Astronomy related news and current events of interest in the skies above our heads written by Matthew Hodgson
Two teams report in Nature their analysis of the Chelyabinsk meteorite estimating the energy to be 500kt equivalent of TNT and find a common origin, 2km diameter asteroid 86039 (1999NC43) located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Click to read more
A statistical analysis of all the data accumulated by the Kepler mission has been conducted to reach an estimate of the number of Sun-like stars that have potentially habitable Earth-size planets orbiting them. Their conclusion is “22% of Sun-like stars harbour Earth-sized planets orbiting in their habitable zones.” Click to read more
A stellar-mass black hole candidate has been discovered in the globular cluster Messier 22. This potential discovery calls into question assumptions about stellar interactions within globular clusters which were thought to have resulted in the ejection of all stellar-mass black holes long ago. Click to read more
A new planet discovery located 400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus has provided a new challenge to planetary formation models. Click to read more
BBC have announced that the Sky at Night will continue to be produced beyond the scheduled run ending in December 2013. Click to read more
A team led by scientists from Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin have published the result of a new study of high red shift galaxies, detecting the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy yet found at z of 7.51. Click to read more
Writing in the October 3rd, 2013 issue of Nature, J Michalski and J Bleacher propose that the Eden Patera Basin on Mars, previously categorised as an impact crater may in fact be the remains of a Super Volcano Click to read more
It has been reported in the last 24 hours that Comet C/2012 X1 has suddenly brightened by over 150 times from magnitude +14 to 8.5. Click to read more
An exciting new project worth several million dollars has been announced by astro-tourism operator, Earth & Sky located in Lake Tekapo in New Zealand’s IDA International Dark Sky Reserve. Click to read more
Ticket still available for this coming Sunday’s Astronomy Now Comet Conference in London. Click to read more
