... 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 Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process.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 Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process.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 Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

... 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. ...

... 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 . ...

... Planets . ... The planets were found using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6m telescope at ESOтАЩs La Silla Observatory. ... A planet in orbit around a star causes the star to regularly move towards and away from observers on Earth. ... One newly discovered planet, HD 85512 b, is best hope found so far for a habitable exoplanet. ... The HARPS team so far have found that about 40% of stars similar to own Sun have at least one planet smaller than Saturn (which is 95 times more massive than Earth). ...

N-BODY SIMULATIONS OF PLANET FORMATION: VARYING THE NUMBER OF PLANETARY EMBRYOS J.E. CHAMBERS Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh, Northern Ireland, BT61 9DG, UK. ... These gained mass until they became large enough to gravitationally per- turb other objects in the nebula. ... Their simulations started with a few tens of planetary embryos, moving on circular nearly-coplanar orbits in the region now occupied by the terrestrial planets. ... Rev. Earth Planet. ... 4 J.E. CHAMBERS Figure 2. ...

Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... Credit: Rick Scott and Joe Orman Explanation: OK, it's a picture of the Sun (duh!), but can you spot the planet ? Of course, most of the spots you've spotted are sunspots, as large or larger than planet Earth itself. ... But also visible in this photograph from November 15, is planet Mercury. ... Publications with keywords: planet - Mercury - transit - sunspot . Publications with words: planet - Mercury - transit - sunspot . ... 3D Mercury Transit . ...

... Behemoth black hole found in an unlikely place . ... black holes . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Could large numbers of black holes account for much of the "dark matter" estimated to exist in our universe? ... NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University) No, because the universe never had the raw material to grow enough black holes to account for current estimates of dark matter. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ...

... Abstract Return the value of the largest (positive) number representable in a double precision variable. Required_Reading None. Brief_I/O The function returns the value of the largest (positive) number that can be represented in a double precision variable. Detailed_Input None. Detailed_Output The function returns the value of the largest (positive) number that can be represented in a double precision variable. ... 2) Initialize a CSPICE "window." ... Link to routine source . ...

... Contact A Problem of an estimation of accuracy of the asteroid CCD observations . The Minor Planet Center supported by the Interntional Astronomical Union is the main office for keeping observational data of the small Solar System bodies and their investigations. ... At Pulkovo Observatory we are estimating an accuracy of the CCD asteroid observations obtained by amateurs and professional astronomers all over the World using the MPC database. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Bad Astro Store . ... Site Info . ... It is from from Voyager 1 and shows a whopping big impact crater dominating the profile of the moon. Note that Mimas is about 400 kilometers across (about 250 miles). ... The wall around the crater is 5 kilometers high, and that central peak rises 6 kilometers above the surface (many impact craters have a large central peak which is caused by a pressure rebound from the impact). ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

... casa::Primes . ... Creates a reference table of prime numbers, and some functions. ... This function returns the closest integer larger than number from the table of primes. static uInt . ... If there is no entry in the table of primes which is larger than number, a zero is returned. static Block < uInt > casa::Primes::cachedPrimes . ... This function finds the next largest prime than number, returns that value and stores it in the table of primes. static uInt casa::Primes::smallestPrimeFactor . ...

T he solar system consists of the Sun ; the nine planets, sixty four (64) satellites of the planets, a large number of small bodies (the comets and asteroids), and the interplanetary medium. The inner solar system contains the Sun, Mercury , Venus , Earth and Mars : . T he planets of the outer solar system are Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus , Neptune and Pluto : . ... small planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Pluto. ... inferior planets: Mercury and Venus. closer to the Sun than Earth. ...

... In addition to the planets and their satellites the solar system contains a large number of smaller but interesting objects. There are thousands of known asteroids and comets and undoubtedly many more unknown ones. ... There are also some asteroids whose orbits carry them closer to the Sun than the Earth (Aten, Icarus, Hephaistos). Most comets have highly elliptical orbits which spend most of their time in the outer reaches of the solar system with only brief passages close to the Sun. ...

RELATIVE SUNSPOT NUMBERS Description of Data from SGD Explanation of Data Reports: Relative Sunspot Numbers -- The relative sunspot number is an index of the activity of the entire visible disk of the Sun. ... The provisional daily Zurich relative sunspot numbers, Rz, were based upon observations made at Zurich and its two branch stations in Arosa and Locarno and communicated by M. Waldmeier of the Swiss Federal Observatory. ... This indicates the uncertainty above and below the predicted number. ...

... 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. ...

.

... Users . ... Data Collection and Analysis . ... This particular part of the analysis has been disabled since the code is struggling to cope with the number of users seen this year, in particular the large contingent of people who have re-tweeted NASA. ... Order accounts: by user number (effectively random) by number of tweets (includes retweets) by number of followers by number of followers that also tweeted about AAS225 by number of friends that also tweeted about AAS225 . ... by user number . ...

... General information . ... Staff . Research staff . ... Information . ... Historical highlights . Historical research . ... This process is thought to occur in circumstellar disks of gas and dust around young stars on rather short timescales : infrared surveys show that the number of low mass stars with disks drops dramatically for stars older than 10 Myr, suggesting that in order to form large solids before the disk disperses, the growth process has to take place within a few million years. ...

Detecting Long Period Planets with WASP 1 University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL To estimate the number of transiting planets in this period range, planetary occurrence rates from Kepler (Fressin et al, 2013) for varying spectral type & planet type were used. ... Two `stare' fields are currently available from 2011 (330,000 stars) producing a detection rate of 3.0±2.4 planets (Fig 4). ... Since 2011, WASP-N cameras have observed in `Stare' mode, with cadence of ~1-2min. ...

Proposal Identification No.: ... Proposal Type: General Category: Sub-Category: Observation Category: Total Time Requested: Minimum Useful Time: Prop osal Title: ABSTRACT: Regular Astronomy Continuum Galactic 120 Hours 2 hours Monitoring radio activity of a sample of M-dwarf stars A growing number of planets discovered around M-dwarfs has motivated new, large surveys and studies of habitability of planets in tight, tidally locked orbits around low-mass stars. ...