#Astronomy

Sure, you’re trapped in your house, but there’s an entire galaxy of cool stuff right over your head in the night sky. Space is infinitely expanding (and contracting, but we’ll focus on the expanding), which might relieve the claustrophobia and boredom that come along with quarantine.  Here are eight pictures showing the mystery and wonder of the universe.  STAR CLUSTER Just how it sounds, a star cluster is a bound group of stars. Young clusters contain fewer stars with more distance between them. As a cluster gets older, the stars move closer together, united by gravity. You can see some star clusters in the night sky with the naked eye. One is the constellation Seven Sisters, another’s inside the constellation Cancer. The closest star cluster, Hyades, is just 153 light-years from earth and you can see it inside the constellation Taurus.  NEBULA  The word nebula is Latin for cloud, which is also a perfect description. Images of nebulae from space are beautiful and other-w

                                                                                                                ( Image credit to NASA artist's impression)    NASA's latest planet hunting probe has discovered a new world outside our solar system, orbiting a dwarf star 53 light years away. This is the third new planet confirmed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite (TESS) since its launch in April last year. The planet, named HD21749b , orbits a bright , nearby dwarf star about 53 light years away,in the constellation Reticulum , and appears to have longest orbital period of the three planets so far identified by TESS. HD21749b journeys around its star in a relatively leisurely 36 days, compared to two other planets -Pi Mensae b, a "super earth" with a 6.3 day orbit, and LHS 3844b , a rocky world that speeds around its star in just 11 hours. All three planets were discovered in the first three months of TESS observations. The surface of the new planet

Exoplanets which are between two to four times the size of earth  are likely to have vast amounts of water, according to a study that may have implications for the search of Alien life in our Galaxy.   Data from the exoplanet hunting Kepler space Telescope and Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50 % of water. This is much more than the earth's 0.02% water content, researchers said. "It was huge surprise to realize that there must be so many water worlds," said Li Zeng  from Harvard University in US. Scientists have found that many of the 4000 confirmed or candidate exoplanets discovered so far fall into size categories: those with the planetary radius averaging around 1.5 that of earth, and those averaging around 2.5 times the radius of the earth. After analyzing the exoplanet with mass measurements and recent radius measurements from the Gaia satellite, scientists have developed a model of their internal structure. &quo

Astronomers, including some of Indian origin, have detected repeating energy bursts from a single source from deep space for the second time in history -- giving impetus to theories that there could be evidence of advanced alien life.  A Canadian - led team of scientists found the second repeating fast radio burst from the Canadian hydrogen Intensity mapping experiment telescope located in the mountains of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. Of the more than 60 fast radio bursts observed to date, repeating bursts from a single source had been found only once before --a discovery made by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2015 , the team said in a paper published in the Journal nature and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on Wednesday. Fast radio bursts are short bursts of radio waves coming from far outside of our Milky Way galaxy and scientist believe fast radio bursts emanate from powerful astrophysical phenomenon billions o