Category Astronomy/Space

The Preface of the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, first panel on left, and the first three pages of the Table. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Santa Barbara

Ancient hieroglyphic texts reveal Mayans made major discovery in math, astronomy. For >120 years the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex – an ancient Mayan book containing astronomical data – has been of great interest to scholars around the world. The accuracy of its observations, especially the calculation of a kind of ‘leap year’ in the Mayan Calendar, was deemed an impressive curiosity used primarily for astrology.

But UC Santa Prof Barbara’s Gerardo Aldana believes the Venus Table has been misunderstood and vastly underappreciated...

An artist’s concept of a trans-Neptunian object(TNOs). The distant sun is reduced to a bright star at a distance of over 3 billion miles. Credit: NASA

The mysterious Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs) lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. For years, astronomers have been discovering bodies and minor planets in this region which are influenced by Neptune’s gravity, and orbit our sun at an average distance of 30 Astronomical Units. In recent years, several new TNOs have been discovered that have caused us to rethink what constitutes a planet, not to mention the history of the solar system.

The most recent of these mystery objects is called “Niku”, a small chunk of ice that takes its name for the Chinese word for “rebellious”...

This is an artist concept of accelerated electrons circulating in Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Tom Bridgman, animator

Our planet is in the center of 2 immense, concentric doughnuts of powerful radiation: Van Allen radiation belts, which harbor swarms of charged particles that are trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. On March 17, 2015, an interplanetary shock – a shockwave created by the driving force of a coronal mass ejection, CME, from the sun – struck Earth’s magnetic field, the magnetosphere, triggering the greatest geomagnetic storm of the preceding decade. And NASA’s Van Allen Probes were there to watch the effects on the radiation belts.

One of the most common forms of space weather, a geomagnetic storm describes any event in which the...

Brown dwarfs are smaller than stars, but more massive than giant planets. As such, they provide a natural link between astronomy and planetary science. However, they also show incredible variation when it comes to size, temperature, chemistry, and more, which makes them difficult to understand, too. New work surveyed various properties of 152 suspected young brown dwarfs in order to categorize their diversity and found that atmospheric properties may be behind much of their differences. Credit: Jacqueline Faherty and David Rodriguez

Brown dwarfs are smaller than stars, but more massive than giant planets. As such, they provide a natural link between astronomy and planetary science...