Astronomy

Since the first two-hour excursion into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the lure of manned space travel has proved irresistible to scientists, entrepreneurs, and entertainers alike. Today, as technology becomes more capable of enabling manned travel to…

Revolving around the sun, in an orbit similar to our own, is NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft. Launched in 2009 and named after the Renaissance computer science homework help astronomer Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s mission, like that of many ground-based…

As our closest astronomical neighbors, the planets have been subjects of keen observation by astronomers for over three millennia. The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, built and launched in the 1970s, flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and…

The Universe contains trillions of galaxies, and each galaxy is home to as many as a few hundred billion stars. To understand the Universe, it is necessary to study its building blocks, in the same way one studies atoms to understand the properties of a…

From the meteor that exploded over eastern Russia in February to the asteroid 1998 QE2 that squeaked by the Earth at the end of May 2013, meteoroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) have garnered increasing attention recently. NEOs, which include…

The Kepler Space Telescope has found thousands of planets and planet candidates. Perhaps one of the most exciting discoveries is that smaller, rocky planets are more common than we thought. Our current understanding of what makes a planet habitable for…

Presented by Greg Kestin, Laura Jeanty, and Brian Clark Lecture Part 1 Lecture Part 2 Lecture Part 3

Presented by Anjali Tripathi, Kirit Karkare, and Sukrit Ranjan Earth is one of the eight planets in our Solar System. Within the past 20 years, astronomers have discovered more than 700 planets in the Universe, which are orbiting stars that are not our…

-- For the first time, recent advances in technology and space exploration have made the prospect of detecting evidence for life outside of our Solar System a foreseeable possibility. The pursuit of this evidence and the desire to learn more about the…

-- Are there other planets like Earth out there? Could they be places that future generations could eventually live? Is our Solar System somehow special? Current research on exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own – aims to answer these…