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| Astronaut Teddy Bear "Sky" |
Cute, cuddly and ready for adventure! Our teddy bear "Sky" is dressed for launch in a Space Shuttle orange pressure suit and helmet. Sky stands 11-inches tall, and his spacesuit is removable. Order now from Countdown Creations!
(Advertisement)
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| What's Up This Week - Nov 15 - 21, 2004 |
Nov 15, 2004 - Welcome back, fellow skywatchers! The "hot" news for this week is, of course, the Leonid Meteor Shower. Where will it happen, when will it happen and how many can we expect to see? The answers to that are all matters of calculation and a whole lot of luck! The predictions for 2004 look best for the early hours of November 19, but why wait? The random rate (thanks to a little help from the Andromedids) has been outstanding! We will also locate and explore globular cluster M30 and a beautiful asterism known as the "Coathanger". Want some color in your stars? Then come along as we locate and view Omicron 1 Cygni! We head south for the "Lonely Star" - Formalhaut, and salute Southern Hemisphere viewers with the finest "double" in the sky, Rigel Kentauris. We will examine lunar features and use the Moon to guide you to the outer planets. You'll find a bit of space history here as well as a lot of fun for the naked-eye
, binocular and telescope observer. For now? Hope for clear skies and mark your calendars...
Because here's what's up! (Full Story) |
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| A Brief Interview With Sir Patrick Moore |
| Nov 15, 2004 - TV host Sir Patrick Moore has popularized astronomy for almost half a century in the United Kingdom and around the world by presenting his monthly Sky at Night program without a break - a slight episode of food-poisoning earlier this year that meant Patrick missed a program, but he made a full recovery. Patrick has also written over a hundred books and thousands of papers on the subject, and was working on a new project when Richard Pearson caught up with him at his East Grinstead home. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Baby Planet Puzzles Astronomers |
| Nov 12, 2004 - In June, researchers from the University of Rochester discovered a planet around a star so young that it shouldn't exist according to existing theories of planetary formation. Further observations have backed up the discovery; there's definitely a planet there which is only 100,000 to 500,000 years old. This is much too young for either of the established theories of planetary formation. In the "core accretion" model, larger and larger chunks of rock smash together for 10 million years until a large planet is formed. In the "gravitational instability" model, a cloud of material pulls together into a planet by its own gravity; this is faster, but still not fast enough to explain how the planet got there. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Keck |
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| Uranus Can Be Stormy After All |
| Nov 12, 2004 - When the Voyager II spacecraft flew past Uranus in 1986, it saw a fairly boring planet with very little storm activity. But new observations from the 10-metre Keck II telescope in Hawaii show that the planet is getting much more active as it's approaching its equinox, with several new powerful storm systems. Just one image taken this year shows 18 storm systems raging across the planet at the same time - Voyager counted a total of 10 during month-long flyby. Some storms come and go in days, while others can last for years. Some storms can reach wind speeds of 420 km/h (260 mph). (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Hubble |
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| Hubble's Accidental Asteroid Discovery |
| Nov 12, 2004 - Although they were using the Hubble Space Telescope to analyze the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, an international team of astronomers were also able to discover a new asteroid that happened to drift through Hubble's field of view. The asteroid is 270 million km (169 million miles) from Earth, which probably puts it into the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - it's only 2.4 km (1.5 miles) across. The asteroid's path is wavy because Hubble was orbiting the Earth as it took a series of long exposures, and the gaps come from times that Hubble's shutter was closed. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| Close View of Phobos |
| Nov 12, 2004 - This photograph of Phobos, one of Mars' two tiny moons, was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft when it was less than 200 km (125 miles) away during a recent flyby. The picture shows the strange parallel grooves that run around moon, and researchers might be able to tell whether they formed before or after the larger impact craters. Phobos is locked in a "death spiral" around Mars, and it'll eventually crash into the planet, or be torn apart and turned into a short-lived ring. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI |
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| Density Waves in Saturn's Rings |
| Nov 10, 2004 - Researchers have used the Cassini spacecraft to make observations of Saturn's rings with tremendous clarity, resolving images down to the size of a football field. A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder have used a technique called "stellar occultation" to look through the rings at a distant star, and then watch how the ring particles obscure it. The ring material bunches up into denser areas, with gaps between them as small as 50 metres (160 feet). This is unusual, because they should be spreading out in the vacuum of space - this means that small objects, like moons, are stirring up the material in the rings like ripples in a pond. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Icy Objects Could Be Smaller Than Previously Thought |
| Nov 10, 2004 - Is Pluto a planet or just a really large Kuiper Belt Object (KBO)? Those arguing that it doesn't deserve planetary status will have to reconsider because of new research from the Spitzer Space Telescope. It was previously believed that KBOs were fairly dark, with a similar reflectivity to comets. From the reflectivity, astronomers guessed that KBOs are quite large, some getting as big as 700 km (434 miles) across. But new observations from Spitzer show that they're probably more reflective than previously thought, and therefore much smaller. This means that Pluto is probably still significantly larger than other objects in the Kuiper Belt. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Planetary Society |
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| Launch Date Set for Solar Sail |
| Nov 10, 2004 - The countdown has begun for the launch of the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 spacecraft; the first ever to be powered by a solar sail. The privately built spacecraft will be lofted into orbit atop a Volna rocket on March 1, 2005. Once Cosmos 1 is in orbit, it will unfurl 8 triangular solar sails, and then use the sails to propel the spacecraft through the pressure of light from the Sun. Cosmos 1 wasn't designed for a long-term trip into space, so it's likely not to last too much longer than a few weeks, or months at the most, but it should serve as a working concept to help designers plan future spacecraft. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Chandra |
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| X-Ray Portrait of Proxima Centauri |
| Nov 10, 2004 - NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory took this image of red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, our closest stellar neighbour (after the Sun, of course). The image shows that its surface is in a constant state of turmoil, with flares occurring almost continuously. Proxima Centauri has only 1/10th the mass of our own Sun, and the conversion of hydrogen to helium happens much more slowly. This creates turbulent, convective motion throughout its interior, which stores up magnetic energy - the energy is what creates all the flares. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| A Solar System's Icy Building Blocks |
| Nov 10, 2004 - New images released from the Spitzer space telescope are helping scientists understand how clouds of gas and dust come together to form new solar systems. One image shows a dim object at the heart of an icy cloud, which resembles our own early solar system. This object isn't a star... yet, but it could be a young failed star, a brown dwarf, a star which has yet to ignite, or something else entirely. In another image, Spitzer looked at the centre of a dusty disc around a young star and found icy building blocks that will eventually form into planets - similar to how our planets looked when they were only a few hundred thousand years old. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NRAO |
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| Black Holes or Galaxies, Which Came First? |
| Nov 9, 2004 - Since supermassive black holes were first discovered, astronomers have been wondering if the hole was created first, and then the galaxy formed around it, or if these monsters tend to form at the heart of galaxies over time. Astronomers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array have discovered a distant galaxy that's less than a billion years old, but seems to have a supermassive black hole - but no massive bulge of stars. The black hole is 1 billion solar masses, so it should be surrounded by several trillion solar masses in stars. This provides evidence that it's the black hole that forms first, then the galaxy. (Full Story) |
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| What's Happening on the Universe Today Forum? |
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Check out the Universe Today discussion forums and share your thoughts with other space enthusiasts. Here are a few interesting topics recently added:
Moon, Jupiter, and Venus - All in one picture.
Aliens - What would they really look like?
Triple Star Systems - Are there many examples of three stars orbiting each other?
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Copyright © 1999-2004 Universe Today, All rights reserved.
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