Article Written by Gavin Ramsay Comets have been known for millennia with Halley’s Comet famously being shown in the Bayeux Tapestry illustrating events which took place in 1066. They were also thought to foretell catastrophic events. Today we know them as having a small nucleus made up of ice and Read more…
Since the beginning of the space age, humanity has been sending robotic emissaries to all corners of the solar system. These represent some of the most complex technological undertakings ever conceived. Travelling for years and even decades to their destinations, they have helped form a modern picture of the solar Read more…
Comets are small icy and rocky objects flying around our Solar System on elliptical orbits, as opposed to near-circular ones the planets are enjoying. They are strange and fantastic enough as it is: bright comets with their tails spanning across the sky have been marvelled at, recorded, and often feared Read more…
Hello and welcome to my first attempt at an Astronotes blog! My name is Stephen and I’m finding out about our sky as I go during my time here in the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium. So, I hope you’ll join me on our journey through the October night sky. Read more…
It is common knowledge that the Earth is running out of resources, we’re constantly plagued with images and statistics supporting renewable energy and changing our way of thinking but what if we gathered resources from Space and gave the Earth a break from human pillaging? This is an idea from Read more…
A team of scientists in Australia are scanning the Universe for signals from extraterrestrial life. Professor Matthew Bailes, based at Swinburne University in Melbourne, is the lead scientist in this project funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. Milner has donated $100 million and has the support of Professor Stephen Hawking. Read more…
During our school days, children in the developing and developed world could not even dream about getting a chance to look through a professional telescope; forget about playing with it for real observations! Those days, only the best professional astronomers/astrophysicists had access to such telescopic sites and networks. However one Read more…
One of the European Space Agency’s flagship missions reached its grand finale on Friday 30 September 2016. After 20 years in development, a 10-year trip around the Solar System and two years on station at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Rosetta mission drew to a close at 12:19 BST when the spacecraft Read more…
Newly discovered small Solar System body V774104 may seem just another tiny, cold and remote world beyond Neptune but this is an important finding as its mere existence suggests that the wastes of the outer Solar System are considerably more populous than we thought a couple of decades ago. Read more…
Maybe you have seen one of the alarming videos or emails circulating around the internet claiming that the End is Nigh. The claim is that an enormous dinosaur-killer of an asteroid is going to smash into the Earth sometime between 15-28 September 2015. The scary predictions say that the asteroid Read more…