On June 25, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 1,500th comet. This tally tops all other comet discoverers throughout history combined. From ESA: When it comes to comet catching, the SOHO has one big advantage over everybody else: its location. Situated between the Sun and Earth, it has a privileged view of a region of space that can rarely be seen from Earth. From the surface, we can see regions close to the Sun clearly only...

Last week, I spent some time under the sunny, clear skies of Las Vegas, Nevada. I was the invited guest speaker at the Atomic Testing Museum . This facility — a real gem — sits 7 blocks from the famed Strip in downtown Las Vegas. The museum chronicles the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons. The exhibits (many of which are interactive) proceed chronologically, and several videos show test explosions. If you visit, don’t miss the 6-minute...

Look out, here comes the “Is Pluto a planet?” debate — again. I wade into these waters with trepidation and wearing armored hip waders. But on the other hand, how often does a guy get a chance to stir up a pot of angry astro-hornets? I won’t regurgitate the backstory. If you are reading this, you have a browser and an Internet connection. If you are not current on the drama, just Google “Is Pluto a planet?” and come back when you recover from your...

The EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle will pepper an unfortunate solar system in Ursa Major with a Doritos ad. EISCAT How little do we think of potential extraterrestrial life? Not much, it seems. The University of Leicester helped Doritos — yes, THAT Doritos — send a message to a solar system 42 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. What was the communication? A peaceful salutation? A threat? Nope, it’s a Doritos ad....

The orbits of stars within the central 1.0 X 1.0 arcseconds of our galaxy. Andrea Ghez/UCLA Reinhard Genzel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, has won this year’s Shaw Prize for astronomy. Genzel pulled off a pretty neat trick by observing individual stars circling the center of the Milky Way, our home in the universe. The stars he observed were close to the galactic center — within light-hours...

Peter Chen displays his 12-inch “moondust mirror.” AAS photo by Richard Dreiser © 2008 American Astronomical Society Once upon a time, the buzzwords in telescope making were Teflon and Formica. In the future, though, they may be epoxy and lunar dust. Peter Chen and his colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, presented a novel recipe for making telescope mirrors at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis...

Astronomers now recognize 88 constellations. A memory aid I’ve used through the years is that there are the same number of constellations as keys on a full piano keyboard. Today’s star groups cover the sky with no overlaps and no gaps between them. This, however, is a fairly recent development. Before 1928, celestial mapmakers were free to populate the skies as they pleased, with only the mildest restraint placed upon them by astronomers and other...

Three of the most luminous supernovae on record — 2006gy, 2005gj, and 2005ap — pose problems for theorists. For example, 2006gy’s peak luminosity reached 50 billion Suns. That’s 10 times brighter than the average type Ia supernova and 100 times brighter than a representative type II. And 2005ap was 2 times brighter still. What’s a theorist to do? In our January issue, I noted that astronomers suspected some of these events might be so-called “pair...