stars

Dark energy may not have much in common with aliens, unless there's a flotilla of freaky monoliths out there with really weird physical properties. But astrophysicists hope to build a two-in-one space telescope that can search for signs of dark energy along with exoplanets.

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While most of the world looked forward to the switch from analog to digital TV for the sharper picture and clearer sound, astronomers around the US anticipated the changeover period for a totally different reason: clarity. In the brief period between the removal of analog television signals and the assignment of those frequencies to other devices like cell phones, astronomers will get their first look at a time in the universe that has been obscured from telescopes since Wally and the Beav roamed the airwaves.

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Astrophotography is hard. Astronomically hard. Everything has to be perfect. Your telescope, with camera attached, must track your target in precise synchronization with the rotation of the Earth. It can't shake. It can't even vibrate. You have to nail your camera's exposure settings or you'll be rewarded with an incoherent mess. Your targets are often so dim you can't even see them until after the image has been made, so focusing is a nightmare.

So why try? Because it makes the entities floating in the vastness of the universe much more real than any Hubble wallpaper on your computer desktop can.

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What a heavenly year for stargazers. We’ve had a spectacular solar eclipse in Asia, a clutch rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the surprising crash of a comet into Jupiter—discovered, no less, by an amateur astronomer. Try the gear below to find the next marvel yourself.

Click here to view gallery

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Observing a star up close (putting aside for a moment how you’d get there or withstand its heat) is probably like sitting beside an enormous silent fire. Sounds—which are simply pressure variations in a medium such as air or water—can’t propagate in the vacuum of space, so the roiling surface of a star would make an impression on the eyes, but not the ears.

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For decades, astronomers have known that the vast regions of intergalactic gas and dust known as nebulae served as the womb of stars. They theorized that under the relentless pull of gravity, the gas of a nebula condenses until critical mass ignites the gas and sparks the birth of a new sun. But while that theory explained the general genesis of stars, no one ventured a guess at which nebula would become a new star when.

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Take a guided tour of the cosmos, led by a robotic telescope. Meade’s ETX-LS is the first scope to automatically point itself at interesting celestial bodies, no human help required. As an extra benefit for beginners, it plays an informational audio clip through its speaker (or a video clip if you plug it into a monitor) once it locks on a worthy star.

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For centuries, the creation of the universe has loomed large in human thought, cropping up in everything from ancient folklore to modern scientific theories. A newly-developed nano-sized device, 100 times smaller than the thickness of human hair and capable of detecting infrared light that dates back to the "big bang," could soon give us more food for thought concerning the galaxy's formation 14 billion years ago.

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Considering the birth rate, astronomers might have named this the Rabbit Galaxy. According to a new paper in today’s issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered a galaxy that birthed stars 400 times faster than our Milky Way, overturning previously held ideas about the formation of giant galaxies

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News of another extrasolar planet hardly grabs headlines anymore, now that scientists have pushed the count far above 200. But yesterday a group of astrophysicists says it may have uncovered evidence of a foreign planet being born.

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