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News: January 2012
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Kepler finds 11 new solar systems beyond our own
Amid a flurry of planetary discoveries from NASA's Kepler space telescope, scientists announced Thursday they have found 26 new worlds around 11 stars outside the solar system.  READ MORE
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Black holes buzz-kill star formation parties
The most massive galaxies today partied hard and lived fast lives in their younger days, forming stars at an incredible rate for a short time before feedback from black holes shut them down. READ MORE
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Eight years on Mars
for Opportunity
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity landed on Mars eight years ago on what was expected to be just a 90 day mission, and while twin rover Spirit has remained silent since March 2010, Opportunity continues to rove across the red planet's surface. READ MORE
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Northern Lights head south
A marvellous display of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, was seen across widespread areas of Scotland and Northern England last night, with reports coming in from Northumberland, The Pennines and Yorkshire. READ MORE
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Astronomers capture
comet's dive into Sun
The first observations and analysis of a comet disintegrating within the Sun's atmosphere on 6 July 2011 are presented this week in the journal Science. READ MORE
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Young magnetic star sports carbon monoxide ring
A team of astronomers has discovered an unusually defined ring of carbon monoxide around a young star, raising questions regarding the stages in solar system formation. READ MORE
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Herschel revisits
Pillars of Creation
The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory has made stunning observations of the iconic Pillars of Creation, first brought to life by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. READ MORE
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NASA’s Fermi reveals new portrait of the sky
A new catalogue of high-energy sources has been published from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope allowing astronomers to paint a better picture of a previously unexplored region of the night sky READ MORE
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Ill-fated Mars probe reportedly falls to Earth
A $170 million Russian Mars probe, stranded in low-Earth orbit after a malfunction following launch in November, reportedly fell back into the dense lower atmosphere Sunday, apparently breaking up over the southern Pacific Ocean west of Chile. READ MORE
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What colour is the
Milky Way?
Astronomers at The University of Pittsburgh have been working to find an accurate answer as to the colour of the Milky Way Galaxy, finding it to be “a very pure white, almost mirroring a fresh spring snowfall”. READ MORE
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Starving galaxies shut down star formation
Astronomers using the partially built ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) observatory have, for the first time, caught a group of galaxies changing from active star building factories into red, dead ellipticals.
READ MORE
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Surprising stars in the Andromeda Galaxy
Greater insights by the Hubble Space Telescope into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way, are revealing a mixed environment of unusually blue stars and a ring of red stars around its giant 100 million solar mass black hole.
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Hubble spies earliest galaxy cluster ever seen
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a distant cluster of galaxies in the initial stages of construction.
READ MORE
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Black hole 'bullets' may shed light on galaxy jets
A nearby black hole has been caught in the act of launching high speed 'bullets' of gas into space thanks to observations from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite and the American National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).
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Planets discovered with double Sun-like stars
Following the recent discovery of exoplanet Kepler-16b orbiting two stars, two further planets both orbiting stellar pairs have been unveiled by the acclaimed spacecraft.
READ MORE
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Saturn-like rings
circle alien world
A Saturn-like ring system has been discovered 420 light years away in the constellation of Centaurus by astronomers using the ground-based SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS), but do the rings encompass a planet or a companion star?
READ MORE
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Mars-sized planet orbits
red dwarf star
A rocky planet just 0.57 times the radius of Earth – a little larger than the planet Mars – has been found orbiting a red dwarf star along with two other smaller-than-Earth companions. READ MORE
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A fat galaxy cluster
found faraway
A titanic collision between two galaxy clusters is creating the most massive collection of galaxies ever observed in the distance Universe. The observation of this new super-cluster, nicknamed ‘El Gordo’ after the Spanish for ‘fat one’, fits in neatly with models of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe. READ MORE
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Planets around stars
are the rule
A six-year study that surveyed millions of stars using the gravitational microlensing technique has concluded that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception, with every star in the Milky Way predicted to host a planet. READ MORE
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NASA funds balloon-borne
X-ray telescope
A new X-ray telescope developed by an international team of scientists will float within the Earth’s atmosphere on a one-day mission to calculate how fast black holes spin. READ MORE
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The Milky Way's stray stars
Results from the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration 2 (SEGUE-2) survey shows that the Milky Way disc grew from the inside out, but that some stars have wandered far from the plane of the Galaxy on unusual orbits. READ MORE
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Mapping the large scale structure of dark matter
A large scale map of the web of dark matter that weaves through the Universe has been unveiled at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, as part of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). READ MORE
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Revolutionary new survey to take Milky Way census
The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) spectrograph is the latest addition to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), and is set to catalogue the motions and chemical compositions of over 100,000 stars that span nearly the entire age of the Universe, 300 at a time. READ MORE
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Mars-bound rover ready to take aim at the red planet
The Mars-bound Curiosity rover will be begin steering toward the red planet during a lengthy thruster firing Wednesday, erasing the launch trajectory's deliberate aim away from the destination. READ MORE
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Lunar tandem successfully enters orbit around Moon
When you gaze up at the Moon tonight, know there's now two new spacecraft orbiting to unveil the hidden lunar interior. The GRAIL twins have reached lunar orbit to join forces in a gravity-mapping tandem after a 2.6-million-mile voyage from Earth. The first craft braked into orbit Saturday and the second followed suit Sunday. READ MORE
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Our latest 132-page Astronomy Now special edition is an extravaganza of astronomy for the year ahead, with a complete 30-page guide to observing the planets, moon, meteor showers, two solar eclipses, and the deep sky in 2010.
A 100-page special edition from the creators of Astronomy Now magazine, The Grand Tour of the Universe takes readers from one end of the Universe to the other and, in doing so, asks the question "just how big is the Universe?"
This special publication features the photography of British astro-imager Nik Szymanek and covers a range of photographic methods from basic to advanced. Beautiful pictures of the night sky can be obtained with a simple camera and tripod before tackling more difficult projects, such as guided astrophotography through the telescope and CCD imaging.
Astronomy Now presents
this 100-page, full-colour guide to the 68 constellations visible from the British
Isles by Neil Bone, the respected amateur astronomer and writer.
Astronomy Now is pleased to announce the publication of Exploring Mars. The very best images of Mars taken by orbiting spacecraft and NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers fill up the 98 glossy pages of this special edition!