Most of the telescopes at the observatory here look spectacular even from the outside. SuperWASP looks like a big garden shed. It’s the white thing at bottom left. Even when it opens up, it still doesn’t look like a professional telescope. To me, it looks more like a small missile launcher. The equipment isn’t that spectacular either. As modern telescopes go, it was built for peanuts. It has eight cameras,…
The Italian National Telescope (the Galileo) is getting a new scientific instrument to look for planets outside our solar system. I remember a childhood astronomy book which said that we would never know whether there are planets outside our own solar system, because they are much, much too small and much much much too far away. That’s all changed in the last few years. There’s a class of instruments called…
Astronomers have found a diamond half the size of Jupiter. Like most planets outside our solar system, nobody’s seen it. In this case, the astronomers were looking at its parent star (a pulsar) and found that the star was being pulled slightly backwards and forwards by the mass of a planet, something as heavy as Jupiter and orbiting very close to the star indeed – just 600,000 kilometres, or 1.5…