Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes

Vesta: A Protoplanet’s Mutable Surface

November 5, 2012

I remember having a particularly strong ‘sense of wonder’ moment when reading Poul Anderson’s “The Snows of Ganymede” when I was a kid. Anderson was good at this kind of thing, but really my reaction was not just to this story but to the whole notion of taking a distant astronomical object and placing people [...]

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Wanderers Between the Galaxies

October 25, 2012

The idea of planets outside their normal settings is unsettling. It implies that beyond the stars all around us there may be worlds without suns, dark planets presumably pushed there by gravitational instabilities in their home systems. We’ve looked at such ‘nomad’ worlds before, noting that ice overlaying a frozen ocean might trap enough geothermal [...]

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Pluto, Charon and Kepler

September 27, 2012

Our view of Pluto/Charon gets better and better as we prepare for the New Horizons flyby in 2015. It wasn’t so long ago that we had no idea Pluto had a single moon, much less the five we have so far identified. When James Christy (USNO) discovered Charon in 1978, he was looking at photographic [...]

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Magellanic Clouds a Celestial Rarity

August 24, 2012

The Magellanic Clouds, visible in the southern hemisphere, are two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, a fact that has always captivated me. We see the galaxy from the inside, but I have always wondered what it would be like to see it from the perspective of the Magellanics. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) [...]

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Revealing The New Universe and a Shared Cosmology

July 9, 2012

By Larry Klaes Larry Klaes, a frequent Centauri Dreams contributor and commenter, here looks at a new book that explores humanity’s place in the cosmos. Is there a way to rise above our differences of outlook and perspective to embrace a common view of the universe? The stakes are high, for technology’s swift pace puts [...]

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Star Consciousness: An Alternative to Dark Matter

June 13, 2012

by Dr. Gregory L. Matloff Gregory Matloff is a major figure in what might be called the ‘interstellar movement,’ the continuing effort to analyze our prospects for travel to the stars. Greg is Emeritus Associate Professor and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at New York City College of Technology as well as [...]

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Brown Dwarfs Sparser than Expected

June 11, 2012

Nobody has been anticipating the results from WISE — the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer — any more than I have. Speculations about the number of brown dwarfs in the galaxy have been all over the map, with some suggesting they might be as plentiful as M-dwarfs, which make up perhaps 80 percent of the stellar [...]

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A Space Telescope on the Cheap

June 5, 2012

Back in 1997, astronaut John Grunsfeld pulled off one of the great radio gags of all time by calling in to National Public Radio’s ‘Car Talk’ program while orbiting the Earth aboard Atlantis in STS-81. He had called to complain about his vehicle’s performance which, as he told the show’s hosts — known as ‘Click [...]

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Thoughts on the Square Kilometer Array

May 30, 2012

We now know that the vast collection of radio dishes and antennae that will become the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be built on two sites, with the majority of dishes in Phase 1 (beginning in 2016) being constructed in South Africa, and further dishes added in Australia as the project develops. The SKA is [...]

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Losing Our Cosmology

May 23, 2012

Long-time Centauri Dreams readers know I love the idea of ‘deep time,’ an interest that cosmology provokes on a regular basis these days. Avi Loeb’s new work at Harvard tweaks these chords nicely as the theorist examines what we know and when we won’t be able to study it any longer. For an accelerating universe [...]

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