An Astronomical Timeline

Compiled by Brian Timmins

Page Four of Five

Page 1	Pre-Recorded History to 1682
Page 2	1683 - Newton's "Principia" to 16thJuly, 1968
Page 3	20th July, 1969 - Armstrong & Aldrin on the Moon to the end of the 20th century
Page 4	1st January 2001 to the 31st December 2007
Page 5	1st January 2008... Onwards and Upwards...

Modern Astronomy - The Twenty-First Century

2001

• 12 February:
  At 3:01:52pm EST, NEAR Shoemaker made a gentle, picture-perfect 3-point landing on the tips of two solar panels and the bottom edge of the spacecraft body - on the asteroid 433 Eros.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
• 28 February:
  The End of an Asteroidal Adventure - NEAR Shoemaker Phones Home for the Last Time. Tonight at 7pm EST, NASA's Deep Space Network antennas will pull down their last Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission data, bringing to a close the first mission to extensively study an asteroid. NEAR, which was the first mission in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, scientifically focused space missions.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
• 30 June:
  MAP. Microwave Anisotropy Probe. In an orbit around the L2 Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, 1.5 million km from Earth, which was reached October 1, 2001. To measure inhomogenities in the Cosmic Background Radiation at improved angular resolution compared to Cobe.
• 8 August:
  United States launched the Genesis mission to study solar wind particles and by doing so obtain precise measure of solar isotopic abundances. Genesis will measure isotopic compositions of oxygen, nitrogen, and noble gases. These data will enable scientists to better understand the isotopic variations in meteorites, comets, lunar samples, and planetary atmospheres.

Evidence for a black hole at the center of our galaxy is found.

Measurements of background radiation with a high resolution show that the Universe is probably flat and that the matter we know only constitutes 5 % of its density. 25 % consists of unknown particles (called dark matter) and as much as 70 % consists of something that makes gravitational force repellent at large distances (called dark energy).

The Mir Space Station, after 15 years in orbit, is crashed into the South Pacific Ocean.

Evidence that water existed on the surface of Mars comes from the study of the Shergotty meteorite.

United States launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission into a successful Martian orbit.

Leonid meteor storm on November 18. At times near the peak of shower, up to 5 or 6 meteors could be seen per second.

Sudbury neutrino detector in Canada demonstrates that neutrinos emitted from the Sun's core change their type as they travel to Earth. This resolves the many decade long mystery of the "missing solar neutrinos" and proves these tiny particles have mass.

2002

• 30 April:
  Striking new images from the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope were unveiled.
• 8 July:
  Astronomy's next big thing OWL (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is an awesome project which requires international effort to make it happen. It would open an enormous new window on the Universe This huge telescope - its main mirror would be more than 100 metres across - would have a predicted resolution 40 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater. It would be sited at an altitude of 5,000 metres and would be operated almost as a space observatory, with a base camp for the human operators nearby at a lower height of no more than 3,000 metres.
  [Cite: ESO :: More… ]
  
• October:
  Following strong early hints of a black hole at the center of our galaxy, observations are reported on a star's orbit around it, suggesting the black hole has the mass of 3.7 million suns.
  
• 8 October:
  Astronomers reported a frozen object beyond Pluto some 800 miles across. They named it Quaoar, after a creation force in Southern California Indian mythology. The Asteroid 50000 Quaoar (2002LM60) was identified in the Kuiper Belt with the Hubble telescope.
• 17 October:
  Integral (ESA, Russia, Nasa). International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory. Uses Nasa's Deep Space Network of ground stations. This ESA satellite is to observe X- and Gamma-ray sources 15 keV to 10 MeV at a resolution of 12 arc minutes.
• 20 December:
  Grote Reber (90), a pioneer of radio astronomy died in Tasmania. He followed up Karl Jansky's 1933 announcement of the discovery of radio waves from space and in his spare time in 1937 built a 30-foot antenna dish, the 1st radio telescope, in his back yard in Wheaton, Ill., and managed to pick up signals two years later.

First planet detected orbiting a giant star.

It is possible to measure the speed at which gravitational force is propagated. It turns out, as anticipated in Einstein's theory of 1915, that it happens at the speed of light. Just as when Rømer measured the speed of light in 1676, conditions in connection with the planet Jupiter are used for the measurement. The weak deflection in Jupiter's gravitational field that occurs with radio radiation from a galaxy depends on, among other things, the speed of gravity. By measuring the deflection, it is possible to measure the speed.

Observations from a spacecraft orbiting Mars suggest large deposits of ice may lie below the Martian surface.

2003

• 12 January:
  CHIPSat (GSFC/Nasa/U Berkeley) Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer. To carry out all-sky spectroscopy of the diffuse background at wavelengths from 90 to 260 Angstrom.
• 1 February:
  Space shuttle "Columbia" disintegrates above Texas, during re entry.
• 28 April:
  GALEX (JPL/Nasa). Galaxy Evolut.ion Explorer. UV imaging and spectroscopic survey mission, to map the history and evolution of the Universe of galaxies.
• 30 June:
  MOST (Canada). Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars. Carries a small (15-cm aperture) telescope, to look for tiny light variations at stars in order to detect e.g. small-amplitude star oscillations or occultations by planets.
• 25 August:
  Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) (JPL/Nasa). Developed as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). Fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories, in Nasa's Origins program.
• 15 October:
  Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, launched into 14 orbits, returns safely.
• 24 November:
  Small icy planet (diameter ~1500 km) discovered beyond Pluto, on a long elliptical orbit near its closest approach to the Sun. Named Sedna, after the Inuit sea goddess.

