February 2024 Leading astronomical research centre Armagh Observatory and Planetarium has played a key role in the discovery of a unique signature of the process by which white dwarf stars cannibalise their planetary systems. The research was conducted by an international team of scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Read more…
Author Name: Thomas Howarth What you’ll discover in this blog post: What may happen if a star wanders too close to the Solar System How astronomers look for these incoming stars How astronomers of the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium used the ESO’s VLT to rule out one such close encounter Read more…
Armagh is a partner in two telescope projects whose key goal is to detect the optical counterpart of colliding massive dead stars. Albert Einstein predicted that when two massive objects spiral around each other, eventually merging to become one more massive object, gravitational waves would be emitted. Scientists spent a Read more…
A team of astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile to shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L 98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System. Amongst the findings are a planet with half the mass of Venus — Read more…
Galaxy is distorted, appearing as a ring of light in the sky. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, have revealed an extremely distant and therefore very young galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The galaxy is Read more…
Astronomers using European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes have discovered giant spots on the surface of extremely hot stars hidden in stellar clusters. Not only are these stars plagued by magnetic spots, some also experience superflare events, explosions of energy several million times more energetic than similar eruptions on the Sun. Read more…
Breaking astronomy news! The European Southern Observatory, in combination with other institutes, has discovered a black hole – and it’s a mere 1000 lightyears from Earth! This newly discovered Black Hole forms part of a triple system (called HR6819) that can be seen with the naked eye. Petr Hadrava, Emeritus Read more…
This week our Astronomy & You series takes a look at Electronic Imaging Detectors and their effect on our lives. This piece was written by Ana I. Gomez de Castro. Ana is a full professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics and member of the Mathematics Faculty in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid Read more…
This week’s edition of our Astronomy & You series is a piece on the applications of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to our everyday lives. The following piece was written by Gabriele Giovannini; vice-President of the IAU’s Division B and full Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Bologna Read more…
This week’s instalment of the Technical Applications of Astronomy to Society features a piece written by Professor Antonio Mario Magalhaes; astronomer, IAU member and Full Professor at the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofisica e Ciencias Atmosfericas of the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In this piece, he outlines the wider Read more…
Article by Armagh Astronomer Tolis Christou Imagine being outdoors on a sunny day, following the Sun as it rises from the east, heading towards the south and then on towards the west where it sets. Now think back: when did you feel the hottest: when the Sun was highest in Read more…
Astronomers have made the exciting discovery of an Earth-mass exoplanet in the habitable zone of our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.25 light years (1.3 parsec) from the Sun. The new-found world, designated Proxima b, is a little more massive than the Earth, implying that it Read more…
For those of you that are still bearing the psychological scars from Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet a decade ago, here is news that may add salt to the wounds. Published recently in the Astronomical Journal, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown claim they have found evidence of a Read more…
Peer deep into the constellation Sagittarius and you will find a spectacular young star cluster and its associated stellar nursery. These are M8 and the Lagoon Nebula. More than 4300 light years (1320 parsecs) from the Solar System, this is an active star-forming region. Billions of years ago our Read more…
The discovery of new planets beyond our Solar System has further expanded on what we thought we knew about what is out there. These distant extrasolar planets or exoplanets have only been confirmed to be in existence within the last twenty years and lots of new discoveries are still being Read more…
Zeta Reticuli, a dim binary system of Sun-like stars only 39.5 light years away in the little constellation of Reticulum is strangely well-known. Why is it so famous? This system was once identified as the home of the little grey-faced and black-eyed humanoids who allegedly abducted Barney and Betty Hill Read more…
Have you ever wished you could hop into a time machine, zip back billions of years and answer one of the age old questions that have plagued mankind from the first time someone peered up into the night sky? To know what exactly happened in the universe that created the Read more…
A new image from the European southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) telescope reveals the glowing clouds of gas and filaments of dust surrounding hot young stars in the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357. Infrared observations like this can reveal features that cannot be seen Read more…
Audiences flocked to see James Cameron’s epic movie Avatar, the story of a disabled human who gets a chance to live a new life as a 3m tall blue-skinned humanoid alien from a world called Pandora. In the movie Pandora is a lush jungle-covered moon of a gas giant planet Read more…
This image of the reflection nebula Messier 78 (NGC 2068) includes the soft glow of submillimetre-wavelength (infra red) radiation from clouds of interstellar dust grains running through the nebula.Dense clouds of gas and dust like this are the birthplaces of new stars. M78 is found in Orion, and appropriately Read more…
A globular cluster is made of hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars packed together in a pretty compact ball. The stars in globular clusters are old and there’s never any sign of new stars forming in them. Older stars are usually yellow, orange and red, so those colours Read more…
