Space

Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.Our Mini Me is named 2024 PT5, an Arjuna asteroid discovered on August 7th of this year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. Arjuna asteroids are defined as small objects "moving in orbits with low eccentricity, low inclination and Earth-like period.” These mini moons occur when an asteroid moving at low velocity gets stuck in a horseshoe pattern because it has low geocentric energy but doesn't complete a revolution around our planet while it is there. Calculatioms show 2024 PT5 rwill return to a…

Mars is no vacation paradise. The temperatures fluctuate dramatically and average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface is red dust punctuated by craters, canyons, and volcanoes. On the plus side, the atmosphere is extremely thin, comprising only about 1% of the density of Earth’s, and gravity is 60 percent lower, so you can finally dunk a basketball. With all of those challenges, Martian landers have still been able capture wind measurements — some gauging the cooling rate of heated materials when winds blow over them, others using cameras to image “tell-tales” that blow in the wind. Both…

Robert Zubrin, a great Aerospace Engineer and advocate for human space exploration, has a credible proposal to move the ISS to higher orbits around the Earth under its own power using electric propulsion.  This would not be a fast process, but it would not need to be a fast process since it is a space station, not a spacecraft.   Think of it this way, ISS is to space what an oil platform is to the sea.  People don't realize that many of those aren't anchored to the seabed but float, and interface with equipment placed on the seabed below.   They move slowly, very…

The northern lights as one would expect and see them if they were in the frozen reaches of Canada, Scandanavia, or Russia, maybe and maybe not.  However, a glow in the sky unlike anything most of us will see in the 48 contiguous United States of America was visible last night, and may be visible again tonight, and Sunday night.  For the first time since 2003 a G5 geomagnetic storm is predicted to hit us.   There have been a series of solar flares emitted in the correct direction and timing for the charged particles released to interact with Earths geomagnetic field. …

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research spans black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the early universe, but it’s his extraterrestrial musings that have set tongues wagging. What he is right about is if alien intelligences exist one of the most interesting things, they could find would be another technological alien species.  If they exist it makes sense that they would observe us from time to time.  Space is full of a whole lot of nothing alive, then a whole lot of single cell life, and technological complex multi…

It is commonly said that Neptune is azure blue and Uranus pale cyan green – but a new study shows the two ice giants are actually far closer in color than typically thought. Because Uranus’ appearance and color has changed over the decades in response to the weirdest seasons in the Solar System. Maybe you don't know that astronomers have known they weren't those colors. NASA makes artistic representations of statistical wobbles, and that can confuse the public, and images of both planets by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, the only spacecraft to fly past these worlds, only recorded images in…

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection of those which I recall, along with issues I am watching out for the next year.  They include a solar eclipse that will happen, and an asteroid that is not likely to impact us.    A prediction made in 2011 was that the German Economy would suffer in part due to the lack of nuclear power.  This has happened but for reasons I did not predict. cnn.com   The war in Ukraine and the collapse of the Russian gas strategy revealed a weakness in Germany’s non-nuclear…

The Universe is very large, and we are very small compared to it, not only in size. Creating a cosmology that attempts to explain the whole existing Universe is an obsession shared by all cultures. We think we now have the true cosmological model, like many civilizations that have come before us. There are, however, reasonable grounds for thinking that the total truth about the origin and evolution of the Universe is beyond our reach. Nonetheless, there is widespread propaganda claiming that absolute truth about the Universe has already been obtained, and, like in any religion or ideology…

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life is valid?  In 2014 I used the planet Kepler 186f as an object for discussing this very question.  First of all, at best we can know the odds that a given planet has life.  We can't be 100% certain until we get a sample and if that planet is around another star, then it'll take a while.   What we can do is roughly estimate the odds based on three primary lines of evidence.  These three types of evidence are things anyone can understand and assess based on the output of…

Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite.  Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact that we know very little about black holes - including how fast they consume the universe around them. The new estimate is that a black hole can tear apart space-time and consume the accretion disk of material around it in months, rather than the hundreds of years that some believe. Such a dramatic…