Browsing Archive: February, 2014

A Horde of New Planets

Posted by on Thursday, February 27, 2014, In : Astronomy 
In an amazing announcement today, NASA's Kepler mission has now more than tripled the number of exoplanets they have discovered, and nearly doubled the total number of known planets. Twenty years ago, no planets were known to exist outside of our own solar system, while this latest result brings the total up past 1700 exoplanets, with over 900 coming from this one space telescope (A complete list of the Kepler planets can be viewed here).

As most people know by now, the first such planets were...
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Visible Supernove

Posted by on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, In : Astronomy 
A quick reminder to all of my readers that these are the last few days to observe supernova SN2014J, the closest supernova of this type in over a century. As I wrote when it was first discovered, this event is rare in that it should be visible to amateur astronomers as well as the big observatories. (It is actually so bright that many of the automated supernovae searches missed it, because they are programmed to search for faint signals)

The supernova is located in M82, and although it is a ma...
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About Me


Dr. Chris Bird I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.

   

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