Space

SpaceShipTwo failed catastrophically during a test flight with a new motor killing 1 and injuring another who parachuted to safety.  It has been revealed that the deceased was Michael Alsbury  age 39 with 15 years of flight experience.  Reportedly the survivor was Peter Siebold a test pilot with 17 years of flight experience. Right now in failure Space Ship 2 still more survivable than either Soyuz or the now retired NASA Space Shuttles.  When those craft have a similar problem everybody dies.  If anyone who has put down their $250,000 really frankly wants…

Have you ever wondered if any spaceship could ever travel through the sun with future technology? What if it is as big as Mercury or larger? Nothing material will work that we know of.  The sun's temperature of 26 million degrees is far too hot, and the most refractory substances we know of melt at a few thousand degrees. It seems a hopeless task. But there are a few things to explore, so let's look a bit more closely. (You can download this article as a kindle ebook) HEAT - NEEDS REFRIGERATION First refrigeration. Okay the sun is far too hot for any material we can construct. But what…

4 billion light-years away, inside a collection of nearly 500 galaxies called Pandora's Cluster, are the faint, ghostly glow of stars gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago. The scattered stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers have assembled forensic evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the  Abell 2744 cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years. Computer modeling of the gravitational dynamics among galaxies in a…

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered a streamer of gas flowing from a massive outer disc toward the inner reaches of a young, low-mass binary star system GG Tau-A. The never-before-seen feature may be responsible for sustaining a second, smaller disc of planet-forming material that otherwise would have disappeared long ago. “We have demonstrated that the inner disks can be replenished with fresh material and are thereby potential sites of planet formation,” Emmanuel Di Folco, co-author of the study from the Laboratory of Astrophysics of…

With private space missions just around the corner, we need to think about keeping important lunar sites safe. Cultsofhteshadow/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND By Beth O'Leary, New Mexico State University Who will preserve the first lunar landing site at Tranquility Base for future generations? It seems an odd question given the fact that this extraordinary archaeological site was created on July 21, 1969 – less than 50 years ago. Although its remoteness has protected the site for almost a half century, it is not immune to future adverse impacts – and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t…

If we were aliens, would we be able to detect Earth, using the technology we have now? That was one of the questions answered by NASA’s Kepler team consisting of SETI researchers, during an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) event Monday on Reddit Science forum. “If the aliens on Proxima Centauri had the same technology as us they would be very close to being able to directly image Earth,” Jason Rowe, Kepler mission team member of the SETI Institute answered. “A few research groups, including researchers at NASA-Ames and SETI, are actively developing chronographic and high-resolution technology that…

Sun is in a real solar flare frenzy recently, continuing a week's worth of substantial flares beginning on Oct.19, 2014. It emitted two mid-level solar flares on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27. The first peaked at 8:34 pm EDT, and the second peaked almost 10 hours later at 6:09 am EDT. The first flare was classified as an M7.1-class flare. The second flare was a bit weaker, classified as an M6.7-class. The series of flares over the course of the previous week all erupted from a particularly large active region on the sun, labeled AR 2192 – the largest seen on the sun in 24 years. Also today, the…

This morning, a large active region on the sun erupted with another X-class flare, its fourth since Oct. 24th.  Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.  This flare…

The first images of a nova during its early fireball stage - when it ejects material and gases expand and cool - have been delivered from a nova that erupted last year in the constellation Delphinus.   A nova occurs after a thin layer of hydrogen builds up on the surface of a white dwarf--a highly evolved star with the mass of the sun packed into the volume of the Earth. A normal star accompanies the white dwarf in a binary star system, providing that hydrogen as the two stars orbit each other. The normal star sheds a small amount of its mass through a stream onto the white dwarf's…

A team of astronomers recently reported discovering a pulsating star that appears to shine with the energy of 10 million suns. A pulsar is a type of rotating neutron star that emits a bright beam of energy that regularly sweeps past Earth like a lighthouse beacon. What are the odds finding another one so bright? According to one of the paper's authors, quite good.  Professor Deepto Chakrabarty of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says he is optimistic that astronomers will find additional ultra-bright pulsars now that…