Articles for tag: Astronomy, Astrophotography, Celestial events, Galactic core, June night sky, Light Pollution, milky way

June’s Spectacular Milky Way Show is Here—Discover How to Witness the Galactic Wonder

June 13, 2025

June is the prime time to see the Milky Way’s brilliant core as it is presenting its best performance of the year. For stargazers, this is “core season” the window through which the brilliant heart of our galaxy flows across the night sky like a celestial river of stars. But catching this cosmic show calls ...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

Did You Know? M87’s Monster Black Hole Spins at 80% of the Cosmic Limit—And Feeds Even Faster!

June 13, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

At the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), a cosmic behemoth is challenging preconceptions. Renowned for being the first black hole ever directly photographed, the supermassive black hole M87 has just exposed another amazing secret: it devours matter even faster and spins at a blistering 80% of the maximum speed in the universe. Using ...

Image title: Moon-Mercury-Pleiades ConjunctionAuthor: Giulio ColomboCountry: Italy This photograph shows the young lunar crescent, some of the nine brightest stars of the Pleiades (with one behind a cloud) on the right, and the planet Mercury, looking slightly red, in the middle of the image. This picture is rather suggestive of the idea that the Pleiades might possibly consist of seven stars. However, the viewer is misled by the clouds; five of the stars form a tiny chariot, one is next to the handle, and three are at the other end of the quadrilateral. Eight stars would be clearly visible if there were no clouds. This configuration of the young Moon next to the Pleiades is visible only in the northern hemisphere spring. Thus it was used by the ancient Babylonians to determine the second month of their year and to judge whether or not an intercalary month was necessary. At least as early as the second millennium before the common era, the Babylonians used several asterisms for each month, with another one of them reappearing every five days after invisibility during daylight. To determine the necessity of intercalation in order to synchronise the solar and the lunar year, the Babylonians used several asterisms, not only the Pleiades. For instance, they also made use of the bright stars Arcturus and Sirius, and they observed a configuration with the Moon as well as heliacal phenomena. The modern Jewish and modern Islamic traditions still make use of some of the Babylonian astronomical rules. However, given that the constellations have shifted as a result of precession, and the fact that nowadays we also have computational means to calculate our calendars, this configuration of the small crescent Moon and the Pleiades is less useful, though it remains exceptionally beautiful. Thus the ancient Babylonian and middle Babylonian tradition survives only rudimentarily. Furthermore, it is unlikely that it is depicted in the Nebra Disc from Bronze Age Europe, as has long been claimed. This image was taken on Elba Island, Italy, in May 2022. Also see image in Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7425575

Have You Seen This? The Moon ‘Kisses’ Mercury and Mars in June’s Cosmic Show

June 12, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

The night sky of June is expected to show a pair of amazing conjunctions one with the elusive Mercury and the other with a remarkably near encounter between the Moon and Mars. These events serve as a reminder of the clockwork accuracy of our solar system and an opportunity to see planetary motions that even ...

This bundle of bright stars and dark dust is a dwarf spiral galaxy known as NGC 4605, located around 16 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). This galaxy’s spiral structure is not obvious from this image, but NGC 4605 is classified as an SBc type galaxy — meaning that it has sprawling, loosely wound arms and a bright bar of stars cutting through its centre. NGC 4605 is a member of the Messier 81 group of galaxies, a gathering of bright galaxies including its namesake Messier 81 (heic0710), and the well-known Messier 82 (heic0604a). Galaxy groups like this usually contain around 50 galaxies, all loosely bound together by gravity. This group is famous for its unusual members, many of which formed from collisions between galaxies. With its somewhat unusual form, NGC 4605 fits in well with the family of perturbed galaxies in the M81 group, although the origin of its abnormal features is not yet clear. The Messier 81 group is one of the nearest groups to our own, the Local Group, which houses the Milky Way and some of its well-known neighbours, including the Andromeda Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. Galaxy groups provide environments where galaxies can evolve through interactions like collisions and mergers. These galaxy groups are then lumped together into even larger gatherings of galaxies known as clusters and superclusters. The Local and Messier 81 groups both belong to the Virgo Supercluster, a large and massive collection of some 100 galaxy groups and clusters. With so many galaxies swarming around, NGC 4605 may seem unremarkable. However, astronomers are using this galaxy to test our knowledge of stellar evolution. The newly-formed stars in NGC 4605 are being used to investigate how interactions between galaxies affect the formation, evolution, and behaviour of the stars within, how bright stellar nurseries come together to form stellar clusters and stellar associations, and how these stars evolve over time. And that's not all — NGC 4605 is also proving to be a good testing ground for dark matter. Our theories on this hypothetical type of matter have had good success at describing how the Universe looks and behaves on a large scale — for example at the galaxy supercluster level — but when looking at individual galaxies, they have run into problems. Observations of NGC 4605 show that the way in which dark matter is spread throughout its halo is not quite as these models predict. While intriguing, observations in this area are still inconclusive, leaving astronomers to ponder over the contents of the Universe.

Will the Universe Snap Back? Dark Energy’s Strange Twist Could Rewrite Our Cosmic Future!

June 8, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Cosmologists have believed for a long time that dark energy the mysterious factor that accelerates the expansion of the universe–was a constant, indestructible presence. However, the latest information obtained from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) indicates this is not the situation. Instead, the impact of dark energy may diminish as time passes, a finding ...

12 Revolutionary Discoveries in Astronomy That Changed Science

June 3, 2025

Annette Uy

Throughout history, the field of astronomy has expanded our understanding of the universe and our place within it. From ancient stargazers to modern astrophysicists, humanity has consistently sought to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos. This curiosity and thirst for knowledge have driven incredible discoveries that not only shifted our perspective of the universe but ...

Pluto’s Secret Rival? Meet the Mysterious Dwarf Planet That Defies Expectations

June 2, 2025

Jan Otte

A recently discovered celestial body is rewriting our knowledge of the Kuiper Belt and maybe challenging the existence of the elusive Planet Nine deep in the cold margins of our solar system. Called 2017 OF 201, this mysterious trans-Neptunian object (TNO) has an orbit so extreme it takes 25,000 years to complete one trip around ...

June’s Spectacular Milky Way Show is Here—Discover How to Witness the Galactic Wonder

Did You Know? M87’s Monster Black Hole Spins at 80% of the Cosmic Limit—And Feeds Even Faster!

Have You Seen This? The Moon ‘Kisses’ Mercury and Mars in June’s Cosmic Show

Will the Universe Snap Back? Dark Energy’s Strange Twist Could Rewrite Our Cosmic Future!

12 Revolutionary Discoveries in Astronomy That Changed Science

Pluto’s Secret Rival? Meet the Mysterious Dwarf Planet That Defies Expectations

From Silence to Song: How Scientists Discovered Gorillas Hum When Happy

Why Some Birds Build Decoy Nests (And Others Create Art Installations)

China’s Genetically Modified Silkworms Spin Silk Stronger than Kevlar