New measurements show that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old.

2004

• 31 August: US astronomers reported finding 2 planets orbiting distant stars. One was near 55 Cancri, 41 light-years away; the other was near Gliese 436, 33 light-years away.
  
  
• 4 October:
  At 15:19 UTC, at the Mojave Spaceport, California, SpaceShipOne completed the second of two record-breaking space flights. SpaceShipOne was an experimental air-launched suborbital spaceplane that used a hybrid rocket motor. The design featured a unique "feathering" re-entry system where the rear half of the wing and the twin tail booms folded upward along a hinge running the length of the wing; this increased drag while remaining stable. The achievements of SpaceShipOne are more comparable to the X-15 than orbiting spacecraft like the Space Shuttle. Accelerating a spacecraft to orbital speed requires more than 60 times as much energy as lifting it to 100 km. The project consisted of Spaceship One and White Knight, the airborne launcher. White Knight is a turbo-jet aircraft, and Spaceship one is, of course, rocket-powered.
  [Cite: Scaled Composites More… :: Mission Stats ]
  
• 20 November:
  Swift (GSFC/Nasa). Multi-wavelength mission to study Gamma-Ray Bursts in X-ray and UV/optical.
  
  
• 7 December:
  Sensitive instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to measure the age of what could be the youngest galaxy ever seen. The galaxy, called I Zwicky 18, may be as young as 500 million years old, a toddler of a galaxy created as complex life was just springing up on Earth, according to a press release from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
  [Cite: NASA ]
  
  
• 16 December:
  Voyager 1 apparently crosses the termination shock of the solar wind, at which it slows down below the Alfven speed (magnetic equivalent to sound velocity). That was the first sign of resistance to the solar wind by the interstellar plasma.
  
  
• 27 December:
  A powerful gamma ray burst arrives, apparently from a "magnetar" in our own galaxy.

The spacecraft Cassini arrives at Saturn.

Mars Expedition Rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity" landed on Mars and January NASA successfully lands two remotely controlled rovers on the surface of Mars, more sophisticated than "Sojourner" landed in 1997. "Spirit" lands on the 4th (launch June 10, 2003) and "Opportunity" lands on the 24th (launch July 7, 2003). They start sending back images and information about the surface rock.[Image - NASA]

The HESS telescope array in Namibia maps a circular source of high energy gamma rays, evidence for the origin of cosmic rays in supernovas. (One of the main goals of the HESS experiment is to identify positively sources of cosmic rays in the galaxy, ending a search that has been going on for almost 100 years).
This particular Gamma-ray image is of the supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946.
The gamma-ray count map is smoothed with a Gaussian of standard deviation of 3 arcmin, matched to the resolution of the instrument for this data-set. No background subtraction has been applied. The superimposed contours show the X-ray surface brightness as seen by the ASCA satellite. [Image - HESS/Max Planck/CERN]

2005

• 19 January:
  Opportunity Rover Finds an Iron Meteorite on Mars
  On a surface of small-grained martian 'soil' rests a mis-shapen oblong rock, now identified as an iron meteorite. Its surface is smooth and dark, with many irregular pits gouging the surface. The large pits are also smooth, and are relics of dramatic erosion that occurred during the meteorite's atmospheric entry. Some of the pits are now filled with reddish dust. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found an iron meteorite on Mars, the first meteorite of any type ever identified on another planet. The pitted, basketball-size object is mostly made of iron and nickel. Readings from spectrometers on the rover determined that composition. Opportunity used its panoramic camera to take the images used in this approximately true-color composite on the rover's 339th martian day, or sol (Jan. 6, 2005). This composite combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 600-nanometer (red), 530-nanometer (green), and 480-nanometer (blue) filters.


• 22 March:
  Astronomers reported a faint heat glow from giant planets circling distant stars.


• 10 July:
  Suzaku, Astro-E2 (Japan). X-ray astronomy for 0.4-700 keV radiation. Backup for lost Astro-E.


• 16 August:
  The European Space Agency probe, Huygens, launched from the spacecraft Cassini, lands on Titan, sending back pictures of a rock strewn surface. Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have created a detailed survey of the structure of the Milky Way. Based on this evidence, they think the shape of the Milky Way is more complex than a plain old spiral. Our galaxy seems to have a long central bar, approximately 27,000 light-years in length. From our vantage point going around the Sun, we see this bar at a 45-degree angle.[Image - NASA]


• 23 December:
  December 23, 2005: NASA scientists have observed an explosion on the moon. The blast, equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT, occurred near the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) on Nov. 7, 2005, when a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid slammed into the ground traveling 27 km/s. The red dot on the image marks the location of the Nov. 7, 2005, meteoroid impact. The object that hit the moon was "probably a Taurid," says MSFC meteor expert Bill Cooke. In other words, it was part of the same meteor shower that peppered Earth with fireballs in late October and early November 2005.
  [Cite: NASA/MSFC/Bill Cooke :: More… ]

