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Stories about: astronomy


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Researchers Want to DNA Test Galileo's Eyes

Researchers from Italy and the UK are currently engaged in actions meant to grant them the possibility of harvesting DNA samples from the body of the father of modern astronomy, Galileo Galilei. It's historically known that the great scientist suffered from intermittent eye problems over the second half of his l...

23 January 2009
05:24 GMT

Galileo Was Not the First to Observe the Moon

Although generally credited as the father of astronomy, and one of the earliest observers of celestial bodies outside our planet, Galileo was not the first to observe and sketch a map of the Moon, as many believe. Rather, an Englishman, Thomas Harriot, drew the first map of portions of our natural satellite as far ba...

15 January 2009
04:35 GMT

'Reviving' Galileo's First Telescopes

The International Year of Astronomy is well underway, and one of the initiatives meant to celebrate the 4 centuries that passed since Galileo first studied the skies, using nothing more than a basic telescope, is to attempt to rebuild that device, and to get a glimpse of how the world could be seen through the scient...

9 January 2009
04:40 GMT

Meet the 2000 Year-Old Computer

The Antikythera mechanism, believed to be the world's oldest computer, has finally been replicated by a British museum curator, more than 100 years after it was first discovered. The original design, intricate and precise as a Swiss clock, was used to calculate dates, motions of the planets throughout our solar ...

23 December 2008
13:01 GMT

The Pope Recognizes the Importance of Galileo's Astronomy

Some 400 years after Galileo Galilei made his work on the movement of planets public, the Catholic Church, through the words of Pope Benedict XVI, apologized for its mistake, namely accusing the scientist of heresy and sentencing him to house arrest for the rest of his life, in light of the fact that the Earth indeed...

22 December 2008
08:51 GMT

Top Ten Scientific Achievements of the Year

Undoubtedly, the number one spot for this year's Top Scientific achievement is the discovering of cellular reprogramming techniques, which offer experts an invaluable tool in studying, understanding, and, potentially, curing such diseases as Parkinson's and diabetes. Sick cells can now be programmed into vi...

19 December 2008
06:26 GMT

Galileo Galilei vs. Charles Darwin

With 2009 being labeled as the International Year of Astronomy, it is quite obvious why the next year should be named the Galileo year, after the great scientist and visionary of his time, Galileo Galilei, the author of the world's greatest discovery in the field. This is even more valid as in 2009, there w...

18 December 2008
18:01 GMT

Maximum Weight of Massive Black Holes Established

According to the latest findings, though black holes attract everything to their core, including light and radiation, they have an upper limit as far as their maximum mass goes. Yale astronomy and physics professor Priyamvada Natarajan believes that the largest black hole can't be more than 10 billion times the ...

30 September 2008
10:41 GMT

Ancient Greek Astronomy Calculator Linked to the Olympic Games

In 1901, divers retrieved a complex mechanism from a Roman merchant shipwreck dated to the 1st century BC. It appeared to be an ancient astronomy calculator that also made references to Greek games, from which the modern Olympic Games have been inspired, and which took place every four years. Now, the discovery of an...

31 July 2008
03:00 GMT

Astronomers Call for Light Switch-off

The Australian National University is making an appeal to the inhabitants of all cities across Australia to turn off all lights this Saturday, between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., in order to raise the awareness of the link between the energy consumption around the world and global warming effects. Amateur astronomers will hav...

26 March 2008
06:49 GMT

The British Return to Gemini

After announcing the total withdraw of the fundings for two of the best land-based space observatories, Gemini North and Gemini South, so that UK funding money could go to other areas of science, the Science and Technology Facility Council seems to have changed its mind and decided to give access, once again, to UK a...

13 February 2008
05:57 GMT

Biblical Sign Has Astrophysical Explanation

The Holy Bible describes how just before Jesus was born a star appeared to the East, guiding the Magi towards his birth place. That's fine from a religious point of view. However, astronomers are more curios when it comes to unexplained cosmic events such as the sudden appearance of a star on the sky. So, over t...

13 December 2007
05:16 GMT

Queen Guitarist Brian May Turns Into Astrophysics PhD

Brian May was the lead guitarist and backing (sometimes lead) vocalist for the English rock band Queen for almost forty years. In addition to being famous for writing the band's biggest hits, "We Will Rock You", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "Tie Your Mother Down", "Who Wants to Live Forever" and "I Want It All," he�...

26 July 2007
04:17 GMT

Which Are the Effects of Contamination with Light?

The sky we see today is very distinct from the sky one could see one century ago, especially in the big cities. This is due to the light contamination, an increasing nightmare for the astronomic observatories. The signals of the mobile phones and of the satellites cover the molecules and waves present in the interste...

29 June 2007
15:06 GMT

The Oldest Astronomic Observatory in the Americas

Researchers have discovered the oldest solar observatory in the Americas in 2,300 years old pre-Inca ruins. The authors found that the large Thirteen Towers of Chankillo (a ruin north of Lima), made of stone and positioned in a line, were employed for marking the sun's position throughout the year-an activity th...

2 March 2007
03:00 GMT


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