Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... Right- B. Smith (U. Hawaii), Glenn Schneider ( U. Arizona ), NASA Explanation: These near-infrared Hubble images of dust surrounding young stars offer the latest tantalizing evidence for planets beyond our Solar System . At left, the dark gap seen in the dust disk is reminiscent of a similar large gap in Saturn's rings believed to be sculpted by orbiting moons. ... Publications with keywords: extrasolar planet - dust - infrared - young stars . ...

... ESO is building what will be the World's largest optical telescope array, The Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT Project organisation is responsible for the design and construction of the Unit Telescopes, including enclosures, optics, adapter-rotators and coating unit. ... Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

... 2009 June 3 . VB 10: A Large Planet Orbiting a Small Star . Illustration Credit: JPL-Caltech , NASA . Explanation: Can a planet be as large as the star that it orbits? Recent observations have discovered that nearby Van Biesbroeck's star might have just such a large planet. ... Since faint M-type stars like VB 10 are so common, planetary system s surrounding them, including planets larger than their parent star, might be more common than planetary systems like our own Solar System . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Solar System . ... Planets . ... This bizarrely shrunken planetary system was found by NASAтАЩs Kepler mission, hence the parent star has been named Kepler-11. ... Planetary scientist and Kepler science team member Jack Lissauer said ?These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water.тАЭ €аNone of these strange new worlds are likely to be home to any form of life; their surface conditions are simply too extreme. ...

... There has been a heated public discussion in the past few years about whether our ninth planet is really deserving of the name. Since Pluto orbits a star, and is much less luminous, it certainly satisfies the definition we have above. The problem is actually not with Pluto, but with a very large number of other bodies in our Solar System which also satisfy this definition, but which are not called planets. Perhaps the most notable of these is Ceres, the largest asteroid. ... Planet . ...

Geotimes -- November 2005 -- Two more moons for "planet" Pluto http://www.geotimes.org/nov05/WebExtra110305.html Web Extra Thursday, November 3, 2005 Two more moons for Pluto When the New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto in July 2015, researchers will have more objects to study than previously thought. In addition to Pluto's confirmed moon Charon, astronomers have detected two more orbiting celestial bodies, which could help reveal how the planet and moon system formed. ...

... They had expected to see impact craters like those on the other terrestrial bodies and from their number per unit area to estimate the age of Io's surface. ... This may have been the most important single discovery of the Voyager missions; it was the first real proof that the interiors of other "terrestrial" bodies are actually hot and active. ... A nalysis of the Voyager images led scienties to believe that the lava flows on Io's surface were composed mostly of various compounds of molten sulfur. ...

... 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 . ...

... A dynamo is created in a magnetic field by an electric circuit, part of which is moving relative to the rest (additional conditions must also be met). ... Furthermore, the plasma between them conducts electricity very well along its magnetic field lines, which act as if they were wires connecting Io and the planet (drawing). ... The drawing is not to scale. ... The Hubble Space Telescope , using its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, has been photographing auroras of the planet Jupiter. ...

The solar system probably formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a giant disk of gas, dust and ice in space. ... All forms of life on Earth require liquid water to survive, so the presence of liquid water is a good criterion for deciding whether other planets in the universe could be habitable. Earth is the only habitable planet in the solar system. Venus, closer to the Sun, is too hot to have liquid water. Planets and moons in the outer solar system are too cold for liquid water. ...

... ATNF Home . About ATNF . ... About ATNF overview . ... Australia Telescope Steering Committee . ... Australia Telescope User Committee . ... Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory . ... Parkes radio telescope . Australia Telescope Compact Array . Mopra radio telescope . ... Australia Telescope Online Archive (ATOA) . ... Parkes | ... Australia Telescope 20GHz Survey . ... Visiting Parkes radio telescope . ... Parkes radio telescope webcam . ... The Secret Inner Life of the Orion Nebula . ...

