... Over the past 16 years, astronomers have found more than 700 planets outside of our Solar System. We call these distant worlds exo-planets . ... For example, they can observe how a star dims when a planet passes in front of it. ... In this new method, astronomers use stars like magnifying glasses! ... And astronomers can tell if the star that is acting like a magnifying glass has a planet in orbit around it, as the power of the magnification is even greater! ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Solar System . ... Moon . ... Comets and Asteroids . ... What changed our view of Chariklo is the discovery of a ring system around it, the first such feature found around a Solar System body smaller than a gas giant planet. ... Almost certainly the rings were born when a collision with a smaller asteroid blasted millions of tonnes of debris off CharikloтАЩs surface. ... A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo (Braga-Rigas et al.) ...

An Ancient Universe: How Astronomers Know the Vast Scale of Cosmic Time . THE CHANGING UNIVERSE: EVOLUTION HAPPENS! . b) Changes in Stars . One of the great discoveries of modern science is that stars (like people) live only a measurable life-time and then die. Although the lives of the stars are enormously longer than the span of a human life, we can learn about the life story of the stars by studying them at many different stages in their life cycle, from birth to death. ...

... 2010 October 4 . Rolling Across the Rocky Plains of Mars . Credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission , JPL , NASA . Explanation: You stare out across the rocky plains of Mars. ... You are being sent on a long journey to a distant crater, the largest crater in the region. ... Rolling about a football field a day, you might reach Endeavour crater sometime in 2012. ... About APOD | ... NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply . NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important Notices . ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . The Armagh Human Orrery is the first large-scale outdoor exhibit to show with precision on the ground the positions of the main planets, a dwarf planet and two comets. It is an innovative education and learning tool designed to explain the motion of the planets around the Sun and the changing position of Earth, relative to those planets, as it too revolves around the Sun. ... The Armagh Human Orrery . ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... I think I will break from my usual format of Bad Astronomy/ Good Astronomy by saying that the way we define seasons currently is not strictly bad, but I feel (in my opinion!) that it could be better. The definition of when the seasons begin is at the moment of solstice or equinox; that is, winter (in the north) starts on December 22 nd and summer starts on June 22 nd . ... Now imagine breaking up the Sun's 46 degree up-and-down yearly swing into 1 day intervals. ...

... Upsilon Andromedae: An Extra Solar System . ... Yesterday, astronomers announced the discovery of the first system of planets around a normal star other than our Sun. ... Subtle changes in the wobble of Upsilon Andromedae, a Sun-like star in the constellation of Andromeda, allowed astronomers led by R. Paul Butler (AAO) and Geoffrey W. Apollo 17s Moonship . ... Across the Solar System, even across our Galaxy, these sights are not difficult. ... Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945 . ... Canaries Sky . ...

... 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 . ...

We present new images of the reflection nebula surrounding the R Coronae Borealis Star, UW Centauri. ... Instead, the morphology of the nebula appears to change as different parts are illuminated by light from the central star that is modulated by shifting thick dust clouds near its surface. ... In this way, the central star acts like a lighthouse shining through holes in the dust clouds and lighting up different portions of the nebula. ... ADS Citation Query . citations = 21 . ...

... The greater the distance, the smaller the parallax. ... That triangle has the same proportions as the much larger triangle ABC, and therefore, if the distance B'C to the thumb is 10 times the distance A'B' between the eyes, the distance AC to the far landmark is also 10 times the distance AB. ... The most distant objects our eyes can see are the stars, and they are very far indeed: light which moves at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second, would take years, often many years, to reach them. ...

... 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. ...

Estimations of the change of the Sun s mass and the gravitation constant based on high-accuracy observations of planets and spacecraft . ... More than 635 000 positional observations of planets and spacecraft of different types have been used for estimating possible changes of the gravitation constant, the solar mass, and semi-major axes of planets. ... gravitation constant, positional observation, Sun's mass. ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... Stories: · · · · Whirlwind History Sky of Many Colors Astronomy+Physics+Statistics CHASC: (brief!) ... X-Ray Sky: Ends of stars and the flickering sky ROSAT All-Sky ~1.5 KeV (Digel and Snowden): Black Holes, Neutron Stars, Active stars --and local glowing gas Gamma-Ray Sky: Pulsars, Active Galaxies, and lots of (nonthermal) glowing gas Ways of Paying Attention: Astronomy Perspective to 1980 After a good beginning, Isolated · · · · · Started out together (Kepler, LaPlace, .. ...

... How to Spot a Pale Blue Dot in the Night Sky - Signatures of Life on Extrasolar Planets . ... Frame 2: Steamy atmosphere, an ocean is covering the entire planet, no oxygen is present, timeline about four billion years ago. ... Using such telescopes as Kepler, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Darwin and Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), and masking the star light, the light from small Earth-like planets can be collected and analyzed. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... Low Polar Orbit . ... Different types of satellite orbits have different uses: while the synchronous orbit is best for communication satellites, Lagrangian point orbits help monitor the solar wind before it reaches Earth. ... Many spacecraft use such orbits, e.g. the US Air Force surveillance satellites of the DMSP series, or the series of French Earth-resources spacecraft SPOT . ... If the satellite then starts near a noon-midnight orbit, it will always pass near noon and near midnight. ...

. There are several ways in which you can change the structure and the content of the file you are editing. Repeat parts of the text . Insert the contents of another file . Cut and paste text .

... 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...

Next: Special Cases: Supernova Explosion Up: Change of Binary Parameters: Previous: Mass change . The binary separation a changes differently depending on the mass exchange mode. ... If the mass transfer is conservative ( , i.e. const) and one may neglect the redistribution of the intrinsic angular momenta of the components, the total orbital momentum conservation law implies . ... the orbital separation always increases in such systems). ...

Giant Jupiter. Jupiter . ... Jupiter has no solid surface that is why speaking about its dimensious point the radius of the upper border line of the clouds, where the presseru is about 10 KPa; radius of Jupiter on the equator is 71400 km. ... The Jupiter satellites. ... Nowadays 16 satellites of the Jupiter are known: Adrastea, Mitis, Amaltea , Phina,then 4 Galilei satellites: Io , Europe , Hanimed , Callisto , Leda, Aimalia, Zicitea, Elara, Ananke, Carme, Pasipe and Sinope. ... Jupiter's ring. ...