Hubble just discovered the newest moon in the solar system, a tiny rock orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. The new moon is about 250 Km across, compared to the 1,400 Km wide Makemake. It orbits in approximately 12 days, and has an edge on orbit, making it difficult to spot. “Our preliminary estimates show that the moon’s orbit seems to be edge-on, and that means that often when you look at the system you are going to miss the moon because it gets lost in the bright glare of Makemake,” said Alex Parker of...
When the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes a few years from now, we will have then opportunity to probe deeper into the cosmos than ever before, to see things we had only dreamed of seeing previously. Among the prime targets for this modern marvel of human ingenuity are potentially habitable exoplanets, where future humans could live, provided there isn’t already life occupying the real estate. To help astronomers assign importance to the growing number of exoplanets, researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised an index to represent the habitability of worlds, near and...
If you could see through the lens of a very powerful telescope, to an area of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a new universe would be revealed to you. For in that tiny patch of seemingly empty sky, there are thousands of galaxies visible, albeit with many hours of light collection. Observing the most distant of these galaxies, at the edge of the universe, allows us to estimate the number of Galaxies present in the distant past, when the universe was very young. As our observations improve, and our ability to simulate the conditions of the...
