Keith Cooper – Page 8 – Astronomy Now

Habitable exomoons will need to be bigger than Mars

1 June 2015 Keith Cooper

Planet-sized moons orbiting huge gas giants could provide havens for life around other stars, but in order to be habitable these moons would need to be larger and more massive than Mars.

The Science of Interstellar

5 May 2015 Keith Cooper

It is not often that a major Hollywood science fiction film uses hard science as one of its primary drivers. In Interstellar, this is thanks primarily to the involvement of Professor Kip Thorne of Caltech, writes reviewer Keith Cooper.

A perfect ring

29 April 2015 Keith Cooper

This incredible halo-shaped object is an Einstein Ring, which is an extreme manifestation of Albert Einstein’s General Relativity in action.

Binary black holes found verging on merging

22 April 2015 Keith Cooper

Twin black holes, so close that they are gravitationally bound and orbiting around one another in the final stages before they merge to form one colossal black hole, have been found in a quasar that existed around 10.3 billion years ago.

Colourful skies over ESO

21 April 2015 Keith Cooper

A kaleidoscope of colours hang above the giant structures of the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The scene is a mixture of a red sunset, the hazy zodiacal light and the pearlescent pinks of star-forming regions in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Massive galaxies died from the inside out

16 April 2015 Keith Cooper

Some of the biggest galaxies in the Universe started to shut down their star-formation from the inside-out ten billion years ago, according to new observations made using the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Clouds fail to spoil the eclipse party

20 March 2015 Keith Cooper

While clouds did their best to obscure the solar eclipse, many observers have still been able to witness the Moon moving in front of the Sun.

Why do eclipses happen?

18 March 2015 Keith Cooper

Solar eclipses are relatively rare; they happen when the Moon moves directly and precisely in front of the Sun. Why are they so infrequent, and why do solar eclipses always come in pairs with lunar eclipses?

The day it rained fire over Chelyabinsk

15 February 2015 Keith Cooper

Two years ago, on February 15th, the morning routine of the Chelyabinsk region in Russia was shattered by the arrival of a 20-metre-wide meteoroid that dramatically fragmented in the atmosphere. The ensuing shockwave shattered windows, damaged buildings and 1,491 people received injuries. What have we learned since 2013?

How to prevent another Chelyabinsk

14 February 2015 Keith Cooper

The Chelyabinsk event two years ago heightened public awareness of the threat posed to humanity by an asteroid strike, but what can be done to prevent it happening again? The forthcoming Sentinel Space Telescope and ATLAS Project will hopefully prevent us being caught off guard.