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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
AE Aurigae: The Flaming Star
4.12.2001
Is star AE Aurigae on fire? Although surrounded by what may look like smoke, the object known as the "flaming star" creates energy primarily by nuclear fusion, like other stars. Fire, typically defined...
Dueling Auroras
3.12.2001
Will it be curtains for one of these auroras? A quick inspection indicates that it is curtains for both, as the designation "curtains" well categorizes the type of aurora pattern pictured. Another (informal) type is the corona. The above auroras resulted from outbursts of ionic particles from the Sun during the last week of September.
Rumors of a Strange Universe
2.12.2001
Three years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new distant supernovae observations.
Neptune's Great Dark Spot: Gone But Not Forgotten
1.12.2001
When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by distant Neptune in August of 1989, astronomers were shocked. Since Neptune receives only 3 percent the sunlight Jupiter does, they expected to find a dormant, dark, frigid planet. Instead, the Voyager images revealed evidence of a dynamic and turbulent world.
Meteor Storm Sights and Sounds
30.11.2001
This dramatic four-frame animation shows a fireball meteor and its developing persistent "smoke" train, recorded two weeks ago in skies near Salvador, Brazil. Indeed similar sights are astonishingly familiar world-wide to witnesses of this November's fireball-rich Leonid meteor storm.
Coronal Inflow
29.11.2001
The active Sun has thrown a lot our way lately, including storms of particles streaming outward in the solar wind and clouds of plasma which triggered awesome auroral displays. Still, a growing body...
Extra Solar Planetary Atmosphere Detected
28.11.2001
By directly detecting the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System, humanity has taken another small step toward finding extraterrestrial life. The unexpected detection by David Charbonneau (Caltech) and associates came from Hubble Space Telescope observations of Sun-like star HD 209458.
Ancient Layered Rocks on Mars
27.11.2001
Is this a picture of Mars or Earth? Oddly enough, it is a picture of Mars. What may appear to some as a terrestrial coastline is in fact a formation of ancient layered rocks and wind-blown sand on Mars. The above-pictured region spans about three kilometers in Schiaparelli Crater.
Leonids from the Road
26.11.2001
Sometimes you just have to stop and watch the meteors. In the early morning hours of November 18, a band of eleven people searched for a flat and cloudless site to see the 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower.
M16: Stars from Eagle's EGGs
25.11.2001
Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars.
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