Stars begin life as clouds of cold gas that transform into blazing hot fireballs.

Star dust, star dust, burning bright

Amid the glare of ancient light

Eternity stares back from the past

Reborn we'll be one day as dust

Stellar astrophysics
January 14, 2012 – Walk out to a dark viewing spot anywhere on the Earth and look up at the night sky. Your eyes will take in ancient light from stars in the Milky Way that covers the whole sky above you. Deep within the stellar nurseries of the Mil...

To entertain you through the January nights
Photo courtesy of NASA

Viewers living in the Northern Hemisphere looking for a winter astronomy treat to keep them entertained through the cold January nights should be able to get a look at Comet C/2009 P1 (Garradd). The Northern Hemisphere night sky hasn't played host to a bright comet since Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) in 1997, although a few were bright enough to view with binoculars. This month viewers have a very good chance of viewing Garrad...

Dawn is falling toward Vesta today as NASA's spacecraft is currently circling one of the largest asteroids in the solar system and preparing to take a closer look at an asteroid first viewed by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers on March 29, 1807. The picture above is one of the latest images taken by Dawn of three craters on the surface of Vesta called “Snowman”that are located in Vesta's northern hemisphere. The associated picture below is of craters visible in the southern e...

The human journey to the beginning of space and time will soon turn the page in space history as the end of an era of human space exploration that will be remembered as a time when America and the world first dared to venture beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere and into the darkness of the unknown comes to an end. The fourth space orbiter built to help take American astronauts into low orbit, Space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift-off of Kennedy Space Centre's Launch Pad 39A f...

The human journey to the beginning of space and time will get a detailed view of Mars using the Mast Camera on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, once Curiosity lands on the surface of Mars, sometime around August 2012, according to the latest estimates by NASA. Space travel is by necessity extremely well planned and every detail must be worked out to a set time table if the Curiosity is to accomplish its mission. All aspects of the mission parameters must be analysed and reanalysed to ensure eve...

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has finally started sending back the first images of the solar systems inner most planet ever taken by a human made invention on March 29. The first views are of the south and north polar regions of Mercury were released by NASA on March 29 and March 30, and they paint a new portrait of the surface of Mercury than the one astronomers had previously painted. The first images of the surface of Mercury show a crater strewn surface use to continual bombardment over mil...

The nights of September 2010 will feature essentially the same night sky as the one your ancestors used as a basis for many of the myths and stories that have been passed down to the modern world of today. September's star gazers can sit huddled around the fire each night of the month, as celestial delights about on a nightly basis, just as they did thousands of years in the past. The perfect time to board your time machine to the stars and take a journey through space and time or lay your ba...

Scientists using the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to look beneath Mar's north polar ice cap and get an idea of the lay of the ground think they know how Chasma Boreale and the much discussed series of spiral troughs were formed. The formation of Chasma Boreale and enigmatic spiral troughs have been talked about for four decades by space scientists and am...