Posts for 'Astrometry' Category

Astro means 'relating to the stars' and metry means to do with measurement, so astrometry is the branch of astronomy concerned with measuring the positions, motions, and brightness of celestial objects.Astrometry by hand When astronomers analyse a new image, one of their first tasks is often to 'solve the astrometry'. This means they work out where that picture belongs in a standard reference frame, such as a chart of the whole sky.

Astrometry 'by hand' can involve lots of complicated calculations but astromomers need to do it so they can compare images and observations. For digital photos, solving the astrometry means they map particular pixels to positions on the sky.

Read the complete story

"Inhospitable" doesn't do it justice: the temperature on Pluto, even during its summer (which comes around only every 248 years) is -230°C. Sheathed in layers of frozen nitrogen and methane, its average distance from the sun is 3.6 billion miles. A contrarian among the spheres, it rotates in the opposite direction to the earth. Yet it's hard not to feel some affection for this unluckiest of heavenly bodies, identified 80 years ago this week at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

The first planetary discovery of the mass-media age excited worldwide interest, much of it focused on the search for a name. Venetia Burnley was the lucky Oxford schoolgirl whose grandfather passed her breakfast-table suggestion on to astronomers. She later claimed to have chosen the Roman god of the underworld because it had not already been used, though the bleak associations could hardly have been more apt.

Read the complete story

Astronomers examining data from a supernova first observed in 2002 have determined that it represents a new class of rapidly exploding star. 

The explosion may have resulted from a binary star system where helium flowed from one white dwarf star to another, building up a layer of gas that detonated in a thermonuclear explosion.

The supernova, dubbed SM 2002bj, was three to four times faster than a standard supernova, disappearing in about 20 days, compared to three to four months for a typical supernova.

"This is the fastest evolving supernova we have ever seen," said Dovi Poznanski, an astronomer with University of California.

Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Its brightness just dropped like a rock."

Read the complete story

And that he did during his high-energy presentation -- all the way to outside our solar system where astronomers have detected 374 other planets so far, and are bound to discover many more, including “new Earths,” he said.

Shipman's presentation kicked off the Harcourt “Ace” Vernon Lecture Series hosted by the Delaware Asteroseismic Research Center (DARC) at UD and sponsored by the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Observatory.

Named in honor of the late Vernon, who was the first chairman of the observatory's board of trustees, the series, which includes two other lectures this autumn, was established to celebrate the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.

Read the complete story

Astronomers have found a rocky planet in a distant solar system, in a discovery that raises hopes of finding alien life. Corot 7b is similar in size to Earth, but daytime temperatures of 1,500C mean it is far
too hot for anything to flourish there.

However the discovery suggests there may be planets with more hospitable conditions throughout the galaxy. Corot 7b orbits a star 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. It is thought to be covered in lava or boiling oceans.

Although scientists have found more than 330 planets outside our own solar system before - including 12 thought to be solid -   this is the smallest, and the first one confirmed to be made of rock. 'This is a day we’ve been waiting for a long time,' said Sara Seager, an expert in distant pla ets at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  'It’s the first definitive rocky world beyond our solar system, and it’s opening a new gate for our research. We’re really, really excited about it.'

Read the complete story

An email promising a "Mars spectacular" on August 27 has astronomers seeing red, as scientists try to counter a seemingly unending Mars hoax.  The anonymous message from an unknown part of the globe says that the red planet " … will look as large as the full moon" in the night sky, and that "no one alive today will ever see this again." 

The claim has been bombarding people's inboxes worldwide every summer for five years. Today the Mars hoax has grown into a kind of cyber legend—one that astronomers are still struggling to debunk.

Read the complete story

This is a short addition to the four-part series on Quantum Astronomy previously written . Here, we add some details resulting from the process of submitting a paper to the scientific literature.

If you'd like to read the technical paper it is entitled, "Quantum Uncertainty Considerations for Gravitational Lens Interferometry" by Doyle and Carico, and can be downloaded.

Read the complete story

Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way.

The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. The results will be published in the August 6, 2009 issue of the journal Nature, with a companion paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

Read the complete story

An amateur astronomer from Canberra who sent the science world into a spin after spotting a rare collision on Jupiter hopes the discovery will inspire others. Anthony Wesley, a computer programmer, etched his name in astronomy history on Monday when he uncovered evidence of a rare crash between a comet and the giant planet.

The tiny black smudge on Jupiter's surface, as seen through Mr Wesley's telescope, was later confirmed to be an impact mark the size of Earth, believed to have been caused by a rare, 1km-wide comet. The find has been hailed by NASA scientists and astronomers worldwide, who thought the chances of a second collision following the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 were astronomical.

Mr Wesley, a longtime astronomy nut, who calls Jupiter "his passion", said the discovery had changed his life. "It's something that anyone who's interested in the planets or astronomy would have to dream about," he told. "But I certainly had no idea that something like this would ever happen again in my lifetime or that I'd be the one to see it."

Read the complete story

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) has achieved a milestone of sorts, in the sense that over a million people have already looked at the sky through a telescope for the first time, and even more have newly engaged in astronomy in just six months this year.This is just one of many achievements, as countless ongoing projects and planned initiatives indicate that the IYA2009 is well on the way towards achieving many of its goals.

UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) launched 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy under the theme “The Universe, Yours to Discover”.The IYA2009 is a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture, with events at national, regional and global levels throughout the whole of 2009.Now, halfway through 2009, much has been achieved and even more can be expected in the future.

Read the complete story