Our Image of the Month was released to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and is a striking panoramic look at a stellar nursery which is fizzing and crackling with energy as it pops out thousands of new stars. The small southern hemisphere constellation Dorado Read more…
![Star types from left to right: a red dwarf, our Sun, a blue dwarf, and R136a1 (hypergiant). Where star sizes are measured by radius, from centre to surface, and where 1 solar radius is equal to that of our Sun (km) - R136a1’s radius is 35.4 times greater than the Sun [approximately 24.8 million km]. Credit: Author: ESO/M. Kornmesser](https://armaghplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image-of-star-types.jpg)
How big is the largest known star? Compared to planets, stars will always be the overall group winners in terms of superior size. When you look at the night sky on a clear night and away from city lights, you will see that there are stars of varying sizes and Read more…
Beautiful colour images of nebulae grace astronomy books and websites and have spread to mainstream culture. They are now familar to the public but what are these gaudy celestial spectacles? So what is a nebula? Nebula is latin for ‘cloud’ so it is the word astronomers use to call Read more…
A new image of the Omega Nebula reveals amazing detail in a cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars. Captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory, this is one of the sharpest views of this stellar birthplace ever taken from Earth’s surface. Read more…
What exciting space events has 2012 in store for us? What important space anniversaries are coming up this year? Welcome to our annual guide to what the Universe has waiting ahead! This year marks twenty years since the first extra-solar planets were discovered when a pair of planets were Read more…
Studying galaxies and clusters in many wavelengths of light tells astronomers more than a single image ever could. Imaged with the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, NGC 4666 lies some 80 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. All looks calm and peaceful, Read more…
A long, long time ago when the first stars and galaxies were forming, the Universe was filled with electrically neutral hydrogen. This thin soup of gas absorbed ultraviolet light and all of space would have seemed filled with softly glowing fog. The light of the first generation of stars was Read more…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is the world’s biggest and most complex astronomical instrument. Located at the European Southern Observatory on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, the array of antennae is now operational even though it is still incomplete. Here is its first image to be released to Read more…
In more than twenty years of hard work, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made both beautiful images and profound discoveries, sometimes doing both at the same time. What are its greatest contributions to science? Hubble has enabled us to estimate just how big and how old the universe is Read more…
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an intergovernmental research organisation for astronomy which is supported by fifteen countries. Established in 1962 it operates some of the most technologically advanced telescopes in the world. Their mission is to provide state-of-the-art research facilities to astronomers and astrophysicists, allowing them to conduct front-line Read more…
A team of astronomers based at the European Southern Observatory have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. This is the largest number of such new worlds ever announced at one time. One of these planets may enjoy conditions favorable for life on its surface. Read more…
Globular clusters, tightly packed masses of stars are dazzling celestial spectacles as shown by this new European Southern Observatory image. This dramatic image depicts Omega Centauri, one of 200 or so globular clusters orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. This is among the first images taken by the VLT Survey Telescope Read more…
The nearby galaxy NGC 6744, similar to the Milky Way, has been imaged by the European Southern Observatory. What can we see in this beautiful galactic portrait? Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is located in a constellation of the southern hemisphere’s sky, called Pavo (Latin for peacock). At a distance Read more…
An image from the European Southern Observatory, reveals two galaxies, NGC 3169 and NGC 3166, meeting in intergalactic space. What kind of cosmic drama ensues in these close encounters of galaxies? Once the Universe was a quiet and peaceful place. Galaxies serenely sailed through the void in splendid isolation. Today Read more…
Cepheid variables are massive, pulsating stars, valued by astronomers for the precise link between their brightness and steady pulsation. Let’s look at the history of Cepheid variables and how recent discoveries about these stars shatter established theories of stellar evolution. Cepheid variable stars have been known since the 18th Read more…
Could HIP 13044 b be the strangest exoplanet yet found? We are getting used to the discoveries of bizarre exoplanets but newly-discovered world HIP 13044 b not only survived the cataclysm of its star swelling into a red giant, but it also originally came from another galaxy! If you Read more…
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope brings us new face-on portraits of six spiral galaxies. But what is the science behind these delightful images? Everyone loves stunning pictures of spiral galaxies, I have said this before and will no doubt say it again. The folks at the European Read more…
Galaxies, distant from us in space and time, have been in the news recently. Astronomers knew that far away galaxies (and hence ancient galaxies)were smaller than those galaxies closer (in time and space) to us today in the Milky Way. It was believed that the first galaxies appeared less than Read more…
If you love great articles on space and astronomy you are probably already following the Carnival of Space. If you aren’t familiar with the Carnival, it’s a regular round up of links to the most exciting blog posts about outer space. It’s a great guide to what’s going on beyond Read more…