Astronomy News - A Quick Read
Monday, July 27th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Astronomy is a subject as large as the universe. That’s because it has the entire universe to explore. Astronomy news is interesting, to say the least, and can be found in astronomy news articles, media reports as well as on web sites such as those maintained by astronomy magazines and agencies like NASA. Here are some recent, tantalizing tidbits of space information.
Astronomy magazine is a great source of current astronomy news. One of the stories it covered was NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft. Just as weathermen examine fronts and the interaction of hot air with cold air and dry air with wet air, IBEX is interested in such fronts and their interaction in outer space. Specifically it’s the interaction of the solar winds with the relatively cold space beyond the solar system. IBEX is also set to map the boundaries of our solar system.
More astronomy news covered by Astronomy magazine is the discovery of a new aurora on Saturn that’s unlike any other known aurora in the solar system. An aurora is formed when charged particles stream along planetary magnetic field. Earth’s aurorae come from charged particles from the solar wind. Jupiter’s aurorae come from interactions within Jupiter’s own magnetic field. But Saturn’s new aurora, seen in the infrared spectrum, is something completely new which could teach scientists a lot about the solar wind and magnetic fields.
Universe today is another source of recent astronomy news. On November 13, 2008 it carried the story of contact reestablished with the Mars rover. The rover had lost contact after running through a massive dust storm. But the Rover named Spirit recovered from a near catastrophic low power period. Its solar panels couldn’t get sun in the dust storm, and scientists feared it would go into a low power coma-like mode from which it would not wake. But it did, and now it’s back to work on the distant red planet.
Contact with intelligent life may be a matter of less than 15 years thanks to the Allen telescope array, at least that’s what’s in astronomy news. The array currently is made up of 42 antennas, but will expand over time to include 350 small radio antennas that search the sky for signals that mean intelligence. It’s only a matter of a short time before it hears signals from deep enough in space that intelligence is sure to be found.
Finding another intelligent race somewhere out there sure would be huge astronomy news.
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