This week in our wrap up, we lull you into a false sense of security with adorable lion cubs then ambush you with terrifying pulsars. We do this not out of a sense of malice but to prepare your mind for the possibility of ...
Three astronomers from the Netherlands have proven that gas that was previously heated near a supermassive black hole flowed to the outskirts of the galaxy and cooled down, moving back towards the black hole. While there ...
Astronomy
Nov 30, 2023
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To their surprise, an international team of researchers has discovered a giant and extremely faint stream of stars between galaxies. While streams are already known in our own galaxy and in nearby galaxies, this is the first ...
Astronomy
Nov 30, 2023
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An international team of astronomers led by Durham University and including astronomers at the UK Astronomy Technology Center has reported the first detection of a rotating disk structure around a forming high-mass star outside ...
Astronomy
Nov 29, 2023
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An international team of astronomers has inspected a low-mass X-ray binary system known as GX 339-4. Results of the study, reported in a paper published Nov. 21 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the high-frequency ...
Observing distant objects is no easy task, thanks to our planet's thick and fluffy atmosphere. As light passes through the upper reaches of our atmosphere, it is refracted and distorted, making it much harder to discern objects ...
Astronomy
Nov 27, 2023
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The Orion Nebula is a favorite among stargazers. It's a giant stellar nebula out of which, hot young stars are forming. Telescopically to the eye it appears as a gray/green haze of wonderment but cameras reveal the true glory ...
Astronomy
Nov 27, 2023
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By analyzing the images from the Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new compact satellite of the Milky Way, which received designation Ursa Major ...
Astronomers have discovered a new stellar system in the outskirts of the Milky Way as part of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). The newfound system, named Sextans II, is most likely an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. The finding is ...
Astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere report the discovery of 63 new giant radio galaxies as part of the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm survey (FIRST). The findings are detailed in ...
A light-year or light year (symbol: ly) is a unit of length, equal to just under 1013 kilometres. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year.
The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The preferred unit in astrometry is the parsec, because it can be more easily derived from, and compared with, observational data. The parsec is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer, and is equal to approximately 3.26 light-years.
The related unit of the light-month, roughly one-twelfth of a light-year, is also used occasionally for approximate measures.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
