... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Last week's Snack talked about how black holes can affect the environment around them in such a way as to be very bright . ... It's a common misconception that black holes always have matter swirling into them. ... As this matter gets closer and closer to the black hole it piles up and a large, fairly flat disk forms. This is called the accretion disk , because matter from this disk accretes (that is, falls in) on the black hole. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

. HK Tauri is the first example of a young binary star system with an edge-on disk around one member of the pair. The thin, dark disk is illuminated by the light of its hidden central star. The absence of jets indicates that the star is not actively accreting material from this disk. The disk diameter is 20 billion miles. The brighter primary star appears at the top of the image. Image: NASA

... For example, last Saturday the Full Moon slid across the northern edge of the umbra. NGC 6960: The Witch s Broom Nebula . ... Baily s Beads near Solar Eclipse Totality . ... As the Moon moves to completely cover the Sun in a total solar eclipse, beads of bright sunlight stream around the edge of the Moon. ... Perseid over Vancouver . ... Recorded on August 12 during the Perseid Meteor Shower, the wide-angle view takes in a large swath along the photographer's eastern horizon. Facing NGC 6946 . ...

... This beautiful new image shows a glowing cloud of cosmic dust sitting boldly against a backdrop of shining stars. To the naked eye, thick clouds like these appear empty and dark, but some are actually home to the brightest nebulae and hottest young stars in the Universe! Stars are made of gas, so it is no surprise that they are born inside thick, gassy clouds. But the clouds that give birth to stars also block our view of them growing within. ...

Why areNuclear Star Clusters interesting? 1) Many -- if not all ­ nuclear star clusters appear to be young, or at least have a young population of stars. ... 3) If nuclear clusters indeed form in the galaxy center, their impact on the dynamics of stars and gas in the central region of the host galaxy needs to be understood, because it can potentially influence the galaxy morphology. For example, it has been suggested that nuclear clusters can destroy stellar bars and thus form galaxy bulges. ...

... Impact craters and associated concentric rings are about the only features to be found on Callisto. ... It has a bright central region that is 600 kilometers in diameter, and its rings extend to 3000 kilometers in diameter. ... This image shows the heavily cratered surface of Callisto. ... Also visible is a fresh, sharp-rimmed crater some 90 km (56 miles) across named Igaluk (center left third of picture), and a bright zone in the south polar area (bottom of image) which could be an impact scar. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... Three sixth-form students from St Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh , used the Faulkes Telescope South in Australia in April to observe and measure HW Virginis , an unusual "binary" or double star system suspected to host one or two extrasolar planets orbiting the central stellar pair. ... Armagh Observatory and associated researchers hope to develop this work to look for further evidence of planet-hosting binary star...

... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about spiral galaxies: . APOD: 2003 March 10 - M101: The Pinwheel Galaxy . Explanation: Why do many galaxies appear as spirals ? ... One result is that M101 , also called the Pinwheel Galaxy , has several extremely bright star-forming regions (called HII regions ) spread across its spiral arms. ... APOD: 2003 April 13 - NGC 1365: A Nearby Barred Spiral Galaxy . ... NGC 1365 is a member of the Fornax Cluster of Galaxies . ...

... Content Model: one ore more OPTION elements . The SELECT element is used for single and multiple choice menus. ... Example: <SELECT NAME="flavor"> <OPTION>Vanilla <OPTION>Strawberry <OPTION>Rum and Raisin <OPTION>Peach and Orange </SELECT> . ... When you want a multiple choice menu, you need to include the MULTIPLE attribute with the SELECT element, e.g. <SELECT MULTIPLE NAME="flavor"> . ... NAME . ... The presence of this attribute denotes that the SELECT element defines a multiple choice menu. ...

... Today this year's largest group of sunspots will cross the Sun's central meridian. ... The next day, the number of spots in the group reached five, and the day after, on June 2nd, it was possible to count thirteen sunspots on solar disk, which had been clear prior to this. ... This year's two most powerful active areas, which passed across the solar disk at the beginning of May, 2009, are set to appear in the Sun's eastern sector in two days, on June 6th. ...

... Auroral Currents . ... 25c. Space tether . ... Aurora from Space . ... But the best view is still from space. ... The Canadian scientific satellite Isis-2 (1971) carried an auroral imaging camera and discovered the diffuse aurora, a broad ribbon around the auroral oval, too spread-out to be noticed from the ground. ... Currently, NASA's Polar (1996) collects images of the polar aurora using three cameras--in visible light (sometimes as frequently as 12 seconds apart), in ultra-violet and in x-rays. ...

User name: . ... Blues . ... Choose a Category of Room: Living . ... First name: . Last name: . Brief description of the problem: . Please attach a file with your event log. File name: . ... Music types for your free CDs: R Jazz Blues Folk Country . Choose a fruit: Apples Bananas Cherries Oranges Pineapple Figs Guava . ... Describe your problem here: For faster response, include a full description of your problem, and tell us what hardware configuration you are using. ...

... PmWiki .Forms$:Audience} . ... An optional name="FormName" argument can be used to name the form. ... input text name value size= n :) (:input hidden name value :) (:input password name value :) (:input radio name value :) (:input checkbox name value :) (:input select name value label :) (:input default default-name default-value :) (:input submit name value :) (:input textarea name [=value=] rows= n cols= n :) (:input reset name label :) (:input file name label :) (:input image name "src" alt :) . ...

... We have measured this "redshift" for the pink black holes, and allowed for it in our calculations. ... We see this effect in the emission from gas around these pink black holes, but it is far too small an effect to account for the pinkness. Thus the swirling motions of gas around or into the black holes cannot produc the colour. ... At first we thought that these things were normal blue black holes hidden behind clouds of interstellar dust, that absorbed the blue light and made them appear pink. ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... The newly discovered ?mega-Earth? ... Its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background (the two planets? proximity is grossly exaggerated) .€а Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 29 000 km, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. ... The first mega-earth to be discovered is Kepler-10c which orbits a star lying about 560 light years from the Sun in the constellation Draco. ... Astronomers Find a New Type of Planet: The ?Mega-Earth? ...

... For the past years I have been working on the problem of synthesis of light curves of close binary systems, consisting of a normal star and a compact object (point object with fixed X-ray luminosity). ... Possible existence of a bright spot on the disk's lateral surface is taken into account. ... The last of then will be published in Gordon and Breach Publishers ( Cherepashchuk A.M., Katysheva N.A., Khruzina T.S., Shugarov S.Yu. ... Cherepashchuk A.M., Katysheva N.A., Khruzina T.S., Shugarov S.Yu. ...

OptInt PmWiki : Pm Wiki / Forms . ... Forms processing can be found in the Cookbook (see below). ... input text name value size= n :) (:input hidden name value :) (:input password name value :) (:input radio name value :) (:input checkbox name value :) (:input select name value label :) (:input default default-name default-value :) (:input submit name value :) (:input textarea name [=value=] rows= n cols= n :) (:input reset name label :) (:input file name label :) (:input image name "src" alt :) . ...

... This artist's concept shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet- . ... Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. ... Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. ... could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star. ...

... Positioning and Moving the Fish and Poles . ... In the <LAYER> version, the layer containing the form is initially hidden, and a waiting layer is temporarily displayed while the fish images are downloading. ... Defining the Form . ... Here's the code that creates the three pole layers: <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Swimming Fish</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <LAYER ID="bluepole"LEFT=160 TOP=150> <IMG SRC=images/bluepole.gif> </LAYER> <LAYER ID="greenpole" LEFT=360 TOP=150> <IMG SRC=images/greenpol.gif> </LAYER> . ...

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. ...