The first picture of a planet that orbits a star, the star 2M1207 in the Hydra constellation, which is 230 light years away. [Image - ESO/VLT]

2006

• January:
  A new planet discovered in our solar system, at a distance of 97 AU, apparently larger than Pluto.
• 19 January:
  Launch of the New Horizon's spacecraft to Pluto, the Kuiper belt and beyond.
• 22 February:
  AKARI, Astro-FIRIS (Japan). Infrared Imaging Surveyor.
• 13 July:
  New exoplanet defies theory. A new planet has been discovered orbiting around a star in a triple-star system in the constellation Cygnus.
• 24 August:
  Leading astronomers meeting in Prague declared that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.
• 20 September:
  Looking out a window of the International Space Station brings breathtaking views. Visible vistas include a vast and colorful Earth, a deep dark sky, and an occasional spaceship sent to visit the station. Visible here is a Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft carrying not only supplies but also three new astronauts. A few days before this picture was taken, the U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis had just departed.
  [Cite: ISS Expedition 13 Crew, NASA]
• 4 October:
  Scientists reported that the Hubble Space Telescope had revealed 16 objects about the size of Jupiter near the center of the Milky Way and that the discovery gave strong evidence that planets are abundant in other parts of the galaxy.
• 11 Dec:
  ESO Council Gives Green Light to Detailed Study of the European Extremely Large Telescope European astronomy has received a tremendous boost with the decision from ESO's governing body to proceed with detailed studies for the European Extremely Large Telescope. This study, with a budget of 57 million euro, will make it possible to start, in three years time, the construction of an optical/infrared telescope with a diameter around 40m that will revolutionise ground-based astronomy. The chosen design is based on a revolutionary concept specially developed for a telescope of this size.
  [Cite: ESO :: More…]
  
• 12 December:
  Geminid meteorite shower.
  [Images - A Dyer, M O'Leary, D Mammana, G Varros]
• 22 December:
  The European spacecraft COROT was launched from Kazakhstan. The satellite will use its 27-centimetre telescope to search for dips of light due to planets passing in front of their parent stars in events called transits

Astronomers identified the three largest stars yet discovered. These three stars are KW Sagitarii (distance 9,800 light-years), V354 Cephei (distance 9,000 light-years), and KY Cygni (distance 5,200 light-years), all with radii about 1500 times that of the Sun, or about 7 astronomical units (AU). For comparison, the well-known red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion is known from other work to have a radius about 650 times that of the Sun, or about 3 AU. If one of these stars were placed in the sun's location, its outer layers would extend to midway between the orbits of Jupiter (5.2 AU) and Saturn (9.5 AU).

2007

• 10 January:
  New Galaxies
  Researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) announced the discovery of eight new dwarf galaxies, seven of them satellites orbiting the Milky Way. They resemble systems cannibalized by the Milky Way billions of years ago to build up its stellar halo and thick disk. The systems discovered by the SDSS-II in the last three years are comparable in number to all the Milky Way satellites detected in the preceding 70 years. They help close the gap between the observed number of dwarf satellites and theoretical predictions. The eighth object, discovered in the past 2 months, shows surprising characteristics - and may be the first of a new class of "free-floating" galaxies unbound to the Milky Way.
  [Cite: SDSS/Vasily Belokurov/SDSS-II/Astronomy magazine :: More… ]
  
  
• 7 February:
  Ulysses scores a hat-trick
  Today the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission has marked another high point in its mission. For the third time in a long and highly successful career, Ulysses has reached its maximum south solar latitude of 80 degrees as it flies over the Sun's southern polar cap.
  [Cite: ESO :: More… ]
  
  
• 24 February:
  SN1987A's Twentieth Anniversary
  Today, it is exactly twenty years since the explosion of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud was first observed, at a distance of 163,000 light-years. It was the first naked-eye supernova to be seen for 383 years. Few events in modern astronomy have met with such an enthusiastic response by the scientists and now, after 20 years, it continues to be an extremely exciting object that is further studied by astronomers around the world, in particular using ESO's telescopes.
  [Cite: ESO :: More… ]
  
  
• 27 February:
  Ganymede Revealed
  This montage compares New Horizons' best views of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, gathered with the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and its infrared spectrometer, the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). The right panel combines the high-resolution grayscale LORRI image with the color-coded compositional information from the LEISA image, producing a picture that combines the best of both data sets.
  [Cite: NASA/Johns Hopkins :: More… ]
  
  
• 7 March:
  The Purple Rose of Virgo
  VLT Image of Bright Supernova in Spiral Galaxy. Until now NGC 5584 was just one galaxy among many others, located to the West of the Virgo Cluster. Known only as a number in galaxy surveys, its sheer beauty is now revealed in all its glory in a new VLT image. Since 1 March, this purple cosmic rose also holds the brightest stellar explosion of the year, known as SN 2007af.
  [Cite: ESO :: More…]
  
