The FAS Astronomers Blog

  • The Night Sky

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 9. The stars follow a very regular pattern when viewed from the Earth. They appear to move from east to west. This pattern repeats itself over the course of a night (Earth’s rotation) and over the four seasons of the year (Earth’s orbit). The constellations that dominate the night…

  • DNA, RNA, Genes, Chromosomes, and the Code of Life

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 8. Recently, a large rover named Perseverance landed on the planet Mars. Perseverance is searching for signs that Mars had life, or at least the conditions for life, sometime in the distant past. Fundamental to life is something called DNA. We have also been dealing with a pandemic caused…

  • First Humans in Space

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 7. Sixty years ago, humans from the planet Earth left their world for the first time and journeyed above the atmosphere. On the morning of October 5, 1957, the world awoke to something new. For the first time in human history an artificial satellite was orbiting the Earth. The…

  • Pluto, the Kuiper Belt, and the Outer Solar System

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 6. Remember Pluto? Pluto was discovered in 1930 and for over seventy years was considered the ninth planet. Pluto is small, and from the beginning, really didn’t fit in with the rest of the planets. It was an oddball located way out in the Solar System. But, for many…

  • Uranus

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 5. For thousands of years, humans looked up at the night sky and observed the stars. They found that stars moved with a predictable pattern from night to night and year to year. However, they notice five objects that behaved differently. These objects “wandered” against the background of stars.…

  • Mapping the World

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 4. The world is round (actually it is an ellipsoid, but close enough).  Maps are flat. This difference doesn’t seem like much. But it is! Because the Earth is round, its surface has what is known as a spherical geometry. Here the sum of the angles in a triangle…

  • The Moon

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 3. On many nights when you look up into the night sky you can see a bright object known simply as the Moon. Twelve humans from the planet Earth have walked on the Moon, although none since 1972. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13, the flight…

  • Exploring Mars, Past and Present

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 2. Back in the 19th century there was a focus on the planet Mars. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli studied the surface of Mars during the opposition of 1877 and believed he saw lines crossing the planet. He called them canali, which means channels. The term was later mis-translated as…

  • The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 1. The universe is a big place. There might be some 200 billion to over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, each with around 200 billion stars. Then here we are on this bluish/green planet orbiting a single yellowish star in a solar system around ½ way out…