Space

To wrap up the year, I'm listing my 4 worst columns.  Or, at least, the four columns that got outstandingly terrible readership.  I searched for a pattern or justification for why people stayed away in droves, but darned if I can spot one.  If you've got any ideas on why some columns sink while others swim, feel free to speak up. To be fair, I'm only selecting from articles, not blog entries, as blog entries typically get half the traffic of a typical article.  Well, except for these under-read items, each of which got under 500 readers.  Most of my blogs beat these…

Here's a pleasant Christmas thought-- why are rocket launches like holidays-- infrequent, big productions that tend to always be the same?  A New York Times op-ed, Faster, NASA, Faster, puts forth an idea that, really, resurfaces at least once every few years.  It's a good idea.  It says, hey, let's do more launches with higher risk.  In Silicon Valley we have a saying: launch early, launch often. It’s an acknowledgment that successful, innovative companies are the ones that rapidly try new ideas, see what works, improve their products and repeat. Businesses that launch…

Stars in globular clusters tend to be 12-13 billion years old but a small fraction appear to be significantly younger than the average population.   Left behind by the stars that followed the normal path of stellar evolution and became red giants, those younger ones have been dubbed blue stragglers. Oddly, blue stragglers appear to regress from 'old age' back to a hotter and brighter 'youth', gaining a new lease on life in the process - a cosmic facelift. A team of astronomers recently used Hubble to study the blue straggler star content in Messier 30, which formed 13 billion years ago…

As 2009 closes, we can look at the state of sci-fi gaming.  You might wonder why a science site cares, and the answer is that science fiction is one of the best gateways to science careers.  For one generation of astronomers, pretty much, either you'd watched Star [Trek/Wars] or you got to peek through a telescope at the real thing.  Or both. If you're new to gaming, pop over to the Guardian, they set the framework for 2009 gaming as a whole.  Moving to specifics, if you look at where science fiction MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) stand in a 2009 wrap-up, you find…

            Darkness. It has often been portrayed to us as a symbol of fear, evil or just plain emptiness. But surprisingly, darkness is also essential, especially when our universe is concerned. Everything that we can see – including ourselves – is part of “normal” matter. But there is also a dark side, composed of two things: dark matter and dark energy. Simply put, dark matter has influenced the history of the universe, and dark energy may decide the future of it.             Let’s start with dark…

Aside from Earth, Saturn's largest moon Titan looks to be the only place in the solar system with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. But that's not the only similarity our home and Titan share. A team of planetary astronomers recently announced that the two share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog. The team discussed their findings in a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters as well as in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union's 2009 Fall Meeting in San…

I'm forwarding on this call to action!  Over at Universe Today, editor Nancy Atkison announces: Calling all podcasters! The award-winning 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is proud to announce the project will continue for another 365 days, and is now accepting sign-ups for participants for 2010 If you pod on astronomy, sign up!  If you're an astronomer (amateur or pro) and you don't podcast-- sign up.  Learn.  Deliver. I'm booked with 365DOA (love the acronym) for the third Friday of each month, and delivered my first (ever) this week.  It took longer to get my initial…

New images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show that the symmetry of supernova remnants, or lack thereof, reveal how the original stars exploded. Astronomers say the discovery is important because it will help them better classify supernovas that exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago. The discovery is reported in a new Astrophysical Journal Letters study. Astronomers sort supernovas into several categories, or "types", based on properties observed days after the explosion and which reflect very different physical mechanisms that cause stars to explode.  But, since observed…

This image of a tiny patch of sky reveals the oldest galaxies ever seen. Their light has traveled 13 billion years to the Hubble Space Telescope, stretched along the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared by the expanding universe. After this long wait, astronomers wasted no time, publishing 12 papers on the data in 3 months.  The beautiful color images were just released yesterday: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was originally imaged in visible wavelengths by the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004.  These new near-infrared images were obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 which was…

An image straight out of a CGI powered sci-fi movie lit up the skies over Norway earlier today at 8:45 a.m. local time. The phenomenon appeared as a spinning spiral of white light, entered around a bright star-like object. A bright blue tail streamed from the center of the object down towards earth. The phenomenon was visible for over two minutes, could be seen for hundreds of miles, and was witnessed by thousands of individuals. It has been dubbed “Star-Gate,” and theories of its origin range from a misfired Russian missile, a meteor fireball, northern lights, a black hole, and alien…