  
• 7 March:
  The Antenna Bride and Bridegroom
  ALMA Achieves Major Milestone With Antenna-Link Success. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international telescope project, reached a major milestone on 2 March, when two 12-m ALMA prototype antennas were first linked together as an integrated system to observe an astronomical object. "This achievement results from the integration of many state-of-the-art components from Europe and North America and bodes well for the success of ALMA in Chile", said Catherine Cesarsky, ESO's Director General. The milestone achievement, technically termed 'First Fringes', came at the ALMA Test Facility (ATF), located near Socorro in New Mexico. Faint radio waves emitted by the planet Saturn were collected by two ALMA prototype antennas, then processed by new, high-tech electronics to turn the two antennas into a single, high-resolution telescope system, called an interferometer. The planet's radio emissions at a frequency of 104 gigahertz were tracked by the ALMA system for more than an hour.
  [Cite: ESO :: More…]
  
  

• 6 April:
  A miniature biological laboratory just tested for the first time onboard the International Space Station. Called LOCAD-PTS (short for Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development - Portable Test System). The mini-lab detects the presence of bacteria or fungi on the surfaces of a spacecraft far more rapidly than standard methods of culturing. Even in space, these fungi can destroy rubber fittings, wire insulators and window seals... OOPS!
  
  
• 12 April:
  Black Hole Secrets Revealed
  NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has observed a remarkable eclipse of a supermassive black hole, allowing a disk of hot matter swirling around the hole to be measured for the first time. The supermassive black hole is located in NGC 1365, a spiral galaxy 60 million light years from Earth. It contains a so-called active galactic nucleus, or AGN. Scientists believe that a black hole at the center of the AGN is fed a steady stream of material from a surrounding disk. Matter just about to fall into a black hole should be heated to millions of degrees before passing over the event horizon, or point of no return. This super-heated disk material glows brightly in the X-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum where Chandra can see it.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 26 April:
  Earthlike(?) Planet Discovered
  Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered the smallest Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, an exoplanet with a radius only 50 percent larger than the Earth and capable of having liquid water. Using the instrument HARPS astronomers have uncovered 3 planets, all of relative low-mass: 5, 8 and 15 Earth masses. This exoplanet, Gliese 581 b, is the smallest ever found up to now and it completes a full orbit in 13 days with a radius of 1.5 times that of earth. It is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun, but its host is a red dwarf, smaller and colder than the Sun, thus less luminous, so the planet nevertheless lies in the habitable zone. The mean temperature of this super-Earth is estimated to lie between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, water could therefore be liquid. The eight Earth-mass planet is Gliese 581 c and the 15 Earth-mass planet is Gliese 581 d and are Neptunian-like planets
  [Cite: ESO ]
  
  
• 4 May:
  New Methane Powered Rocket Engine
  On January 16, 2007, a dazzling blue flame blasted across the sands of the Mojave desert.
  
  In many respects, it looked like an ordinary rocket engine test, but this was different. While most NASA rockets are powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid chemicals, "we were testing a methane engine," says project manager Terri Tramel of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The main engine, built and fired by the NASA contractor team Alliant Techsystems/XCOR Aerospace, is still in an early stage of development and isn't ready for space. But if the technology proves itself, methane engines like this one could eventually be key to deep space exploration. Methane (CH4), the principal component of natural gas, is abundant in the outer solar system. It can be harvested from Mars, Titan, Jupiter, and many other planets and moons. With fuel waiting at the destination, a rocket leaving Earth wouldn't have to carry so much propellant, reducing the cost of a mission.
  [Cite: NASA/Mike Massee/XCOR Aerospace :: More… ]
  
  
• 7 May:
  Europa-rise From Jupiter
  This unusual vista was then actually captured by the New Horizons spacecraft in February just after it buzzed past Jupiter on its way to Pluto and the outer Solar System. Visible above is the cracked surface of Europa's expansive ice fields, visible just behind a jumble of Jupiter's swirling clouds. Europa is one of the largest moons of Jupiter and a possible host to sub-surface liquid oceans that are real candidates for containing extra-terrestrial life.
  [Cite: NASA, Johns Hopkins U. APL, SWRI]
  
  
• 7 May:
  The Brightest Supernova Ever?
  The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own galaxy. "This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. "That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We've never seen that before." The discovery of the supernova, known as SN 2006gy, provides evidence that the death of such massive stars is fundamentally different from theoretical predictions. First Image: Optical (left) and X-ray (right) images of SN 2006gy. The dimmer source at lower-left is the nucleus of the host galaxy. The brighter source at upper-right is the stellar explosion. The supernova was as bright as the entire core of a galaxy! "This provides strong evidence that SN 2006gy was, in fact, the death of an extremely massive star," said Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley, who led the Chandra observations. The star that produced SN 2006gy apparently expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding. This large mass loss is similar to that seen from Eta Carinae, a massive star in our galaxy, raising suspicion that Eta Carinae may be poised to explode as a supernova. Although SN 2006gy is intrinsically the brightest supernova ever, it is in the galaxy NGC 1260, some 240 million light years away. However, Eta Carinae is only about 7,500 light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. "We don't know for sure if Eta Carinae will explode soon, but we had better keep a close eye on it just in case," said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research. Second Image: eta Carinae--a supernova waiting to happen in our own galaxy? The giant star is highlighted by diffraction spikes in this astrophoto.
  [Cite: NASA/Brad Moore :: More… ]
  
