Astronomy Archives - Virtual Orbit

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The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth keep rising. But there are four reasons I’m not worried yet | Carrie Nugent

Two days after Christmas, the Atlas sky survey team discovered a new rocky object in Earth’s astronomical neighbourhood. Atlas discovers near-Earth objects all the time: in 2024, the team discovered 167 of them. They also codiscovered comet Tsuchinshan–Atlas, which dazzled sky gazers last autumn. But this discovery was special: there’s a chance the 40-90 metre object, known as 2024 YR4, will hit Earth in 2032.In January, the impact probability was estimated to be just over 1%, then it was raised to 2.3% in early February. As of this week, the Nasa JPL Center for Near Earth Object Studies has raised that to 3.1% – or about 1-in-32 chance of impact.There are four reasons I’m not worried just yet. First, the possible impact would be in December 2032, so we’ve got time to prepare. Second, the ...

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Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we’re not alone

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which upends the decades-old "hard steps" theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event, suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. A team of researchers at Penn State, who led the work, said the new interpretation of humanity's origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. "This is a significant shift in how we think about the history of life," said Jennifer Macalady, professor of geosciences at Penn State and co-author on the paper, which published today (Feb. 14) in the journal Science Advances. "It suggests that the evolution of ...

This Hot Jupiter Probably Formed Close to Its Star

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This Hot Jupiter Probably Formed Close to Its Star

The current exoplanet census contains 5,832 confirmed candidates, with more than 7,500 still awaiting confirmation. Of those that have been confirmed, most have been gas giants ranging from Neptune-like bodies (1992) to those similar to or many times the size and mass of Jupiter and Saturn (1883). Like the gas giants of the Solar System, astronomers generally theorized that these types of planets form in the outer reaches of their star system, where conditions are cold enough for gases like hydrogen and helium and volatile compounds (water, ammonia, methane, etc.) will condense or freeze solid. However, astronomers have noted that many of the gas giants they’ve observed orbited close to their stars, known as “Hot Jupiters.” This has raised questions about whether or not gas giants a...

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February Night Sky 2025 – Astronotes

This month is an interesting one for those of us who love to stargaze. I know the nights are still cooler, so wrap up and head out to watch the stars. While the sun will gradually set later and later until the summer solstice. We will still have plenty of dark sky time. While we do, find somewhere with as little light as possible to look out to the universe. Constellations We are going to see some recognisable constellations for this month including Orion the Hunter (best known for his belt of three stars) and Taurus with some notable deep sky objects of its own. Both constellations are quite old, recorded by an astronomer called Ptolemy in the 2nd century, but he did not create or imagine them. They were two of forty eight constellations that he learned of while studying the stars. Back...

NASA’s Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy – Astronomy Now

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Astronomy

NASA’s Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy – Astronomy Now

In the years following the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31). It can be seen with the naked eye on a very clear autumn night as a faint cigar-shaped object roughly the apparent angular diameter of our Moon. Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed billions of years ago, evidence shows they have very different evolutionary histories despite sharing the same cosmological neighbourhood. A century ago, Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called “spiral nebula” was actually very far outside our own Milky Way galaxy —at a distance of approximately 2.5 million light-years or r...