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Mercury’s best early evening twilight show for 2015

1 May 2015 Ade Ashford

The first ten days of May offer observers in the British Isles their best opportunity to see Mercury in the early evening twilight during 2015. So, if you’ve never seen the innermost planet, let dazzling Venus be your convenient guide to this elusive little world.

Jodrell Bank to be headquarters for world’s largest radio telescope

1 May 2015 Astronomy Now

At their 29th April meeting, members of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation decided that negotiations should start with the UK government to locate the permanent headquarters of the SKA project at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank site.

Lava lake of Io’s volcano Loki viewed with Large Binocular Telescope

30 April 2015 Astronomy Now

With the first detailed observations through imaging interferometry of a lava lake on Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory places itself as the forerunner of the next generation of extremely large telescopes.

New Horizons detects features and possible polar cap on Pluto

30 April 2015 Astronomy Now

For the first time, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto — the primary target of the New Horizons close flyby in mid-July.

Was water abundant in the first billion years of the universe?

29 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Bok globules are dark knots of gas and dust in larger molecular clouds that we see today. New theoretical work shows that similar islands of gas enriched in heavy elements in the early universe could have held as much water vapour as we find in our galaxy today.

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.

Astrophysicists create 3-D master map of the universe

29 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have created a spherical 3-D map of the universe spanning nearly two billion light-years that is the most complete picture of our cosmic neighbourhood to date.

IAU contest enables public to name 47 exoplanets and stars

28 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The NameExoWorlds contest, organised by the International Astronomical Union and Zooniverse, is now entering its next stage. Fifteen stars and 32 planets have been made available for naming proposals from registered clubs and non-profit organisations.

U. S. Naval Observatory releases 228 million-star catalogue

27 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The United States Naval Observatory’s Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) near Flagstaff, Arizona began to systematically image the sky every clear night for a period of just over two years, culminating in the URAT1 catalogue of precise positional data on about 228 million stars.

Astronomers find runaway galaxies

25 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers mining data from Virtual Observatory archives found 11 previously unknown compact elliptical galaxies that were isolated from from any galaxy cluster, flung out of their homes at speeds up to 6 million miles per hour to wander the void of intergalactic space.