Top Stories
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MRO maps out hidden ice
Gamma-ray glow steeped in mystery
Lava likely made river-like channel on Mars
Old star missing link in galaxy evolution
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Is Comet Siding Spring splitting up?
This dramatic image, captured by Astronomy Now's Nick Howes earlier today of Comet C2007 Q3 Siding Spring, suggests that the comet's nucleus might be disintegrating.
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Preview the April issue of Astronomy Now!
Editor Keith Cooper previews the March 2010 issue of Astronomy Now magazine WATCH NOW |
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Sizing up a
temperate exoplanet
Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and ground-based ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have a discovered a 'standard' exoplanet that is set to become the Rosetta stone of exoplanet research. FULL STORY |
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First look at weather inside Jupiter's red spot
Stunning new thermal images derived from ground-based telescopes reveal the first detailed weather maps of Jupiter's giant storm system. FULL STORY |
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Planck's tapestry of
cold dust
The latest offering from ESA's Planck satellite reveals giant filaments of cold dust stretching across the Milky Way. The nature of these features could help determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation. FULL STORY |
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Ultra-luminous supernova sparked by merger
More evidence that a significant proportion of Type Ia supernovae are the result of two white dwarfs merging together and exploding has been found in a study of an ultra-luminous supernova. FULL STORY |
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Flickering ribbons shield star-forming gas
By all rights massive stars should emerge from their nebulous wombs stillborn, as their radiation heats the surrounding gas and stops the star from growing. Now new research has revealed that spiral filaments of gas act as a shield, absorbing the heat of young stars and allowing gas from beyond to continue to fall onto them.
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Solar wind pulses strip
Mars' atmosphere
Mars is constantly losing small amounts of its atmosphere into space, but a new study shows that the loss rate may be enhanced by pulses of solar wind energy.
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Titan's interior revealed
By precisely tracking Cassini's motion during its closest passes of Saturn's moon Titan, scientists have been given an insight into the large moon's internal structure, finding it to be a disorganised mix of rock and ice. FULL STORY |
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Explosive outflows halt star formation in distant galaxy
Tumultuous events in a galaxy far, far away are signalling the end of star formation within it, indicating how and why the most massive galaxies in the Universe ceased growing a few billion years after the big bang. FULL STORY |
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Cosmic dark flow
mystery deepens
The motion of distant galaxy clusters streaming at a million miles per hour along a path centred on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra has been tracked to twice the distance originally recorded. FULL STORY |
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Glimpsing the heartbeat
of the Milky Way
Thousands of stars comprising Spitzer's Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) have been used to listen for the 'heartbeat' of the Milky Way in terms of the rate at which our Galaxy is producing new stars. FULL STORY |
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Lava likely made river-like channel on Mars
Dried-up river channels on Mars are some of the best evidence that water once flowed on the surface of the red planet, but new analysis of a channel once thought to have been carved by water shows that it was in fact formed from lava. FULL STORY |
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The five-minute
white dwarf waltz
Utilising the resolving power of the ten-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii, astronomers from the University of Warwick and Radboud University in the Netherlands have confirmed the existence of a double white dwarf system where the two stars orbit one another every 5.4 minutes. FULL STORY |
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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter maps out hidden ice
Significant volumes of buried ice have been discovered in the mid-latitudes of Mars’ northern hemisphere, according to a report presented at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference earlier this week. FULL STORY |
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Bully galaxy rules the neighbourhood
Galaxies are often found in groups, interacting with their neighbours, but a recent Hubble Space Telescope image reveals that some galaxies are loners, gobbling up other galaxies that lie in their path. FULL STORY |
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Winds of change in middle-of-the-road galaxy
A howling gale of radiation blowing from a black hole in the spiral galaxy M77 is impacting on star formation despite the black hole’s ‘moderate’ size, according to observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. FULL STORY |
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Old star missing link in galaxy evolution
A newly discovered star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the big bang may be the missing link in models of our Galaxy's evolution. FULL STORY |
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Gamma-ray glow
steeped in mystery
An omnipresent fog of high energy gamma-ray radiation that bathes the entire Universe is being produced mostly by a mysterious, unknown source, revealed scientists this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High-Energy Astrophysics Division. FULL STORY |
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First step taken to solve neutrino problem
Scientists at the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan have tracked the experiment's first neutrino, a small step towards finding out why we live in a matter-dominated Universe. FULL STORY |
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Ice found at Moon's north pole
Radar data analysed from India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft reveals ice deposits in craters dotted around the Moon’s north pole that could contain as much as 600 million tons of ice. FULL STORY |
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Mars Express ready for closest Phobos flyby
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express is set to perform its closest flyby of Phobos tonight. ESA hopes that the data collected by the spacecraft will help solve the origin of Mars’ largest moon. FULL STORY |
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Galaxy magnifiers measure age and size of Universe
Using galaxies as giant magnifying lenses, researchers have measured the size and age of the Universe, giving strength to the gravitational lensing technique as one that can provide reliable data on the parameters of the Universe. FULL STORY |
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Super-hot giant exoplanet spills into host star
A gas-giant planet orbiting a star in the Auriga constellation is slowly having its atmosphere stripped off and siphoned onto the surface of its host star. FULL STORY |
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Silence from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander
We all struggle with long northern winters here on Earth, but enduring the harsh northern Martian winter may have proved too much for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. FULL STORY |
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First images of soil moisture and ocean salinity
The first images delivered by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission show global variations in Earth's soil moisture and ocean salinity. FULL STORY |
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Amateur astronomers to shed light on solar storms
Internet users are being asked to help scientists analyse solar storm data from America’s space agency NASA as part of "Solar Stormwatch", a new initiative that was launched last week. FULL STORY |
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Cassini unravels secrets of Titan's cryovolcanism
Scientists have long believed that the Hotei Regio area on Saturn's murky moon Titan shows signs of ancient cryovolcanism, but have debated over whether there is sufficient evidence to show there is any current activity. Now, data from two sets of instruments onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have been combined to reveal the latest findings. FULL STORY |
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Stardust primed for second comet fly-by
Stardust, the first unmanned spacecraft to return comet samples to Earth, has been successfully aligned for its second and possibly final mission: to deal with NASA’s unfinished business at comet Tempel 1. FULL STORY |
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For more news stories see our News Archive
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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.
U.K. STORE
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!
Hubble Reborn takes the reader on a journey through the Universe with spectacular full-colour pictures of galaxies, nebulae, planets and stars as seen through Hubble's eyes, along the way telling the dramatic story of the space telescope, including interviews with key scientists and astronauts. 
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.
Witness the most awesome sights of the Universe as they were meant to be seen in this 100-page extravaganza of planets, galaxies and star-scapes, all in 3D! 
