Astronomy

As seen from the European Very Large Telescope.

Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona.

Via MNN:

Neptune was supposedly discovered in 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle using calculations by Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, making it a joint British-French-German discovery.

But these astronomers were not the first to observe Neptune. That honor goes to the famous Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.

While sketching the moons of Jupiter with his newly discovered telescope, Galileo twice drew Neptune, which happened to be in conjunction with Jupiter in early 1613. It's usually said that Galileo mistook Neptune for a star because of its slow movement.

Emerging out of the Western Australian outback MWA is a remarkable telescope for radio astronomy where more than 2000 antennas are spread across 3 square kilometers, in 128 groups of dual-polarisation dipole antennas. — John Goldsmith

Via NBC:

"Planet X" might actually exist — and so might "Planet Y."

At least two planets larger than Earth likely lurk in the dark depths of space far beyond Pluto, just waiting to be discovered, a new analysis of the orbits of "extreme trans-Neptunian objects" (ETNOs) suggests.

Researchers studied 13 ETNOs — frigid bodies such as the dwarf planet Sedna that cruise around the sun at great distances in elliptical paths.