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Spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The same basic principles operate in the intense gravity wells around black holes, which bend not only the paths of solid objects, but light itself. If a photon, or a light particle, enters a particular region in the vicinity of a black hole, it will do one partial circuit around the black hole and get flung back in exactly the same direction. Physicists call those regions "gravitational mirrors" and the photons they fling back "boomerang photons." Boomerang photons already move at the speed of light, so they don't pick...

British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died, aged 89, his friends and colleagues have said. He "passed away peacefully at 12:25 this afternoon" at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, they said in a statement. Sir Patrick presented the BBC programme The Sky At Night for over 50 years, making him the longest-running host of the same television show ever. He wrote dozens of books on astronomy and his research was used by the US and the Russians in their space programmes. Described by one of his close friends as "fearlessly eccentric", Sir Patrick was notable for his...

Astronomer Brian G. Marsden, a comet and asteroid tracker who stood sentinel to protect the Earth from collisions with interplanetary rocks and other remnants of the solar system's creation, died Thursday of cancer at Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. He was 73. Director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., Marsden was perhaps best known for his 1998 announcement that an asteroid known as 1997 XF11 might strike the Earth in 2028, causing untold damage. The announcement sparked additional studies which quickly showed that such an impact was unlikely. Marsden,...

Allan R. Sandage, who spent his life measuring the universe, becoming the most influential astronomer of his generation, died Saturday at his home in San Gabriel, Calif. He was 84. The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to an announcement by the Carnegie Observatories, where he had spent his whole professional career. Over more than six decades, Dr. Sandage was like one of those giant galaxies that sit at the center of a cluster of galaxies, dominating cosmic weather. He wrote more than 500 papers, ranging across the cosmos, covering the evolution and behavior of stars, the birth of the Milky...

An astronomer at the University of Western Ontario has found a Soviet moon rover in recently released images from a NASA satellite. Phil Stooke combed through data and images of the moon's surface from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that NASA released Monday. Stooke compared the images to his own recently published reference book on moon geography, The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration, and pinpointed the location of the Soviet rover Lunokhod 2. "The tracks were visible at once," said Stooke, in a statement. The location of the rover was already known through laser ranging experiments, but there's no telescope on...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a "cosmic ghost," a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object. The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online. "At first, we had no idea what it was. It could have been in our solar system, or at the edge of the universe," Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski, a member and co-founder...

A Spanish astronomer has admitted he accessed internet telescope logs of another astronomer's observations of a giant object orbiting beyond Neptune – but denies doing anything wrong. Jose-Luis Ortiz of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada told New Scientist that it was "perfectly legitimate" because he found the logs on a publicly available website via a Google search. But Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer whose logs Ortiz uncovered, claims that accessing the information was at least "unethical" and may, if Ortiz misused the data, have crossed the line into scientific fraud. The incident highlights two emerging controversies in...

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved. The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these...

<p>LAS CRUCES, N.M (AP) — New Mexico State University astronomer Reta Beebe says she can't bear to watch her old friend — the Galileo spacecraft — crash. Beebe has worked with Galileo for almost two decades.</p> <p>The little craft, which was launched in 1989, is to purposefully crash into Jupiter on Sunday. The heat and pressure will completely vaporize it in less than two hours, Beebe said.</p>

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 May 18 Andromeda Island Universe Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler Explanation: How far can you see? The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two million light-years away. Without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy appears as an unremarkable, faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. But a bright yellow nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, gorgeous blue...