  
• 10 May:
  More On SN 2006gy
  The stellar explosion cataloged as supernova SN 2006gy shines in this wide-field image (left) of its host galaxy, NGC 1260, and expanded view (upper right panel) of the region surrounding the galaxy's core. In fact, given its estimated distance of 240 million light-years, SN 2006gy was brighter than, and has stayed brighter longer than, any previously seen supernova. The Chandra observations in the lower right panel establish the supernova's x-ray brightness and lend strong evidence to the theory that SN 2006gy was the death explosion of a star well over 100 times as massive as the Sun.
  [Cite: NASA/CXC/Nathan Smith/Weidong Li/UC Berkeley/et al.]
  
  
• 22 May:
  The Moon and Saturn
  Because the Moon and bright planets wander through the sky near the ecliptic plane, such occultation events are not uncommon, but they are dramatic, especially in telescopic views. In this sharp image Saturn is captured emerging from behind the Moon, giving the illusion that it lies just beyond the Moon's bright edge. Of course, the Moon is a mere 400 thousand kilometers away, compared to Saturn's distance of 1.4 billion kilometers.
  [Credit & Copyright: Jens Hackmann]
  
  
• 28 May:
  Holes in Mars
  Black spots have been discovered on Mars that are so dark that nothing inside can be seen. Quite possibly, the spots are entrances to deep underground caves capable of protecting Martian life, were it to exist. The unusual hole pictured above was found on the slopes of the giant Martian volcano Arsia Mons.
  [Cite: NASA/JPL/U. Arizona]
  
  
• 28 May:
  Astronomers on teams from UC Berkeley and Australia reported the discovery of 28 new planets in the Milky Way.
• 30 May:
  Awesome Upheaval
  Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence for a titanic event in a massive cluster of galaxies. A bright arc of ferociously hot gas extending more than two million light years requires one of the most energetic events ever detected. "The huge feature we detected in the cluster combined with its high temperature (170 million oC) points to an exceptionally dramatic event in the nearby Universe," says Ralph Kraft of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of a team of astronomers involved in this research. "While we're not sure what caused it, we have narrowed it down to a couple of exciting possibilities". In this side-by-side comparison, an apparently ordinary star field in optical light (left) is shown to be dramatically different when observed in X-rays (right). Chandra's image of 3C438, the central galaxy within a massive cluster, reveals evidence for one of the most energetic events in the local Universe. The favored explanation is that two massive galaxy clusters are running into each other at about 4 million miles per hour. When hot clouds of gas in the two clusters meet, shock waves produce a sharp change in pressure along the boundary where the collision is taking place, giving rise to the observed arc, which resembles an titanic weather front.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
  
• 30 May:
  NASA Space Telescope Gives Scientists Depth Perception
  Astronomers now have a new "eye" for determining the distance to certain mysterious bodies in and around our Milky Way galaxy. By taking advantage of the unique position of NASA's Spitzer's Space Telescope millions of miles from Earth, and a depth-perceiving trick called parallax, they were able to pin down the most probable location of one such object. The findings will ultimately help astronomers better understand the different components of our galaxy. "Forty years ago a visionary astronomer named Dr. Sjur Refsdal theorized that dark bodies could be located using parallax and a space telescope," said Andrew Gould of Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, who led the project. "It is truly remarkable that we have been able to prove him right with this Spitzer observation." Spitzer is the only telescope that orbits the sun behind Earth, and is the farthest telescope from us with the ability to study distant stars. Currently, Spitzer is about 70 million kilometers away from Earth. It will continue to drift farther and farther away at a rate of about 15 million kilometers per year.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 5 June:
  Messenger Passes Venus
  Picture this: A spaceship swoops in from the void, plunging toward a cloudy planet about the size of Earth. A laser beam lances out from the ship; it probes the planet's clouds, striving to reach the hidden surface below. Meanwhile, back on the craft's home world, scientists perch on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens. Sounds like science fiction? This is real, and it's happening today. (Image shows laser surrounded by 4 receiver telescopes) The spacecraft is MESSENGER, and the planet is Venus. On June 5, 2007, MESSENGER will fly past Venus just 338 km above the planet's surface, and it will shoot a 20 Watt laser into the clouds. MESSENGER is on a mission to Mercury, not Venus. But the spacecraft must pass by Venus for a gravity assist en route. In passing, researchers hope to learn a few things about Earth's "evil twin," an Earth-sized world with sulfuric acid clouds, a choking carbon dioxide atmosphere, and a surface hot enough to melt lead.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 18 June:
  The Moon And Venus
  If you were out just before sunset on June 18 you had the opportunity (given no clouds) of seeing an occultation of venus by the moon - both visible during the daylight. The shape of Venus' image is due to its phase, not by its shape being obscured by another astronomical body.
  [Cite: Images - P Heinzen & H Gröll]
  
