Astronomers have been on quite a roll lately with lots of new discoveries being announced over the last several months. One of the most interesting discoveries that astronomers have made in recent times was the discovery of one of the most tightly packed exoplanet systems ever identified. The discovery was made using the Kepler Space Telescope.
A group of astronomers, including some volunteers has made a very interesting discovery of a new planet in a unique system. The new planet that was discovered is a gas giant about six times the size of the Earth. The planet itself isn't as interesting as the fact that it orbits a unique star system.
Sometimes interesting discoveries in space are made by amateur astronomers rather than scientists at NASA and other organizations around the world. This is exactly what happened this week when amateur astronomer George Hall captured image of what appears to be some sort of massive impact on the surface of Jupiter. Hall was recording video observations of the planet with his telescope on September 10 from Dallas, Texas.
The cosmos is an amazing place. The things astronomers and scientists discover scattered around the universe are incredible. Thanks to a group of volunteers participating in the online Galaxy Zoo project, we can now literally say that galaxies come in all shapes of the alphabet.
Astronomers have announced an interesting discovery around a distant star 400 light years from Earth. The astronomers have discovered simple sugar molecules floating in gas around the star in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region. According to the astronomers, the discovery doesn't indicate there's any life around the star in question, but shows that the basic building blocks for life can be found even before planets begin to form.
Our Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy and as special as it is, it's certainly not the only galaxy of its kind in the universe. Astronomers have announced the discovery of two galaxies that are nearly a perfect match for the Milky Way. According to astronomers, spiral galaxies are common, but these newfound twin galaxies share other key features of our Milky Way.
An enormous sunspot observed on the sun over the weekend may portend problematic solar activity, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report. The cool area of the sun known as AR1476, which contains multiple sunspots big enough to see with even basic astronomy equipment, displayed complex beta-gamma magnetic fields as it passed within view of the Earth on May 6th.
Even casual students of astronomy know that comets ringing a star in semi-stable orbits is a common universal occurrence, even for our own Sol. But European astronomers have found one star that has an astounding number of them: as many as 83 trillion, to the best of the scientists' estimates. This incredible number of orbital bodies creates constant collisions in space, which in turn litters the solar area with massive amounts of ice and dust, the reflections of which can be seen from our own high-powered infrared telescopes 25 light years away. The amount of mass that this dust represents at any given time is about a hundred times that of the Earth.