News (Page 823)

Thanks to a Massive Release from Gaia, we now Know Where 1.7 BILLION Stars are in the Milky Way On December 19th, 2013, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft took to space with one of the most ambitious missions ever. Over the course of its planned 5-year mission (which was recently extended), this space observatory would map over a billion stars, planets, comets, asteroids and quasars in order to create the largest and most precise 3D catalog of the Milky Way ever created. The first release of Gaia data, which took place in September 2016, contained the distances and motions of over two millionRead More →

Asteroids Smack Jupiter More Often Than Astronomers Thought Pow: The July 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: R. Evans/J. Trauger/H. Hammel/HST Comet Science Team/NASA. Are you keeping a eye on Jupiter? The King of the Planets, Jove presents a swirling upper atmosphere full of action, a worthy object of telescopic study as it heads towards another fine opposition on May 9th, 2018. Now, an interesting international study out of the School of Engineering in Bilbao, Spain, the Astronomical Society of France, the Meath Astronomical Group in Dublin Ireland, the Astronomical Society of Australia, and the EsteveRead More →

How Many Planets is TESS Going to Find? The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA’s latest exoplanet-hunting space telescope, was launched into space on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018. As the name suggests, this telescope will use the Transit Method to detect terrestrial-mass planets (i.e. rocky) orbiting distant stars. Alongside other next-generation telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), TESS will effectively pick up where telescopes like Hubble and Kepler left off. But just how many planets is TESS expected to find? That was the subject of a new study by a team researchers who attempted to estimate just how many planets TESS is likelyRead More →

Facial Recognition Deep Learning Software is Surprisingly Good at Identifying Galaxies Too A lot of attention has been dedicated to the machine learning technique known as “deep learning”, where computers are capable of discerning patterns in data without being specifically programmed to do so. In recent years, this technique has been applied to a number of applications, which include voice and facial recognition for social media platforms like Facebook. However, astronomers are also benefiting from deep learning, which is helping them to analyze images of galaxies and understand how they form and evolve. In a new study, a team of international researchers used a deepRead More →

If We’re Searching for Earth 2.0, Would We Know It When We Find It? In the past few decades, there has been an explosion in the number of extra-solar planets that have been discovered. As of April 1st, 2018, a total of 3,758 exoplanets have been confirmed in 2,808 systems, with 627 systems having more than one planet. In addition to expanding our knowledge of the Universe, the purpose of this search has been to find evidence of life beyond our Solar System. In the course of looking for habitable planets, astronomers have used Earth as a guiding example. But would we recognize a trulyRead More →

Carnival of Space #558 Welcome to the 558th Carnival of Space! The Carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. We have a fantastic roundup today, so now, on to this week’s stories! First up, over at Blasting News, we learn that as the Google Lunar XPrize ends Israel is still shooting for the moon! Israel’s SpaceIL is still planning to land on the Moon by the end of 2018! Best of luck! Then, we visit The Hill, where we learn why Why NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is such aRead More →