Year of the Comet
Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS)

PANSTARRS information

Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON)

ISON information

Astronomy News

Your online destination for news articles on planets, cosmology, NASA, space missions, and more. You’ll also find information on how to observe upcoming visible sky events such as meteor showers, solar and lunar eclipses, key planetary appearances, comets, and asteroids.

February 2011
Virgin-Galactic
Payload specialists will perform research using existing biomedical, microgravity, and astronomical imaging experiments conceived and prepared for flight at the research institute.
By Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas
Published: February 28, 2011
Shuttle-Discovery
Besides delivering a new module and critical supplies, the shuttle is also delivering a robot that will become a permanent resident of the station.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 25, 2011
Asteroid discoveries
Astronomers uncovered 19 new near-Earth asteroids in a single night.
By University of Hawaii at Manoa's Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu
Published: February 25, 2011
Wide-field-view-T-Cha
Astronomers may have found the first observable object clearing its path in the natal disk surrounding a young star.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: February 24, 2011
Cas-A
New neutron star data has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities.
By Royal Astronomical Society, United Kingdom
Published: February 24, 2011
kleopatra
Scientific observations of the orbits of the asteroid’s two satellites imply that Kleopatra is a rubble pile instead of being solid.
By University of California, Berkeley
Published: February 23, 2011
Mrk 231
Gemini Observatory observations expose a broad outflow extending in all directions around the galaxy Markarian 231’s core, removing gas from the nucleus at more than twice the rate of star formation.
By Gemini Observatory, Hilo, Hawaii
Published: February 23, 2011
solar system portrait
The MESSENGER spacecraft pieced together the first picture of our solar system from the inside looking out.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 22, 2011
Discovery
The astronauts will deliver the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) to the International Space Station.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 21, 2011
Milky-Way
The Very Long Baseline Array Telescope can produce images hundreds of times more detailed than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
By NRAO, Socorro, New Mexico
Published: February 21, 2011
AB-Aur
Images reveal for the first time the fine structures of a disk orbiting closer to its star than Neptune's distance from the Sun in our solar system.
By Subaru Telescope Facility, Hilo, Hawaii
Published: February 18, 2011
Lockman Hole
The space telescope was able to uncover more about how this galaxy-making process works by mapping the infrared light from collections of distant, massive star-forming galaxies.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 17, 2011
021411_solar-flare

A region in the Sun's southern hemisphere let loose a strong solar flare, the largest one since December 2006 and the biggest so far in Solar Cycle 24.

By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Published: February 17, 2011
NGC2841
The driving force behind star formation is particularly unclear for a type of galaxy called a flocculent spiral, which features short spiral arms rather than prominent and well-defined galactic limbs.
By Hubble ESA, Garching, Germany
Published: February 17, 2011
Comet Tempel 1 mosaic
The spacecraft captured images of changing surface features, new terrain, and the crater generated by the 2005 Deep Impact mission.
By NASA/JPL
Published: February 16, 2011
M78
The ultraviolet radiation from the stars that illuminate M78 is not intense enough to ionize the gas to make it glow — its dust particles simply reflect the starlight that falls on them.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: February 16, 2011
thick-disk-structure
The discovery and properties of the thick disk will constrain the dominant physical processes involved in the formation and evolution of large spiral galaxies.
By Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, United Kingdom
Published: February 15, 2011
Telescopio Nazionale Galileo
A precision spectrograph has been designed to detect tiny radial-velocity signals induced by planets as small as Earth.
By Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published: February 14, 2011
North-America-Nebula
In Spitzer's infrared view, the “continent” disappears. Instead, a swirling landscape of dust and young stars comes into view.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Published: February 11, 2011
arp147
The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely 10 to 20 times that of the Sun.
By Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published: February 10, 2011
Jupiters lost belt
Using Europa as an adaptive optics guide star, astronomers discovered icy clouds obscuring the brown-red South Equatorial Belt.
By W. M. Keck Observatory, Kamuela, Hawaii
Published: February 9, 2011
Titan aerosol
The concentration of these clouds in the cold polar region strengthens the understanding of the global atmospheric circulation on Saturn’s largest moon.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 8, 2011
Both-sides-of-Sun
The new perspective will allow scientists to better predict space weather and the violent eruptions from the Sun's surface.
By the Science and Technology Facilities Council, United Kingdom
Published: February 7, 2011
ejecta
The familiar pattern of instabilities appear to form and build on one flank of a coronal mass ejection.
By University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
Published: February 7, 2011
First-star-forms
The findings challenge the previously held wisdom that primordial stars formed in complete isolation, rather than in groups typical for stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
By McDonald Observatory at University of Texas, Austin, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Published: February 4, 2011
Northern Mars dune field
A report identifies the seasonal coming and going of carbon dioxide ice as one agent of change on Mars’ northern sand dunes, and stronger-than-expected wind gusts as another.
By NASA/JPL
Published: February 4, 2011
Kepler-11
The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: February 3, 2011
NGC3621
Recent research suggests that bulge-less, or pure-disk, spiral galaxies like NGC 3621 are actually fairly common.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: February 3, 2011
magnetospheric substorm
Learning about the source of such particles and how they are shuttled through Earth's atmosphere is crucial to better understanding the Sun's complex space weather system.
By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Published: February 1, 2011
Cluster-image_aurora
The new results from Cluster give scientists a greater insight into the workings of space plasma.
By ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
Published: February 1, 2011
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