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Recent astronomy articles can be found both online and in print magazines.  New photos of space objects result in articles.  New space missions result in articles.  Discussion abounds about everything.  This article relates a few of them.

There were many recent astronomy articles on space dust that was bumpy.  Why is that?  Scientists know that hydrogen is the universe’s basic building block.  However, larger molecules require that hydrogen bonds.  But a special medium is required in the cold of space.  It could be the bumpy surface of dust that helps in that process.  Nobody thinks of dust being bumpy when they vacuum.

One of Saturn’s moons is called the “Death Star.”  It looks like the Star Wars space station, with a huge crater on one side.  Recent astronomy articles focused on Cassini’s mission to this moon, called Mimas.  We gained a lot of compelling data from this mission, including stunning images.  Folks loved to see this news.  Scientists believe the mission will create new understanding as to the number of crater creating objects that pass near to Saturn.  We’ll learn a lot about how planets like Saturn clean debris from the solar system.

For years people have studied dark matter.  It’s not well understood how it helps the universe expand.  Dark matter was a popular headline in recent astronomy articles.  SNAP, the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, was planned to help solve dark matter by examining many distant supernovae.  It’s important because about 70% of the stuff in the universe is dark matter.

Before becoming a sun, our little yellow sun was just a proto-sun.  But scientists wondered if this protosun emitted any heat or light or a solar wind enough to effect the formation of life on Earth.  Yes it did, says recent astronomy articles.  Scientists have used new techniques to discover that the protosun did indeed emit ultraviolet and other particles in an early form of the solar wind.  All of this helped life on Earth form.

For any astronomy enthusiast it’s important to keep up on recent astronomy articles.

Astronomy is as large as the universe that it seeks to discover.  Star astronomy is just one part of the overall science and hobby.  There are ample phenomenon and objects in just our own solar system to keep someone bust for an entire life time.  Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

Our sun is 94,000,000 miles from Earth, and that’s the closest star we know.  It generates an amazing amount of heat to reach all that distance.  The sun contains about 98% of the mass in our entire solar system.  That includes all the other planets even with huge Jupiter and Saturn on our side.  It would take 109 Earths to span the sun’s disk, and over 1.3 million Earths would fit within the sun.  The heat is generated from a nuclear reaction in the sun’s core where the pressure is 340 billion times the pressure on Earth and temperatures reach 27,000,000F.  Try that for a grill, George Foreman.

Since it’s so close to Earth, relatively compared to other suns, the Sun is the most thoroughly studied star.  It’s about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next known star.  But the interesting part of star astronomy is there’s so much to work with beyond our own solar system.  From the Earth about 5,000 stars, every one in our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen with the naked eye.  With telescopes many more of the over 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe (that’s an estimate) can be seen.  If you’re counting that’s a one followed by 22 zeros.  Hundreds of thousands of stars come into view even with an amateur telescope.  That is amazing!  Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of over 200 billion stars. Just counting that many is a lifetime of work.

Star astronomy experts have now proven that many other stars have planets.  They know this first through measuring the wobble caused to stars by planets and other objects orbiting them.  In 2008, for the first time, astronomers took visible light photographs of planets orbiting distant suns.  That means yet another step taken towards verifying the existence of other intelligent life out there somewhere in the universe.

Will Vulcans or Klingons visit us tomorrow?  Not likely.  Star astronomy continues, however.  We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!