Space

Our solar system is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, but it's difficult to know how long it actually took to form.   The reason is, basically, our 'clocks'.   Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that 'tick' at different paces - nuclear clocks used for dating are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, which is the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species. Radiocarbon dating is the most famous. It was invented in Chicago in the late…

Research suggests that the explosion of massive stars near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. When the most massive stars exhaust their available fuel and reach the end of their lives, they explode as supernovae, tremendously powerful explosions that are brighter than an entire galaxy of normal stars. The remnants of these dramatic events also release vast numbers of high-energy charged particles known as galactic cosmic rays (GCR). If a supernova is close enough to the Solar System, the enhanced GCR levels can have a direct impact on the atmosphere of the…

I've been a great admirer of GRACE since the first time I 'met her'. That was at a meeting in Potsdam, Germany, a beautiful city just outside (on the 'wrong side' = old Eastern Germany) Berlin. I was attending a geodesy meeting, I do not even remember exactly which one,  when we popped in to listen to Chris Reigber, one of the pioneers in space-based gravity measurements, giving a talk thanking the community for a reward he had just gotten for his work in this field. GRACE is the brainchild of Chris Reigber and his group at Geoforschungzentrum in Potsdam, and NASA. One of the…

Half-mile-sized objects have been seen punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.  These mini-jets' trails in the rings fill in a missing link in our understanding of the curious behavior of the F ring.  Scientists have known that relatively large objects like the moon Prometheus, 92 miles across, can create channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring but what happened to these snowballs after they were created was unclear.  Now Professor Carl Murray, Nick Attree, Nick Cooper and Gareth Williams from Queen Mary's Astronomy Unit have…

Here's an astronomy puzzles: Rather than occupying orbits at regular distances from a star, giant gas planets, like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system, appear to prefer to occupy certain regions in mature solar systems while staying clear of others, which results in “planet pileups” and “planet deserts." Researchers identified high-energy radiation from baby sun-like stars as the likely force that carves gaps in protoplanetary disks, the clouds of gas and dust that swirl around young stars and provide the raw materials for planets. The gaps then act as barricades, corralling planets…

It appears that a small cabal of  billionaires -- those who got rich through innovation and who feel loyal to the future -- are about to to fund a new effort worth some excitement and attention. It aims at transforming not just our Earth -- but the whole solar system. And, along the way, this endeavor may help bootstrap us back into our natural condition... a species, nation and civilization that believes (again) in can-do ambition. Can that be achieved - while making us all rich - through asteroid mining?  In its Tuesday announcement, Space exploration company Planetary Resources…

Neil deGrasse Tyson shared “deeply cosmic” thoughts, whatever that is supposed to mean, and then “a fascinatingly disturbing thought” - watch it on liveleak. There is a lot one can criticize* about his claims, however, he is missing something obvious that stands out like a sore thumb: Silicon! Neil, super smug** and on every semi-intellectual speaking platform like TAM, on every show he can get his hands on and has a receptive target audience, from “The Daily Show” to “The Big Bang Theory”. But science is not finished and moves fast. Is it time for some quiet reading time and reflection in…

Billions of stars in our galaxy have acquired released planets that once roamed interstellar space. Those free agent worlds left the star systems in which they formed, and found a new home with a different sun. If it sounds a lot like baseball, that's because it is, said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, making the most incongruent cosmological metaphor of April 17th, 2012. Perets and Thijs Kouwenhoven of Peking University simulated young star clusters containing free-floating planets. They found that if the number of rogue planets equaled the number of…

Astronomers believe they have found the answer to the mystery of a powerful ‘superwind’ which causes the death of stars. Stars like our own Sun end their lives with a ‘superwind’ 100 million times stronger than the solar wind, which occurs over a period of 10,000 years, and removes as much as half the mass of the star. At the end, only a dying and fading remnant of the star remain. Not to worry. The Sun won't begin to throw out those gases for around five billion years. The cause of this superwind has remained a mystery but scientists have assumed that they are driven by minute dust grains,…

A new observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), is still under construction but it has already given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby planetary system and provided valuable clues about how such systems form and evolve.  Astronomers using ALMA have discovered that planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut are much smaller than originally thought. The discovery was made possible by exceptionally sharp ALMA images of a ring of dust orbiting Fomalhaut, which lies about 25 light-years from Earth. The ALMA images show that both the…