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Many stars form in giant groups known as open clusters, which are crucial for the galaxy's development. There should be about 30,000 clusters in the Milky Way, but we've only ever found 2,500. Now, you can raise that number to 2,596. More »
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At first, the exoplanet 55 Cancri e didn't look all that impressive: just another large rocky planet circling its star every couple of days. But a recalculation of its orbit has revealed that it's the galaxy's densest known planet. More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted evidence of this cosmic buffet taking place 600 light years away in the constellation Auriga, where the WASP-12 yellow dwarf star is eating one of its planets. More »
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Well, it's about time. Asteroids hitting Earth has been a big problem for life this planet since forever, and at last governments around the world have been united in their inability to give a shit. And they did it without Gort the giant robot forcing them! Next year, the Canadian Space Agency will launch the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), the first space-borne asteroid hunting device ever made. More »
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You're looking at the future site of the Earth's first permanent base on the Moon's south pole. This picture was created this week using NASA Jet Propulsion Lab's new, extra-powerful radar antenna dish, 70 meters across, in the California Mojave desert. Says NASA researcher Scott Hensley, "With these data [from the new radar antenna] we can see terrain features as small as a house without even leaving the office." Find out why the Moon's south pole is a great spot for condos and what it would be like to live there below. More »
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Yeah, you read that headline right. This supermassive radio telescope, set to be completed in Chile in 2012 (you're seeing an artist's rendering), listens to frequencies between the infrared and radio spectrum. It tunes in particles that will give astronomers an unprecedented portrait of the early universe, as well as planetary and star formations in our current volume of space. It's called the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA for short). One of the best parts of the array is that it comes with giant antenna transporters that allow researchers to reconfigure it on the fly. Just last week, the transporters arrived in Chile. Want to see one? More »
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The Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico is the most sensitive and gigantic radio telescope in the world, used to do radar studies on objects in our local solar system. Despite its long history of excellent operation - it was built in the early 1960s - the National Science Foundation is threatening to cut its funding down to almost nothing by 2011. Nevertheless, the massive radio apparatus just got a fresh coat of paint, as you can see in the picture, and the Arecibo Observatory is scrambling for fresh funding sources. See the telescope in its glory days in 1962 below the fold. More »
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