After ʻOumuamua, now we are likely to have another interstellar visitor beyond our solar system: comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). So the interstellar objects entering the solar system may not be rare at all.
Category Archives: Astronomy
Hubble’s latest portrait of Saturn and its rings
On June 20, 2019, Hubble Space Telescope snapped this beautiful portrait of Saturn and its rings at the ringed planet’s closest approach to Earth. The image was published on September 12, 2019.
Super Saturn: J1407b
The exoplanet J1407b is simply “Super Saturn”. If you read Isaac Asimov‘s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth”, you’ll remember how the main characters of the book (Councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Pelorat, and Gaian Bliss) were amazed by Saturn’s rings. They were thinking the gas giant with preeminent rings in old stories was just a …
Terrascope: Turning Earth into a giant telescope
We can turn Earth into a giant telescope. According to a recent study titled “The ‘Terrascope’: On the Possibility of Using the Earth as an Atmospheric Lens”, published by David Kipping of Columbia University, our planet offers an opportunity for pronounced lensing.
Where are the spacecraft and planets now? [NASA animation]
To see exactly where the spacecraft and the celestial bodies (planets and other astronomical objects) really are, right now, you can use NASA’s real-time, 3D solar system model.
NASA has published the amazing map of 4,000 exoplanets
Even as late as 1991, we had no hard evidence of planets existing outside our solar system (a centuries-old quest), known as “exoplanets”. Today, over 4000 exoplanets are known to exist. NASA has published an amazing video map showing them in the Milky Way galaxy on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
How Earth Could Die [12 Horrible Ways!]
Now we’re living on a warm, hospitable planet. As Carl Sagan has said “That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” We, humans, are the unquestionable rulers of our little oasis in a hostile universe. But …
Solar System through the eyes of Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and entered service on May 20, 1990. Since then, it has observed all the planets in our Solar System, apart from Earth and Mercury. Earth is far better studied by geologists on the ground and specialized probes in orbit. Hubble can’t observe Mercury as it is …
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What if Ganymede was the Earth’s second moon?
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest and most massive of the Solar System’s moons. It has a mean radius of 2634.1±0.3 km (about 1636 miles, 0.413 Earths). For comparison, our Moon’s radius is 1,737.1 km (1079 mi). What if Ganymede was the Earth’s second moon? How would it look in the sky, if it was …
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This image of Antares is the best-ever photo of a star Beyond the Sun
On August 23, 2017, astronomers have unveiled a photo that is the most detailed ever image of a star other than our Sun. The image of the red “supergiant” Antares has been constructed using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) on Cerro Paranal (a mountain in the Atacama Desert of northern …
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