  
• 25 June:
  Thinking Big About Space Telescopes
  A new NASA launcher - the Ares V - will be able to place almost 130 metric tonnes into low Earth orbit. It would be large enough to carry primary mirrors 8+ meters wide, by comparison with Hubble's paltry 2.4 m - see Image 1.
  They want to "park" it at the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. The 5 Lagrange points are stable parking spots in space. If put there properly, any object's orbit is inherently stable and does not decay - see Image 2.
  A key advantage of L2 is that the Sun, Earth and Moon are concentrated in one small part of the sky, giving any telescope located there a wide and unobstructed view of deep space. The resolution of the telescope's images would be more than three times sharper than those of Hubble. More important, the mirror would see objects about 11 times fainter than Hubble can because the area of the mirror would be 11 times greater.
  [Cite: NASA]
  
  
• 28 June:
  NASA's Mars Rover
  Opportunity is scheduled to begin a descent down a rock-paved slope into the Red Planet's massive Victoria Crater. This carries real risk for the long-lived robotic explorer, but NASA and the Mars Rover science team expect it to provide valuable science.
  [Cite: NASA Science :: More… ]
  
  

• 6 July:
  The Adventures of ASTRO and NextSat
  Picture this: Two robots hang suspended in space, nose to nose. One reaches out a crooked silver arm and begins to minister to the needs of the other. Fuel is exchanged, a battery is replaced; servicing complete, the two silently drift apart. These robots, named ASTRO and NextSat, are REAL and they are in Earth orbit NOW!
  [Cite: NASA Science :: More… ]
  
  
• 13 July:
  
  
  The Grand Canary Telescope, one of the most powerful in the world, began spying on the universe, using its 34-foot wide mirror to search for planets similar to our own from a mountaintop on one of Spain's Canary Islands. The Canary Island observatory said institutes in Mexico and the US collaborated in the project, involving more than 1,000 people.
  
  
• 27 July:
  Beware the Pirhana. Deep in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy lurks an extraordinary black hole. Astronomers call it "supermassive." It has been feeding on the core of our galaxy so long, the hole has accumulated more than a million Suns of mass inside its pinprick belly.
  [Cite: NASA Science :: More… ]
  
  
• 6 August:
  Largest merger of galaxies discovered. The merger is taking place in the giant galaxy cluster CL0958+4702. The four white blobs seen in the image are galaxies in the process of merging into a single gargantuan one. The smash-up is shedding light on how the biggest galaxies in the universe form – and why many of them stopped giving birth to stars billions of years ago.
  [Cite: Image: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/CXO/WIYN/Harvard-Smithsonian :: More… ]
  
  
• 10 August:
  Of Skunks and Telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. It will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. JWST will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. The telescope's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.
  JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won't fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once the telescope is in outer space. It will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.
  [Cite: JWST and NASA Science :: More from JWST... :: More from NASA Science... ]
  
  
• 15 August:
  Surprise! MIRA, A Star with a Comet-like Tail. Astronomers using a NASA space telescope, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, have spotted an amazingly long comet-like tail behind a star streaking through space. The star, named Mira after the Latin word for "wonderful," has been a favorite of astronomers for about 400 years, yet this is the first time the tail has been seen.
  
  Galaxy Evolution Explorer - "GALEX" for short - scanned the popular star during its ongoing survey of the entire sky in ultraviolet light. Astronomers then noticed what looked like a comet with a gargantuan tail. In fact, material blowing off Mira is forming a wake 13 light-years long, or about 20,000 times the average distance of Pluto from the sun. Nothing like this has ever been seen before around a star.
  [Cite: NASA Science :: More… ]
  
  
• 19 August:
  Spectacular photograph of the International Space Station, photographed from Shuttle Endeavour just after it undocked on its way back to earth. The image was acquired by an astronaut through one of the crew cabin windows, looking back over the length of the Shuttle. Endeavour had undocked from the International Space Station, and the crew had begun late inspection of the orbiter’s Thermal Protection System (wing leading edges, nosecap, and belly tiles) prior to landing
  [Cite: NASA Science :: More… ]
  
  
• 22 August:
  HAWK-I Takes Off. New Wide Field Near-Infrared Imager for ESO's Very Large Telescope. Europe's flagship ground-based astronomical facility, the ESO VLT, has been equipped with a new 'eye' to study the Universe. Working in the near-infrared, the new instrument - dubbed HAWK-I - covers about 1/10th the area of the Full Moon in a single exposure. It is uniquely suited to the discovery and study of faint objects, such as distant galaxies or small stars and planets.
  [Cite: ESO :: More…]
  
  
• 23 August:
  Edge-On! Peering at Uranus's Rings as they Swing Edge-on to Earth for the First Time Since their Discovery in 1977.
  As Uranus coasts through a brief window of time when its rings are edge-on to Earth - a view of the planet we get only once every 42 years - astronomers peering at the rings with ESO's Very Large Telescope and other space or ground-based telescopes are getting an unprecedented view of the fine dust in the system, free from the glare of the bright rocky rings. They may even find a new moon or two.
  [Cite: ESO :: More… ]
  
