In less than two weeks time I'll be boarding a plane from London to Zurich and then zipping across the Swiss-German border to Lindau by train. I'm pretty excited about it – it will be the first time I've stepped foot outside of the UK since before I started my Physics degree five years ago, and my first time at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.In its motto, the meeting promises to "educate, inspire and connect scientific generations"...
I woke up early on Wednesday morning, half feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, half feeling like I'd rather just stay in bed. While most people in the UK were sound asleep, amateur and professional astronomers alike got up before dawn to witness an astronomical spectacle that won't happen again until the year 2117: the transit of Venus...
The Dragon spacecraft finally set off to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning. On Friday, Dragon docked with the ISS and NASA streamed it live.
Point a camera at a particular patch of sky for more than 50 hours and what do you get? This image of Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light years away: Well, for "camera" read (after taking a deep breath) "Wide Field Imager of the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile"...
I took a couple of weeks off blogging while I had my exams at the start of the month. This is what I missed. ESA has approved a billion-euro mission to Jupiter's icy moons, called Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer)...
The big story this week was the launch of Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company backed by the likes of James Cameron, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
A glowing fireball descended through the sky over North Africa last July, accompanied by two sonic booms. Observers saw the fireball turn from yellow to green, then split into two parts before one fell to the ground in a valley and the other crashed into a mountain...
Objects half a mile in diameter have been spotted punching through Saturn's outermost ring, the F ring, and leaving glittering trails as they drag icy particles behind them.
If I lived elsewhere in the multiverse, this is the news and cool space stuff I’d have been covering this week. Unfortunately, in this universe I didn’t have the time.
Two thousand comets a day collide around nearby star Fomalhaut creating a continually replenished dust belt in the outskirts of the star's system, according to a new paper recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.Fomalhaut is a young star...
Astronomers have taken a fresh look at an old supernova and found that it was turned inside out during its explosion. Iron, which forms during the stars death, is usually in the centre of the supernova remnant...
To say a picture is worth a thousand words would be selling this one rather short.This edge-on image of the Milky Way contains at least a billion stars.
It looks like the faster-than-light neutrino saga – or should that now be slower-than-light or the-same-speed-as-light? – may nearly be over. On Friday, CERN updated their statement on the initial OPERA result with some new results from ICARUS, another experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy...
Today is International Women's Day. To celebrate, here's a post showcasing just a couple of the many really amazing discoveries made by women in astronomy.
Something unusual has been spotted lurking around several galaxies' central black holes. Astronomers think it may be limiting the growth of the black holes – and stars elsewhere in the galaxies, too.Astronomers studying nearby galaxies have found a new type of outflow called an ultra-fast outflow, or UFO...
The faster-than-light neutrinos seen by the OPERA particle physics experiment last year may have just been explained. By a loose cable. I wish I was joking.To back up a little, the OPERA collaboration based at the Gran Sasso laboratory underneath the mountain of the same name in Italy published a paper to pre-print server arxiv.org last September saying that they had seen neutrinos, a type of sub-atomic particle, travel faster than the speed of light...
Judging by the many flares erupting from the sun at the moment, it is well on track to reach its next peak in activity early next year. As this peak approaches, we can expect many more huge bursts of energy that erupt from the sun and send lots of energetic particles, and sometimes magnetic fields, our way...
A new supernova yields clues to how white dwarfs flame out
Fed up of simply reading about space and want to do some real science? Well, here's your chance: astronomers are asking anyone with a pair of binoculars or telescope to train them on a new object visible in the night sky...
The Sun is hotting up, and we can see the results right here on Earth. Across the northern hemisphere, fantastic light displays have been visible of late, and the frequency of these events is set only to increase as the Sun heads toward a peak in its magnetic activity.In light of this (no pun intended), I decided a post about what is going on during an aurora was in order...
