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Search Results for 'davide'
ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET!
Huge news! Astronomers have announced they have found a planet orbiting one of the stars making up the most famous star in the sky: Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own! At 4.3 light years distant, this is far and away the closest exoplanet known… and of course, it has to be. Alpha [...]
Hold on tight: in 4 billion years, we're due for a galactic collision!
The galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy that lives in a small cluster of other galaxies called the Local Group. The other big member is the Andromeda galaxy, located about 2.5 million light years away. That’s a long way off, but we’ve known for a long time that Andromeda [...]
The darkness and the light
The sky is not as it seems. Certainly, gazing upon it on a clear night you see so much: stars, planets, the glow of hot gas here and there… but there’s also darkness. Look at the Milky Way, its stream split down the middle by a rift of black. Gape at a gaudy nebula, and [...]
First light for ALMA
After a decade of painstaking engineering and construction, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is now open for business. ALMA is a collection of (currently) 19 telescopes, each 12 meters across, that can detect light that is between the radio and infrared parts of the spectrum. All sorts of interesting objects emit this kind of [...]
The Triangulum Galaxy, writ large
Need a little face-on spiral awesomeness for your Monday morning? Then try this magnificent image of the nearby face-on spiral galaxy M33, aka the Triangulum Galaxy: [Click to islanduniversalize, or go here to get the cosmic 7900 x 8000 pixel version.] That not enough for ya? Then try this: Here’s a zoomable and pannable version! [...]
Exoplanet found… from another galaxy!!
Today, astronomers announced that they have found a new exoplanet, a planet orbiting another star. Nearly 500 exoplanets have been found in the past 15 years, so what’s the big deal, you may ask? The big deal is that this planet and star are from another galaxy! [Artist's impression of the alien planet; click to [...]
Awesome Antennae!
The Antennae Galaxies are probably the most famous and beautiful example of a cosmic traffic accident in the sky: two spiral galaxies undergoing a massive collision. Davide De Martin took the Hubble images of this pair and reprocessed them as part of his Sky Factory project: Holy wow! These galaxies are very roughly 45 million [...]
Gravity's galactic brushstrokes
Great beauty in art, it is sometimes thought, comes at the price of great strife. Massive forces, both internal and external, shape the flow of artistry. This metaphor applies equally well to galaxies as it does to humans. Of course, when the Universe is your canvas, the scale’s a little bigger. Like with this dramatic [...]
Satellites collide in orbit
[Note: The initial math I did here was wrong; off by a factor of 5 or so because I forgot to add in a piece of needed physics! I correct it in this post below, and give details in the following post.] Wow: two satellites have collided in orbit, destroying both. This is the first [...]
Sky Factory's stellar foreground
I have managed to pull a muscle in my shoulder, so writing is really hard today. Until I can make my left arm move normally, I will simply leave you with this incredible image of Gamma Cygni, a bright star in the summer constellation of Cygnus. The image is by Davide De Martin of Sky [...]
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