  
• 28 August:
  A total eclipse of the Moon. Seen best by skywatchers in western North America, and the Pacific region, the resulting total lunar eclipse was a dark one, lasting about 90 minutes. Of course, even during a total lunar eclipse,the Moon is not completely dark. Instead the Moon remains visible during totality, reflecting reddened light filtering into the Earth's shadow. The light comes from all the sunsets and sunrises, as seen from the lunar perspective, around the edges of a silhouetted Earth.
  [Cite: Images Chuck Hunt, James W Young, Jonathan Dael ]
  
  
• 18 September:
  Thermal images of planet Neptune taken with VISIR on ESO's Very Large Telescope, obtained on 1 and 2 September 2006. These thermal images show a 'hot' south pole on Neptune. These warmer temperatures provide an avenue for methane to escape out of the deep atmosphere. Scientists say Neptune's south pole is 'hotter' than anywhere else on the planet by about 10 degrees Celsius. The average temperature on Neptune is about minus 200 degrees Celsius.
  [Cite: ESO :: More… ]
  
  
• 18 September:
  "We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters. Last week she sat in an audience of nearly two hundred colleagues at the "Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and watched in amazement as Saku Tsuneta of Japan played a movie of sunspot 10926 breaking through the turbulent surface of the sun. Before their very eyes an object as big as a planet materialized, and no one was prepared for the form it took. "It looks like a prehistoric trilobite," said Marc De Rosa, a scientist from Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. "To me it seemed more like cellular mitosis in which duplicated chromosomes self-assemble into two daughter cells," countered Guhathakurta. Look HERE and make up your own mind.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 26 September:
  Foton-M3 experiments return to Earth. The reentry capsule for the Foton-M3 spacecraft, which has been in low-Earth orbit for the last 12 days, successfully landed this morning in an uninhabited area 150 km south of the town of Kustanay in Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border. The unmanned Foton spacecraft, which was launched on 14 September from Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, carried a payload of 43 European experiments in a range of scientific disciplines – including fluid physics, biology, crystal growth, radiation exposure and exobiology.
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  
• 27-28 September:
  
  
  NASA's Mars rover Opportunity edged 3.7 meters (12 feet) closer to the top of the "Duck Bay" alcove along the rim of "Victoria Crater" during the rover's 952nd Martian day and gained this vista of the crater. The rover's navigation camera took the seven exposures combined into this mosaic view of the crater's interior. This crater has been the mission's long-term destination for the past 21 Earth months. The far side of the crater is about 800 meters (one-half mile) away. The rim of the crater is composed of alternating promontories, rocky points towering approximately 70 meters (230 feet) above the crater floor, and recessed alcoves, such as Duck Bay. The bottom of the crater is covered by sand that has been shaped into ripples by the Martian wind. The rocky cliffs in the foreground have been informally named "Cape Verde," on the left, and "Cabo Frio," on the right.
  [Cite: NASA/JPL ]
  
  

• 4 October:
  50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I. "Sputnik" in Russian means traveling companion. Despite the innocuous sounding name, the launch of planet Earth's first artificial moon, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, changed the world and set in motion events which resulted in the creation of NASA and the race to the Moon. One month later Sputnik II was launched into orbit, containing a dog named "Laika".
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 10 October:
  The latest pictures of the Gallilean Four. Winging its way past Jupiter on 28 February, The New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to meet Pluto sometime in 2015. It rode the planet's gravity to boost its speed and shave three years off its trip. As at today's date it has returned about 70% of the 32 Gigabits of information collected. It was the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter.
  [Cite: NASA :: More Info... :: More Pics... ]
  
  
• 11 October:
  The latest pictures of "Lakes" on Titan. Superb views of the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Saturn's moon Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft are released today. Radar images comprised from seven Titan fly-bys over the last year and a half shows a north pole pitted with giant lakes and seas, at least one of them larger than Lake Superior in the USA, the largest freshwater lake on Earth. [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 24 October:
  In athletic events such as swimming or running, a world record will often stand for several years before it’s broken. The same thing usually holds true for astronomical records as well. But in the case of black holes that form when their parent stars explode as a supernova, a record established less than two weeks ago has just been shattered. Black holes are objects with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. On October 17, astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that a black hole in the galaxy M33 contains 16 times the mass of the Sun. For two weeks it was the heaviest known black hole of its type. Such black holes are known as "stellar-mass" black holes, because they have masses typical of stars.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 4-8 November:
  A Tale of Comet Holmes. A beautiful blue ion tail has become visible in deep telescopic images of Comet Holmes. Pointing generally away from the Sun and also planet Earth, the comet's ion tail is seriously foreshortened by our extreme viewing angle. Still, enthusiastic comet watchers have remarked that on the whole, the compact but tentacled appearance suggests a jellyfish or even a cosmic calamari. This stunning view of the comet's greenish coma and blue tail was recorded on November 4 in clear skies near Budapest, Hungary. The colors are caused by molecules in the tenuous gas, like C2 (green) and CO+ (blue), fluorescing in sunlight. In a more recent development, the dramatic inset is a deep image from L'Aquila in central Italy on November 8, showing the ion tail disconnecting from the comet.
  [Cite: Main Image: Ivan Eder :: Inset: Paolo Berardi ]
  
  
• 5 November:
  When a spacecraft watches stars setting through a planet's atmosphere from orbit, it can reveal hidden details about that planet’s atmosphere. The technique is known as stellar occultation. It works by watching stars from space, while they drop behind the atmosphere of a planet under investigation, before disappearing from view below the planet’s horizon. When the stars are shining above the atmosphere, they give off radiation across a wide spread of wavelengths. As the orbit of the spacecraft carries it around the planet, the star appears to sink down, behind the atmosphere of the planet. The atmosphere acts as a filter, blocking out certain wavelengths of the star’s radiation. The key to this technique is that the blocked wavelengths are representative of the molecules and atoms in the planet’s atmosphere.
  
