Astronomy

Armagh Observatory and Planetarium has announced that a number of family friendly events will take place on site from 26 to 28 January 2023. These will be: A Star Tracker evening, which will take place on 26th January. Suitable for adults and children aged over eight, this two-hour event will include a talk on ‘Big Telescopes’ by Armagh Observatory and planetarium PhD student, Christopher Duffy. The talk will be followed by a Dome Show and live stargazing (weather permitting.) Startrackers The Legendary Telescope Tours, which will take place on Saturday 28th January. These 90 minute tours will run at 1pm and 3pm. Suitable for adults and children over ten, they will take visitors on a journey through the Armagh Observatory to see its historic telescopes. An expert guide will tell visitors a...

Venus and Saturn lie close together in the early evening sky from 21 to 24 January. This is the view soon after sunset on 23 January, when the addition of a young crescent Moon adds a picturesque quality to the south-western sky. AN graphics by Greg Smye-Rumsby. The new year gets off to a great start with all the planets visible in the night sky at some point during January. The planets can all be spotted in the evening sky (Mercury is a tough proposition though), with the red planet Mars being the most accessible, though it’s outshone by dazzling and increasingly-prominent Venus and a fading Jupiter. There’s an exciting conjunction of Venus and Saturn, while a New Year’s Day spectacular sees Uranus occulted by the Moon.   Venus takes its time to achieve a decent elevation in the pos...

Little 'hurricanes' that form in the disks of gas and dust around young stars can be used to study certain aspects of planet formation, even for smaller planets which orbit their star at large distances and are out of reach for most telescopes. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Study have developed a technique, which uses observations of these "hurricanes" by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array (ALMA) to place some limits on the mass and age of planets in a young star system. Pancake-like clouds of gases, dust and ice surrounding young stars—known as protoplanetary disks—are where the process of planet formation begins. Through a ...