Archive

InSight Mars lander deploys seismometer shield

5 February 2019 Astronomy Now

A robot arm aboard NASA’s InSight Mars lander has completed deployment of a sensitive French-built seismometer and its critical wind and thermal shield.

New analysis shows Milky Way a decidedly ‘warped” spiral

5 February 2019 Astronomy Now

Precisely mapping more than 1,300 Cepheid variable stars with known distances, astronomers have shown the disc of the Milky Way galaxy is warped.

A meteoroid crashes on eclipse-darkened moon

3 February 2019 Astronomy Now

Amateur and professional astronomers alike captured the flash generated by a small meteoroid crashing into the moon during the January lunar eclipse.

Wreckage of a doomed star in the Large Magellanic Cloud

1 February 2019 Astronomy Now

A supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic cloud, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006, shows the spectacular aftermath of a supernova blast, generating a cloud of debris expanding at 18 million kilometres per hour (11 million mph).

Gravity measurements surprise Mars researchers

1 February 2019 Astronomy Now

Analysing gravity data from the Curiosity Mars rover, researchers have found Gale Crater might not have been completely filled in the distant past.

Hubble stumbles on previously unseen dwarf galaxy

31 January 2019 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the age of a globular cluster stumbled on a previously unknown, relatively nearby dwarf galaxy.

Watch the International Space Station pass overhead from the UK

31 January 2019 Ade Ashford

Have you ever seen the International Space Station (ISS)? It’s capable of exceeding Venus at its brightest and visible for up to 7 minutes as it crawls across the sky in an arc from west to east. Find out when and where to see some favourable passes of this 450-tonne, 109-metre-long spacecraft over the British Isles and Western Europe this week.