  Explanation: The blue color of earth's sky is due to the scattering effect of the molecules that make up our atmosphere. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. Whichever direction you look, this scattered blue light is what makes the sky appear blue. As you change your viewpoint and look towards the horizon the scattered blue light must pass through more atmosphere. Some of it gets scattered again, so less blue light reaches your eyes and therefore the color of the sky near the horizon appears a paler blue or even white. Different gases scatter light differently, so analysis of the known light of a star as it is occulted by a planet will provide accurate information concerning the constituents of that planet's atmosphere.

  
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  
• 20 November:
  Earth's true colours True colour images of Earth as seen by Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera are now available. The pictures were taken on 13 November during the swing-by, and on 15 November, as Rosetta left on its way to the outer Solar System, after the swing-by. After its closest approach to Earth, Rosetta looked back and took a number of images using the Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). This particular image was acquired 15 November 2007 at 03:30 CET.
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  Earthrise from Moon-Orbiting Kaguya
  
  Explanation: What does the Earth look like from the Moon? A new version of this space age perspective was captured by the robotic Kaguya spacecraft currently in orbit around Earth's Moon. Launched two months ago by Japan, the scientific mission of the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE), nicknamed Kaguya, is to study the origin and evolution of the Moon. Last month Kaguya reached lunar orbit and starting transmitting data and images. This frame is from Kaguya's onboard HDTV camera. An astronaut standing on the lunar surface would never actually see the Earth rise, since the Moon always keeps the same side toward the Earth. This Earthrise as well as the famous Earthrise captured 40 years ago by the crew of Apollo 8, only occurs for observers in lunar orbit.
  [Cite: SELENE Team, JAXA, NHK :: More… ]
  
  
• 22 November:
  Mars Express - 5000 orbits and counting... On 25 December 2003, Europe’s first Mars orbiter arrived at the Red Planet. Almost four years later, Mars Express continues to rewrite the text books as its instruments send back a stream of images and other data. Today, the spacecraft reached another milestone in its remarkable career by completing 5000 orbits of Mars. During its mission to investigate martian mysteries, the orbiter has revolutionised our knowledge of Mars, probing every facet of the Red Planet in unprecedented detail. Some of the most visually astonishing results have been returned by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which has produced breathtaking, 3D colour images of the diverse martian surface – with giant volcanoes to sinuous valleys and ice-modified craters.
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  
• 25 November:
  Rock climbers of the world... eat your hearts out! Cliffs almost two kilometers high at the Martian north pole. This image, showing the Martian north polar ice cap, was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, was taken in 2005, and released at the First Mars Express Science Conference this week. Here we also see dark material in the caldera-like structures and dune fields which could be volcanic ash.
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  
• 28 November:
  A Cosmic Canonball, travelling at 3 million miles per hour! Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered one of the fastest stars ever seen. It's a "cosmic cannonball" that is challenging theories to explain its blistering speed. The name of the star is RX J0822-4300. It's a neutron star created by the Puppis A supernova explosion about 3700 years ago.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 28 November:
  
  
  A new view of the atmosphere from Venus Express. Venus Express has been making the most detailed study of the planet’s thick and complex atmosphere to date. The latest findings highlight the features that make Venus unique in the Solar System and provide fresh clues as to how the planet is - despite everything - a more Earth-like planetary neighbour than one could have imagined.
  [Cite: ESA :: More… ]
  
  
• 2 December:
  Astronomers Uncover One of the Youngest and Brightest Galaxies in the Early Universe
  NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, with a boost from a natural "zoom lens", have uncovered what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic "dark ages", just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe.
  [Cite: NASA :: More… ]
  
  
• 4 December:
  Twelve yearsof SOHO observations give us these two sequences of the surface of our sun.
  at 60,000-80,000 degrees Kelvin
  at 1,000,000 degrees Kelvin
  [Cite: SOHO/EIT (ESA & NASA) :: More… ]
  
  
• 17 December:
  
  The first image is a composite and shows the jet from a black hole at the center of a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy, the first time such an interaction has been found. In the image, data from several wavelengths have been combined. X-rays from Chandra (colored purple), optical and ultraviolet (UV) data from Hubble (red and orange), and radio emission from the Very Large Array (VLA) and MERLIN (blue) show how the jet from the main galaxy on the lower left is striking its companion galaxy to the upper right. The jet impacts the companion galaxy at its edge and is then disrupted and deflected, much like how a stream of water from a hose will splay out after hitting a wall at an angle.
  
  The second image is an artists impression of exactly what is happening to make visualisation easier.
  [Cite: Chandra/NASA :: More… ]