So as well as welcoming Ceres into the new dwarf planet club with Pluto we also have to say hello to 2003 UB313, colloquially known as Xena. Xena is in fact one of the reasons that the dwarf planet category was even created since its discovery was announced in 2005…

So rather than continually harp on about Pluto and how is has annoyed me that they ‘demoted it’, I thought it might be advisable to focus on one of the god things that has come out of the IAU’s recent meeting. Ceres, the largest member of the asteroid belt, has…

Well it had to be expected really: astronomers are not entirely happy with Pluto being demoted from planet status. Quite a lot of them are angry about what seems to be a ridiculous attempt at rewriting history and textbooks. Its good to se that i am not alone.

One bone of…

NASA’s astronomy picture of the day was, today, an amazing image of the lagoon nebula with the stars removed. The one above is the usual, starred version, showing the background and foreground stars which are along the same line of sight. On this link however, you’ll find the starless version which…

So that’s that then; Pluto is no longer a planet in the old sense of the word. Now for something to be a (classical) planet it has to satisfy three conditions:

It orbits around the Sun
Has sufficient mass that its own gravity overcomes rigid body forces so that it assumes a…

It will be a disappointing moment for me personally but the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will voting very shortly on the fate of the planet Pluto.

As discussed in a previous entry, Pluto planetary status has been in jeopardy since a new object, larger than Pluto was discovered in the Kuiper…

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey probes have discovered something quirky and highly unexpected on the surface of Mars. It appears that every Martian spring there are huge CO2 geysers erupting near the Martian south polar ice cap.

The teams working with the probes noticed that each spring, as the ice…

Although the IAU conference in Prague is still continuing until the 25th, I thought it was worth noting that some has proposed a promising draft of the definitions of a planet that would make Pluto just one of several planets known as Plutons.

Under the proposals, the Solar System would consist…

Prague is the setting for the International Astronomical Union conference that will mull, over 12 days, the definition of a planet.

Planet is a greek word translating to ‘wanderer’ as the planets were first noticed as stars that moves around in the sky. Modern science more recently made a planet something much…

There are many categories, or classes, into which a star can form, based its temperature and luminosity. The size of the star is related to these factors. Supergiant stars are typically 10,000 times brighter than the Sun and 100 to 1000 time larger (that is that they have a radius…

According to Space.com, there are now over 10,000 man-made satellites orbiting the Earth. A few hundred are big enough and fly close enough to the Earth that they are visible. This list includes the International Space Station (ISS) and NASA’s space shuttles.

In the case of the latter two examples, the…

A star or constellation that is always visible (i.e. that never sets) is known as circumpolar. Dependent on where you are in the world different stars will be circumpolar. To explain this more fully we need to understand why the stars set at all.

The stars above our heads are to…