... 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.. ...

... Cloud" CALDWELL 14 MESSIER 34 MESSIER 45 CALDWELL 41 DEEPSKY "Large Mag. Cloud MESSIER 79 MESSIER 38 MESSIER 42 MESSIER 36 MESSIER 37 MESSIER 35 SAO 234480 MESSIER 41 MESSIER 44 CALDWELL 53 CALDWELL 92 NGC 3377 CALDWELL 91 NGC 4261 MESSIER 68 CONSTELLATION Coma Berenices CALDWELL 99 CALDWELL 94 CALDWELL 77 CALDWELL 80 MESSIER 51 MESSIER 04 MESSIER 13 MESSIER 92 MESSIER 06 MESSIER 07 MESSIER 08 ... This is" "short for 'Quasi stellar objects.' ...

Galileo Finds Giant Iron Core in Jupiter's Moon Io . Jupiter's volcano-pocked moon Io has been found by NASA's Galileo spacecraft to have a giant iron core that takes up half its diameter, scientists report in today's issue of Science magazine. The spacecraft also has detected a large "hole" in Jupiter's magnetic field near Io, leading to speculation about whether Io possesses its own magnetic field. If so, it would be the first planetary moon known to have one. ... Space History Galileo . ...

... 8, ``Celestial Mechanics'', 2002 Formation and migration of trans -- Neptunian objects S. I. Ipatov 1;2 1 Institute of Applied Mathematics, Moscow, Russia 2 NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, USA We support the Eneev's idea [1] that the largest (with diameter d?100 km) trans ­ Neptunian objects ( TNOs ) moving now in not very eccentric orbits ... The total amount of water delivered to the Earth during the formation of the giant planets was about the mass of water in the Earth's oceans. ...

... This glossary is not meant to be an exhaustive list of techno-definitions. ... Is there a term you don't see here? ... Do you know how to pronounce the CONSTELLATIONS , STARS , or the PLANETS and their MOONS ? ... First Law - the orbit of each planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus . ... LIGHT BUCKET: A common slang term for a large apertures . ... LIGHT POLLUTION: The illumination of the night sky caused by artificial light sources on the ground (streetlights, billboards, etc.) ...

... The study of extra solar planets will be one of the most important areas of research in astronomy in this century. ... The first planets outside the solar system were found in 1992 around the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12 by Alex Wolszczan at the Arecibo Observatory . ... Three space missions based on this principle (MOST, COROT and Kepler ) have already been launched or approved, and have the last one at least has the potential to find Earth-sized planets. ... SIM ( NASA ) is one of such missions...

... Bad Astronomy . Misconceptions . ... Bad Astronomy : The Moon only shows one face to us because it is not rotating. Better astronomy : The Moon only shows one face because it is rotating, once every time it revolves around the Earth. ... Place the Moon model on the table about 30 centimeters (one foot) away with the X facing the Earth model. ... You'll see that to keep the X facing the Earth model, you have to rotate the Moon model as it goes around the Earth model . ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

PhD Thesis (PDF) . ... The evolution of stars and gas in galaxies. Observing the atomic neutral hydrogen (HI) 21 cm emission and radio continuum emission of galaxies. ... The goal of research is to quantify the neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) gas content galaxies as they evolve with time. ... Neutral atomic hydrogen gas produces a radio signal that can be used to directly measure the amount of gas present. ... USyd Summer Research Scholarship Report (PDF) . ... Research Topic Write Up (PDF) . ...

Mercury - is the nearest to the Sun. Ellusive planet. ... They had several names for this star: Set and Gor (ant. ... The same surface spot with many craters, some of which has the systems of light beams only dark spots, like the Moon seas were considerably less. ... Further was the period of intensive bombing Mercury by the remains of before planet’s swarm (planetozimalies), when the ponds were founded for example Colories (diameter - 1300km) as well as craters like Copernic crater in the Moon. ...