The eight planets in our solar system each occupy their own orbits around the Sun. They orbit the star in ellipses, which means their distance to the sun varies depending on where they are in their orbits. When they get closest ...
Space Exploration
Apr 22, 2014
1
5
How far is the Sun? It seems as if one could hardly ask a more straightforward question. Yet this very inquiry bedeviled astronomers for more than two thousand years.
Space Exploration
Jan 5, 2015
3
43
Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the ...
Astronomy
Jul 5, 2022
4
3079
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is by far the closest such object to us, about 27,000 light-years away. Although it is not nearly so active or luminous as other galactic ...
Astronomy
Jul 12, 2021
100
725
The existence of black holes is one of the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. Despite his original misgivings about their reality, massive black hole holes are today believed to lie at the ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2009
14
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- The majority of extra-solar planets (about 278 of them) are more massive than Jupiter. About 20% of this majority group orbit their stars at a distances of less than one-tenth of an astronomical unit (one ...
Astronomy
Oct 22, 2010
0
0
The discovery of the star, known as S5-HVS1, was made by Sergey Koposov from Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5). Located in the constellation of Grus—the Crane—S5-HVS1 ...
Astronomy
Nov 12, 2019
5
426
"Space is Big. Really Big." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle.
Astronomy
Aug 21, 2013
17
0
(Phys.org)—Members of the International Astronomical Union have voted to approve a change to the definition of the famous "astronomical unit" aka, AU, from one based on variable data, to a definite number. The change has ...
A team of astronomers has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date.
Astronomy
Feb 17, 2022
2
563
