with words: planets - Earth - Gliese 876 . ...

... Exoplanets . ... Artists impression of the blue exoplanet. ... This exoplanet is located in the constellation of Vulpecula, the fox, a faint pattern inside the Summer Triangle.ТљТљ This planet is a not too distant 63 light years away so has been studied by space-based telescopes.Тљ Data collected from Hubbleт??s Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) when this planet moved behind its star showed that in the shadow of the star the light reflected from HD 189733b reduced into the blue part of the spectrum. ...

... Each day we feature a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. August 15, 1995 . Venus: Earth's Sister Planet . ... Explanation: This picture in visible light was taken by the Galileo spacecraft. Venus is very similar to Earth in size and mass - and so is sometimes referred to as Earth's sister planet - but Venus has a quite different climate. ... Chronological Archive | Subject Sorted Archive | ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Bad Astro Store . ... Slacker Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... Life Under the Moon . ... Seeing Jupiter's Moons . ... Time Zones and the Spherical Earth . A Companion to the Earth? ... December 19, 1999) . ... Big Moon, Little Moon . ... How Big is the Moon? ... 14, 2000) . ... 2008 Phil Plait. ... Subscribe to the Bad Astronomy Newsletter! Talk about Bad Astronomy on the BA Bulletin Board! ...

... 142,800 Mean density (kg/m^3) .. ... 5.203 Rotation period (length of day in Earth hours).. 9.8 Revolution period (length of year) (in Earth years). 11.86 Obliquity (tilt of axis) (degrees).. 3.08 Orbit inclination (degrees).. 1.3 Orbit eccentricity.. 0.048 Mean surface temperature (K)........................ 120 (cloud tops) Visual geometric albedo.. 0.44 Atmospheric components.............................. 90% hydrogen, 10% helium, .07% methane Rings.. ...

Metis . Jupiter XVI - 1979J3 . Metis [MEE-tis] is the innermost known satellite of Jupiter. ... Metis and Adrastea lie within Jupiter's main ring and may be the source of material for the ring. ... Galileo Image of Metis . ... Although Metis was discovered by Voyager, it was no more than a point of light on images. This Galileo image is the the first image of the small moon that shows its irregular shape. ... The longest dimension of Metis is approximately 60 kilometers (37 miles) across. ...

... Feeding the Monster: Gas Caught in its Death Spiral into a Massive Black Hole . ... Stromlo Professor Mike Dopita have used the Hubble Space Telescope to discover how a massive Black Hole in a nearby galaxy feeds itself. ... Earlier Hubble Telescope data obtained by another team member, Professor Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, had found a disk of gas rushing around the Black Hole at a speed of 500 kilometers a second. ...

... Over the past decade and a half, astronomers have used both ground-based and space-based telescopes to discover more than 400 "extrasolar" planets. The Kepler space-based mission uses a technique called transit photometry to search for these planets. In January 2010 the Kepler mission team announced the discovery of five new planets. ... The ultimate goal of the Kepler mission is to search out the existence of Earth-like planets. ... A Collection of Resources to Get Behind the Headlines . ...

... Our Sun is part of a huge wheel-shaped collection of stars. ... Astronomers have long suspected it was a very massive black hole, and that every galaxy had such a central mass, created early in the history of the universe. ... However, unless that object happens to be headed directly at the black hole (a relatively small target) it will just swing around and fly away again, like a comet making a pass at the Sun. The velocity acquired in falling towards the black hole also helps it escape. ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL: 9:20 AM CST, January 6, 1999 CONTACT: John Biretta Space Telecsope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (Phone: (410) 338-4917; Internet: biretta@stsci.edu) HUBBLE DETECTS FASTER-THAN-LIGHT MOTION IN GALAXY M87 Astronomers reported today discovering clouds which appear to move many times faster than the speed of light, shooting out from the region of a black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. ... It's an illusion created by the finite speed of light and rapid motion," Biretta said. ...

Image credit: Michael Nolan, Arecibo Observatory. These radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2001 SN263 were obtained on 2008 Feb 12 and 13. ... Image from Feb 12 . ... First near-Earth triple asteroid discovered by Arecibo Observatory . ... was discovered this week by astronomers at the sensitive radar telescope at Cornell University?s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. ... For example, Arecibo has discovered more than half of the near-Earth binary asteroid systems discovered since 1999. ...

The small solids. Asteroids or the small planetes . ... The comets. ... Ceneca the Young.Procuring about the nature.63 y. The comet is a celestial body of a great size, but a rare one... transparent. Sometimes there seen a core and the medium forms a kind of a tail, beard or dishevelled looks. ... The core is an ice body - conglomeration of frosted gas and dust. ... The comet state is variable: ones have the con tails, others the dust tails, and the third have both. ... Meteors and meteorites. ...

... Jupiter is our Solar System?s very own superhero. The giant planet is two and a half times more massive than all the rest of the planets in our Solar System combined. And with great mass, comes great gravity. With the power of super-strong gravity, Jupiter plays a heroic role in our Solar System, protecting life on Earth. ... Unfortunately, we have found lots of solar systems with massive planets that lie close to their star, but not so many that lie far away, like Jupiter. ...

Thebe . Jupiter XIV - 1979J2 . Thebe [THEE-bee] is the fourth known satellite of Jupiter. ... Thebe rotates synchronously around Jupiter. Very little is known about this moon. ... Stephen Synnott . Date of discovery . ... Discovery Image . This is one of the discovery images (FDS 16383.54) of Thebe. ... Once the shadow images were analyzed, Thebe was located on several other images. ... This image of Thebe (FDS 16220.56) was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 27, 1979. ...

... SS433 is a close binary system, one star is a supergiant, a second one is a black hole. ... Even a black hole cannot accept such an enormous mass flux, a supercritical accretion disk appears, all the excess gas glows up to several tens of thousands degrees and is ejected off the disk with enormous velocities. ... SAO researchers have found an evidence of the supercritical accretion onto a black hole in SS433, which follows from a brightness variability of the SS433 disk. ...

... S.P. KOROLEV ROCKET AND SPACE CORPORATION ENERGIA . ... RSC Energia after S.P. Korolev is the leading enterprise of Russian rocket and space industry in the filed of manned space flight programs; responsible for building the ISS Russian Segment, its being integrated into the station and operational use, including building and operation of the main segment modules (Zvezda, Pirs, Poisk, Rassvet, etc.), as well as manufacture, commissioning and operational use of Soyuz TMA, Progress-M space vehicles. ...

Class 1 Introduction, Background History of Modern Astronomy The Night Sky, Eclipses and the Seasons Kepler's Laws Newtonian Gravity General Relativity Matter and Light Telescopes Class 2 Solar System Characteristics Formation Exosolar Planets Class 3 Stars The Sun Stellar Evolution of Low and High Mass Stars Deaths of Stars Exotic Stars Class 4 Galaxies Galaxy Classification Formation of Galaxies Galactic Evolution ... So far, one planet has been studied by this method. ...

... Asteroid . ... In case you didn't hear about it, which you probably didn't: On Jan. 7, an asteroid 1,000 feet across -- nearly three times the current diameter of Marlon Brando -- barely missed the Earth, which is most likely your planet of residence. ... What if this asteroid had hit the Earth? ... As it happens, the American Astronomical Society was holding a conference in Washington AT THE VERY SAME TIME as the asteroid nearly hit the Earth. ...