The strange cloud-like protursion above Mars' limb (around the 1 o'clock point). Credit: Wayne Jaeschke. Last week, amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke noticed something peculiar in his observations of Mars — there appeared to be a cloud-like structure hanging above the limb of the planet....

A comparison between an observation of the sun using the ATA's 2.75 GHz band (left) and SOHO's 195A filter. Both are near-simultaneous observations on Oct. 1, 2009 (Saint-Hilaire et al., 2011). And no, “aliens” isn’t the answer. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), located near...

The black hole lurking inside galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.6 billion suns, according to today's announcement (NASA) Fresh from the Department Of I Really Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Last Binary, astronomers attending the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash., have announced a supermassive...

Solar spicules as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) There’s one recurring question I’ve been asking for nearly a decade: Why is the Sun’s corona (its atmosphere) so hot? When asking this out loud I inevitably get the sarcastic “um, because the Sun is…...

Conceptual design of the Fermilab holometer (Fermilab) During the hunt for the predicted ripples in space-time — known as gravitational waves — physicists stumbled across a rather puzzling phenomenon. Last year, I reported about the findings of scientists using the GEO600 experiment in Germany....

Solar Dynamics Observatory view of the solar disk shortly after eruption (NASA). This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic...

My impression as to how a black hole 'aurora' might look like near an event horizon (Ian O'Neill/Discovery News) Usually, aurorae happen when the solar wind blasts the Earth’s atmosphere. However, black holes may also have a shot at producing their very own northern lights. What’s more, we...

The asteroid Itokawa (as imaged by the Japanese Hayabusa probe) and a gecko tattoo. Bear with me, it'll make sense soon (JAXA) What do asteroids and geckos have in common? Not a lot, as you’d expect, but they may share a common force. This rather strange notion comes from research being done by...

Where is this mystical land? (NASA/ESA/HST). Sometimes, words are not enough to describe views of the universe when captured through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is one of those moments. Kicking off its 20th anniversary (yes, that super-sized telescope has been in space that long —...

The Orion Nebula's star-forming region (NASA). Firstly, apologies that it’s been over a month since last posting to Astroengine.com. Call it slacking off, call it a sabbatical, either way, it’s not good. I’ve actually prepared several half-finished articles, but I just never got around...