Current Events In Astronomy

By U Learn It | February 21, 2009

Astronomy can be like a professional sport. It’s fun to watch what’s going on day after day, reading the magazines and web sites for all the current events in astronomy. There’s breaking news every day. That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

NASA’s website contains a lot of this information. NASA stays on top of all the latest events, and even makes a lot of the news itself. A quick look at NASA’s web site in mid November revealed some pretty big current events in astronomy.

The shuttle Endeavor launched in November, which was an important one of the many current events in astronomy. Refueling the International Space Station was its goal. This included a number of space walks to perform routine maintenance on the outside of the station. Space walks are not just spacewalks they are also learning experiences that apply to future missions. Space station work includes a lot of astronomy work.

And amazing discovery by the Hubble telescope is another one of the current events in astronomy. It took a historic visible light image of a planet circling another sun. Back in the early 1980s an infrared telescope called IRAS saw dust around the star. Scientists knew this was a sure sign that planets might circle the sun.

Current and events in astronomy can also be about what happened a long time ago. Images of the moon taken in 1966 and 1967 are being restored in the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Luckily much of this data had been removed from tape and stored in analog form. NASA has already released some of these restored historic images.

Astronomy, like the Universe, is huge. Also large is a list of current events in astronomy. Keep watching!