There’s lots to look forward to in the Month of May: the evenings are brighter, there’s the promise of good weather and most importantly – not one, but two bank holiday weekends! There’s also lots to look forward to and look out for in May’s night sky. There’s the chance Read more…
While you may be familiar with black holes from sci-fi and many artists’ renditions of the phenomenon, our first actual view of the event horizon of the supermassive black hole which is at the centre of a neighbouring galaxy, Messier 87, was released 4 weeks ago to the day. What Read more…
Have you ever been worried about the impact of an asteroid wiping out human life? Well, I have some disturbing news for you: there is another possibility involving the explosion of a massive star that gives rise to a gamma-ray burst (called by astronomers simply a GRB), when the star ends its life producing a black hole.
After a special vote in the IAu General Assembly, we interview Armagh Observatory and Planetarium Director. Professor MIchael Burton, on the renaming of the Hubble Law.
Star Wars, the very name brings up images of childhoods spent in front of a TV or cinema screen, absorbing up stories of a galaxy far, far away. For many, it was the thing to ignite their passion for storytelling, and for others it was the thing that ignited their Read more…
On October 31, 2017, the world will celebrate the international hunt for dark matter. Armagh Observatory and Planetarium will be having a special showing of the “Phantom of the Universe” at 2pm, a Full Dome show which discusses our understanding (or lack thereof) Dark Matter, and the search to find Read more…
On Aug 14th 2017 LIGO and the Virgo Gravitational Wave detectors based in the USA and Italy detected the fourth merging Black Hole event. This was a triumph for both groups, but especially the Virgo group which had only started taking regular data earlier that month. It did leave many 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…
Dim and isolated, the dwarf irregular galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) could be described as an astronomical “living fossil” as it seems to have developed without ever interacting with any other galaxy since it formed billions of years ago. First observed in 1909, the WLM galaxy is part of the Read more…
Once again, astronomers around the world are investigating a stellar explosion, a supernova, in M82, a galaxy 12 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Although supernovae are awesomely destructive, this event is far, far too distant to cause any danger at all to our planet. Discovered Read more…