Space Scoop

15 February 2012:

14 February 2012:

9 February 2012:

8 February 2012:

1 February 2012: Every 50 years or so, a massive star in our Galaxy explodes in what is called a supernova. In the explosion, the star’s outer shells of gas are blown into space. This hot gas gives off X-ray radiation, which astronomers can photograph using special telescopes in space.

1 February 2012: Do you ever look at clouds in the sky and see the shapes of objects and people in them? Well, astronomers do the same thing in the night sky.

25 January 2012:

24 January 2012: Scientists have launched many spacecraft to study the objects in our Solar System. So far, though, only one has travelled to the edge of the Solar System and it is called Voyager 1. It has taken Voyager 1 more than 30 years to make this incredible road trip, so you can image why astronomers get excited when objects from the outer Solar System visit Earth instead!

19 January 2012: It’s not just slang words, like “sick” and “wicked”, that can mean something completely different to what you would normally expect. For example, take this new picture of an object in space called a planetary nubula – it actually has nothing at all to do with planets!

11 January 2012: Over the past 16 years, astronomers have found more than 700 planets outside of our Solar System. We call these distant worlds ‘exo-planets’.

10 January 2012: What do you get when you smash two of the largest objects in the Universe together? A big fat one!

4 January 2012: Astronomy involves a lot of technical gobbledygook, right? There are lots of strange words, such as galaxy and nebula. Well, we’re going to let you into a secret: most of them are just translations from ancient languages for everyday words. For example, the word ‘galaxy’ comes from the Greek word for ‘milky white. And ‘nebula’ is a Latin word for ‘cloud’.

20 December 2011: Weird things happen to stars when they run out of fuel. That’s because the fuel doesn’t just generate light and heat – it is needed to stop stars from collapsing! This is a problem that the bright white star in the right-hand-side of this new space photo has already faced.

20 December 2011: It’s no wonder that the galaxy in this new photo is nicknamed the Silver Coin Galaxy – it looks a giant coin that has been flipped to decide between Heads and Tails! The ‘coin’ also looks well polished and shiny, being one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky.

14 December 2011: You’re probably wondering what on Earth is going on in this picture! Unlike many of the wonderful photos that we bring you in Space Scoop, this picture is an illustration drawn by an artist on a computer.

13 December 2011: Like a soda drink moving around in a glass, huge clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth in this new space picture.

7 December 2011: Astronomers have taken the best photos ever of a star that has lost most of its material to a vampire star!

5 December 2011: Like a team of detectives, a group of astronomers are trying to solve a mystery. They have recently found a weird star that is about 25 times heavier than our Sun and spinning more than 300 times more quickly – it spins faster than any other known heavyweight star!

17 November 2011: The Earth’s atmosphere blocks harmful high-energy radiation from space, such as X-rays, from reaching the ground. To detect this radiation, astronomers have to go beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

16 November 2011: Dust is just some dirty stuff that has no real purpose, right? Actually, in space, dust is a crucial ingredient for making stars!