We live in a galaxy – a star city with several hundred billion residents. Moreover, we know our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with prominent arms of bright young stars that spiral outwards from a central bar that is dominated by old stars. These arms are so prominent as Read more…
It is widely accepted that our Solar System was created about 4.6 billion years ago based on dating of meteorites. Scientists believe the Solar System formed when a cloud of dust was disrupted by the shockwave from the explosive death of a nearby star initiating its collapse into a stellar 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 December skies mark my favourite time of the year for stargazing. Despite the cold weather, the skies promise the best opportunities to see what lies beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. So pour yourself a hot chocolate, wrap up in warm clothes and head outside to witness the night sky’s wonders. Read more…
Looming large in the after dark southern sky in July is the large and overlapping but often overlooked constellations of Ophiuchus and Serpens. Lacking outstandingly bright stars these “two for one” constellations still contain much of interest. Ophiuchus is one of the thirteen constellations that cross the ecliptic, making 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…
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…
We are looking far from home in this pretty image of an open cluster of young stars, sparkling like jewels. They and their associated gas cloud are known as NGC 346 and are located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy which is more than 210 000 light years 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…