Amateur astrophotographer Francisco Sojuel took an amazing photo of our satellite: because of the clouds, the Moon looks like Saturn – as if it is attempting to impersonate the ringed planet.
Category: Astronomy
Freeman Dyson, the English-born American theoretical physicist, and mathematician who imagined a hypothetical alien megastructure called “Dyson Sphere” died on February 28, 2020. Freeman was 96 years old.
A very beautiful photo of Earth and Moon as seen through Saturn’s rings – an image taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on April 13, 2017.
Why the night sky is dark? It sounds obvious. That’s what night is. The sun has set and when you look up at the sky, it’s black. Except where there’s a star, of course. The stars are bright and shiny.
Do you remember when did you see a sky full of stars last? It’s been many years for me, I even can’t remember when I saw last. A lot of young people didn’t see even once, because of the light pollution in cities, since they were born in cities and probably never went to the countryside.
Once (almost) every four years, we have a “leap year” which has 366 days instead of 365. Why it is like that? Why do we have leap years? JAXA (Former NASA Goddard) Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) explains why we have leap years in his latest video.
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy created a spectacular image of the Moon’s surface in great detail by combining 100,000 long-exposure photos.
Most exoplanets, bodies orbiting stars other than the sun, are too far away for us to be able to send probes to. So it’s no wonder that the discovery of a possibly habitable planet around the sun’s nearest neighbour star, Proxima Centauri, a few years ago generated a lot of excitement. Now we have spotted what we think is a second planet around this star.
Every season has its characteristic star constellations in the night sky. Orion – one of the most recognisable – is distinctly visible on crisp, clear winter nights in the northern hemisphere. The constellation is easy to spot even in light-polluted cities, with its bright stars representing the shape of a person.
Betelgeuse, marking Orion’s top left shoulder, is often its brightest star. Red in colour, this star is usually the 12th brightest in the entire sky. But it has recently dimmed dramatically to an all-time low of the 21st brightest star in the sky. As a result, many have started speculating about whether it could be about to explode. But could it? And what would that look like?
Scientists have found the oldest material on Earth in a 7 billion-year-old meteorite – a space rock that is way older than the Earth and even older than our solar system! For comparison, the age of Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years, with an error range of about 50 million years. The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old.