Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes

It’s fascinating to realize how recent our knowledge of the nearest stars has emerged. A little less than a century has gone by since Proxima Centauri was discovered by one Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes (1861-1933), a Scot who had moved to Australia and went on to work at the Union Observatory in Johannesburg. Innes used [...]

When I was in Huntsville for the recent interstellar conference, I noticed people walking around with black rubber wristbands that said ‘Build a Star Ship.’ Space educator Mike Mongo was handing these out to all concerned, and I soon picked one up to give my grandson. They’re an interesting form of marketing — leave these [...]

The American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Long Beach is going to occupy us for several days, and not always with exoplanet news. Brown dwarfs, those other recent entrants into the gallery of research targets, continue to make waves as we learn more about their nature and distribution. The hope of finding a brown dwarf closer [...]

Planets without stars may exist throughout the galaxy, and some studies suggest that there may be more so-called ‘rogue planets’ than main sequence stars. Now we get word of an object called CFBDSIR2149, associated with the stream of young stars called the AB Doradus Moving Group, a group of about 30 stars of the same [...]