Astronomy for ALL

28/07/2015

Announced on July 23, 2015, planet Kepler-452b is larger than Earth and orbits a star nearly identical to the sun, but older and therefore hotter. The planet's orbit is nearly the same as Earth's, and its year is about 20 days longer than Earth's. Kepler-452b is 1,400 light-years away.

13/05/2015

Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach you, thus you see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. It might have blown up 4 minutes ago and you wouldn't know about it!
When Galileo viewed Saturn for the first time through a telescope, he described the planet as having "ears". It was not until 1655 that Christian Huygens suggested the crazy theory that they might be an enormous set of rings around the planet.

13/05/2015

SORRY for the inactivity of mine. Stay tuned as a whole lot of news is coming for u all.

13/11/2014

Philae is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanied the Rosetta spacecraft[4] until its designated landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, more than ten years after departing Earth.On 12 November 2014, the lander achieved the first-ever controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus.Its instruments are expected to obtain the first images from a comet's surface and make the first in situ analysis to determine its composition.

04/11/2014

What is the origin of the stellar mass spectrum? That is, why do astronomers observe the same distribution of stellar masses – the initial mass function – apparently regardless of the initial conditions?[93] A deeper understanding of the formation of stars and planets is needed.

02/11/2014

A white dwarf is a compact star. Their matter is squashed together. Gravitation has pulled the atoms close together, and stripped off their electrons. The mass of a white dwarf's mass is similar to that of the Sun, but its volume is similar to that of the Earth.

White dwarfs are the final evolutionary state of all stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star. Over 97% of the stars in the Milky Way will become white dwarf stars.

30/10/2014

Mars takes its name from the Roman god of war:
The ancient Greeks called the planet Ares, after their god of war; the Romans then did likewise, associating the planet’s blood-red colour with Mars, their own god of war. Interestingly, other ancient cultures also focused on colour – to China’s astronomers it was ‘the fire star’, whilst Egyptian priests called on ‘Her Desher’, or ‘the red one’. The red colour Mars is known for is due to the rock and dust covering its surface being rich in iron.

27/10/2014

A nebula (from Latin: "cloud";[1] pl. nebulae or nebulæ, with ligature, or nebulas) is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. Originally, nebula was a name for any diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble and others.

24/10/2014

ISRO and NASA have inked a deal to collaborate on future missions to jointly explore the Red Planet and our Home Planet hot on the heels of ISRO’s wildly successful Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), India’s first ever interplanetary voyager to explore Mars.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), signed an agreement to collaborate on future science missions to explore Mars as well as to build and launch a joint NASA-ISRO mission to observe Earth.

21/10/2014

A black hole is a region of spacetime from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.[1] The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole.

21/10/2014