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. * Annie Maunder was born in Ireland in 1868. She won a scholarship to go to Cambridge, where she studied mathematics. She was top in her year, but did not [...]

How did the Christmas gamma-ray burst explode? No, it’s not a geeky Christmas cracker joke, it’s a real question scientists have been trying to answer since Christmas day last year, when a gamma-ray burst called GRB 101225A first lit up the sky. The Christmas burst, as its come to be known, exhibted some rather unusual [...]

This post in an updated version of one that appeared last year on the previous incarnation of this blog. Once again, by chance, I’m away from the bright lights of the city during a yearly event that is best witnessed in an area with little light pollution and a clear sky. Unfortunately, this year, the [...]

The range of topics relevant to astrobiology is pretty staggering – from microbial populations, chemistry, geo-chemistry, geobiology, climate, non-linear systems, solar system exploration, robotics, planetary science, exoplanets, astrophysics, and even cosmology. I often call astrobiology an ‘inter-discipline‘, since so much of it is about the connecting threads, the metaphorical synapses between highly specialized areas of [...]

Some 340 million kilometers away, out beyond the orbit of Mars, the Stardust spacecraft is getting ready for a big Valentine’s Day date. On February 14 the NASA craft will fly past Comet Tempel 1 at a planned distance of only 200 kilometers, getting a good look at the second comet it has investigated at [...]

NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft is closing in on a comet called Hartley 2 in advance of a November 4 flyby, but stargazers on Earth are already getting a fairly good look at the icy object, which is currently in the midst of an unusually close passage of Earth. Hartley 2 is now only about 18 million [...]

A Russian astronomer turned a few heads earlier this month when he published a paper noting that a dwarf star, currently 63 light-years away, will very likely dip into the outer edge of our solar system in fewer than two million years. Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in Russia presented in the March issue [...]