Space

When you have only had telescopes for a few hundred years, it can be difficult to determine the history of our Sun and figure out what it was like billions of years ago. One way to do that, and to predict the future of our star, is to find those rare stars that are almost exactly like our own, but at different stages of their lives. Astronomers have identified a star that is essentially an identical twin to our Sun, but 4 billion years older — almost like seeing a real version of the twin paradox in action.[1] The team studied two solar twins [2] — one that was thought to be younger…

Hot off of revolutionizing ground-based transportation with the electric car company Tesla and revolutionizing slightly-above-the-ground-based transportation with the Hyperloop, eccentric billionaire genius Elon Musk appears to believe he has risen above the law.  Or rather, he believes his SpaceX Grasshopper rocket has risen above the law.What was this brazen defiance of international norms?  On August 9, Musk violated the touch-move rule by picking up his 10-story tall SpaceX Grasshopper rocket, moving it a tenth of a km horizontally, and then placing it back on the…

On August 21st, 2013 at 1:24 am EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection - CME - a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of particles into space and reach Earth one to three days later. These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 380 miles per second, which is a fairly common speed for CMEs.…

If you're not convinced that Planet Nibiru is not hiding in an multiverse pocket of dark matter or you just want to know the best way to get to constellation Boötes so you can ask the residents of Gliese 526 if they got that email you sent from Lone Signal, a new 'GPS' tool can help. But baby steps first.  While global positioning often works great, that 'global part' is a limiting factor. Our existing system of GPS can be off by 10 m and 0.01 mms−1 over time and is limited to using Earth for reference. If you think a car GPS can be a little crazy driving around Florida, image being…

A new hypothesis by computational physicists states that "zombie vortices" help lead to the birth of a new star. They even find a way to make it about angular momentum, saying that variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. Astronomers accept that in the first steps of a new star's birth, dense clouds of gas collapse into clumps that, with the aid of angular momentum, spin into one or more Frisbee-like disks where a protostar starts to form. But for the protostar to grow bigger, the spinning disk needs to lose some…

Astronomers have discovered a pulsar at the center of our Milky Way and this magnetar -  a pulsar with extremely high magnetic fields of the order of 100 million (108) Tesla, about 1,000 times stronger than the magnetic fields of ordinary neutron stars - and its extremely strong magnetic field enabled researchers to investigate the direct vicinity of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy.  They measured the strength of the magnetic field around this central source and were able to show that the latter is fed by magnetic fields. These control the inflow of mass into the black…

Mars is a fascinating planet, the most like Earth of all the planets in the solar system, and may help us to understand much about the origins of life on Earth. Undoubtedly, it's a wonderful place to explore, especially with augmented reality vision. But though it was quite Earth-like in its first few hundred million years, it is not at all Earth like now. Earth remains by far the most habitable place in our solar system. The most inhospitable places on Earth, such as Antarctica, even in the depths of winter, and at the centre of the continent, are far more habitable than anywhere else in our…

Detectives of both the amateur and occupational variety know that the best way to solve a mystery is to visit the scene where it began and look for clues. Cosmological detectives do that too, by trying to peer as far back to the Big Bang as possible. A new analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation data has taken the furthest look back through time yet – 100 years to 300,000 years after the Big Bang - and provided tantalizing new hints of clues as to what might have happened.  Our knowledge of the Big Bang and the early formation of the universe stems almost entirely from…

In the next few months, something big is going to happen - but don't worry if you miss it, in about 11 years, it will happen again. The sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip. The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years, at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, which means half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come.  Todd Hoeksema is the director of Stanford University's Wilcox Solar Observatory, one of the few observatories in the…

Over 12 billion years ago, a star exploded and blasting its remains outward in twin jets at nearly the speed of light. Its glow was a million times brighter than its entire galaxy. After traveling across space for 12.7 billion years, that flash was seen by astronomers on a planet that didn't even exist when the explosion happened - Earth. By analyzing this light, astronomers learned about a galaxy that was otherwise too small, faint and far away for even the Hubble Space Telescope to see. The star announced its death with a flash of gamma rays, an event known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRB…