Category Archives: Stars

Is it a parallax or only one? ;)

Posted on January 25, 2014 by juliamac17

So one feature of star observation that has allowed us to figure out that we’re not the center of the universe is this really neat and slightly tricky idea of stellar parallax. It’s the phenomenon where based on our position in orbit, a star may appear to have moved based on the stars behind it. […] Continue reading →

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Star Walk: Planetarium in Your Pocket

Posted on January 25, 2014 by hollyreichert

When looking up into the sky at night, usually I can’t identify all the constellations above.  The Star Walk app knows where you are and tells you what stars and planets are above you.  You can hold it up wherever you are and it is like having a mobile planetarium.  Even in the city where […] Continue reading →

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Betelgeuse and Orion’s Belt

Posted on January 14, 2014 by paanvaannd

This is an image of Orion’s Belt (the three stars in a row on the bottom right) and the star Betelgeuse (the big bright star on the bottom left) taken by me on New Year’s Day. It is a sizable image, and a lot of star data might not be visible in this post due […] Continue reading →

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Impacts on Saturn and the Drake equation

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed meteors colliding with Saturn’s thin rings.  This marked the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings, although astronomers already expected this to be occurring regularly.  However, specific details of such impacts were merely speculation, much of which is cleared up via […] Continue reading →

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And It All Leads Up To The Now

Posted on April 21, 2013 by wherrysg

This semester we have studied everything from the creation of the universe to black holes to microscopic bacteria living on the bottom of the ocean floor. The range of topics covered in this class has helped round my view of the beginnings of time up until now and clarified many common misconceptions ranging from tides […] Continue reading →

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Transiting Exoplanets: The Search for Terrestrial Worlds

Posted on April 10, 2013 by werdercj

On Monday, NASA announced a new project scheduled to launch in 2017: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  This project was selected after a three-year competition, and will use surveys covering 400 times as much sky as any past missions to discover transiting exoplanets.  This struck me as particularly significant having just studied methods of […] Continue reading →

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Binary (Double Star) Systems

Posted on April 10, 2013 by marknshirleyvu

If you’ve ever seen any kind of sci-fi movie, I’m sure you’ve seen an example of a binary star system.  Countless space movies (most notably Star Wars) feature an alien sky with more than one Sun.  While the effect is usually dramatized in film, these binary star systems are in fact very real. A binary […] Continue reading →

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100,000 Stars

Posted on April 9, 2013 by kevinm387

Above is a video of an awesome website, 100,000 Stars. This website is an interactive, 3D map of the closest 100,000 stars to us. The video gives a little taste, but I encourage everyone to go to the site and explore for yourselves. Zooming in on our Solar System, you encounter the Oort Cloud first, […] Continue reading →

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A Black Hole’s Diet

Posted on April 7, 2013 by wherrysg

Source Incredible! While studying a distant galaxy, astronomers noticed a bright flare of X-rays coming from another galaxy that happened to be in their field of view. Upon closer look, they discovered that it was actually a black hole ‘eating up’ what they believe to be either an extremely large planet or a smaller brown […] Continue reading →

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Nearby Star System Discovered

Posted on March 20, 2013 by werdercj

Above: an artist’s conception of the binary system On the same note of new discoveries, Kevin Luhman, a researcher in Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, just discovered a pair of stars that constitute the closest star system found in a century, and the third-closest star system we have ever discovered.  The binary […] Continue reading →

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