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The day of Monday August 21 will feature a real treat -- a solar eclipse visible (weather permitting!) across the United States. While Cleveland won't be in the path of the total eclipse this time, we will see a partial eclipse where the Moon will cover up to 80% of the Sun's face at maximum eclipse, so it should still be a fun sight to see!
The timing of the eclipse varies depending on where in the country you are viewing it, but here in Cleveland, the eclipse begins at 1:06pm, when the Moon will start to carve a "notch"...
Red giant stars are the most luminous ones found in a population of old stars, and so are particularly useful to study the early history of the Milky Way. "We use these stars like fossils, because in many cases their chemistry and motions have been unchanged since they were formed more than 10 Gyr ago", says CWRU astronomer Heather Morrison. She and her collaborators have spent more than a decade identifying these rare red giants as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's SEGUE project, and have found over 5,000 giant stars, some of them as far away as...