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STS-120 day 2 highlights

Flight Day 2 of Discovery's mission focused on heat shield inspections. This movie shows the day's highlights.

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STS-120 day 1 highlights

The highlights from shuttle Discovery's launch day are packaged into this movie.

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STS-118: Highlights

The STS-118 crew, including Barbara Morgan, narrates its mission highlights film and answers questions in this post-flight presentation.

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STS-120: Rollout to pad

Space shuttle Discovery rolls out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and travels to launch pad 39A for its STS-120 mission.

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Dawn leaves Earth

NASA's Dawn space probe launches aboard a Delta 2-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral to explore two worlds in the asteroid belt.

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Dawn: Launch preview

These briefings preview the launch and science objectives of NASA's Dawn asteroid orbiter.

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Embryonic planet imaged around young star
BY EMILY BALDWIN
ASTRONOMY NOW

Posted: April 2, 2008


This is an image from the computer simulation of HL Tau and its surrounding disc. In the model the dense clump (seen here at top right) forms with a mass of about 8 times that of Jupiter at a distance from the star about 75 times that from the Earth to the Sun. Image: Greaves, Richards, Rice & Muxlow 2008).

The youngest planet ever to be seen has been captured in its earliest stage of formation in a disc of gas and rocky debris around a star 520 light years away.

Using the MERLIN and Very Large Array radio observatories in the UK and US respectively, a team of astronomers lead by Dr Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews studied the disc of gas and rocky particles surrounding the extremely young star HL Tau and identified a 'clump' of material at a distance of about 65 AU from the parent star, twice as far from HL Tau as Neptune is from our Sun.

VIDEO Dr Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews speaks with Astronomy Now Web Editor Emily Baldwin about her discovery of the youngest forming planet yet seen.
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"This star is probably less than 100,000 years old," says Greaves, "and we see a distinct ball of gas and dust orbiting around it, which is exactly how a protoplanet should look." The protoplanet is made up of dust grains and fist-sized rocks, and could form a planet about 14 times as massive as Jupiter.

Using computer simulations, team member Dr Ken Rice of the University of Edinburgh showed that a massive protoplanet of around 8 Jupiter masses could condense out of a disc into a self-constrained structure at a distance comparable to that observed by the radio telescopes. "The simulations show that the gravitational instability model really does work," comments Greaves. "This is the first image of a protoplanet that has ever been made and we've also captured the environment in which the planet is forming."

The team hope to use the eMERLIN telescope array to make similar observations of other protoplanetary discs, which may be able to resolve Earth-sized exoplanets.

2008 Yearbook
This 132-page special edition features the ultimate observing guide for 2008, a review of all the biggest news stories, in depth articles covering all aspects of astronomy including astrophotography, the future of the Sun and space missions for 2008, and much, much more.
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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?"
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Infinity Rising
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.
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Starry Night
Explore the Universe with these new versions of the award-winning Starry Night Software. Available now from the Astronomy Now Store.
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Exploring Mars
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!
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Mars rover poster
This new poster features some of the best pictures from NASA's amazing Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
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