Space
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), only about 160 000 light-years from our own Milky Way, so very close on a cosmic scale, is one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way and in this spectacular new image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial menagerie of different objects and phenomena in part of the LMC is on display, ranging from vast globular clusters to the remains left by brilliant supernovae explosions. This fascinating observation provides data for a wide variety of research projects unraveling the life and death of stars and the…
antunes |
NASA is dead. Jedi killed it.
Used to be, growing geeks wanted to go to Space Camp. To fly rockets, to mimic operating a shuttle, to #$^ing be an astronaut. It was engineering and space heaven. Based on an idea tossed out by rocket god Wernher von Braun and given life in 1982 by a state agency, it was all about to know what it’s like to train like an astronaut.
"We have band camp, football, cheerleading; why don't we have a science camp?" [von Braun]
At space camp, kids (9 and up) and adults ('You're never to old to go to Space Camp, dude') learn the holy trio of…
Scientists have reconstructed the formation of a chasm larger than the Grand Canyon and a series of spiral troughs under the northern ice cap of Mars—solving a pair of mysteries dating back four decades while finding new evidence of climate change on Mars.
In a pair of papers to be published in Nature, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics describe how they used radar data collected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to reveal the subsurface geology of the red planet's northern ice cap.
On Earth, large ice sheets are shaped mainly by ice flow. But on…
Astronomers studying hydrogen gas clouds found in and above the Milky Way Galaxy have discovered that the clouds have preferred locations in and around the galaxy, a fact which has given astronomers a key clue about galaxy evolution.
Astronomers studied gas clouds in two distinct regions of the Galaxy. The clouds they studied are between 400 and 15,000 light-years outside the disk-like plane of the Galaxy. The disk contains most of the Galaxy's stars and gas, and is surrounded by a "halo" of gas more distant than the clouds the astronomers studied.
The clouds consist of neutral hydrogen…
Hank |
Check out these awesome videos from NASA's new Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). If you aren't familiar with it, SDO is part of NASA's Living With a Star Program, which should help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth by studying the solar atmosphere in small time scales and in many wavelengths simultaneously.
The end goal is to help us understand solar variations that influence life on Earth by determining how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured and how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of…
Scientists from the University of California, Berekley have captured images of a comet diving into the sun.
Using instruments aboard NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, the researchers were able to track the comet as it approached the sun and estimate an approximate time and place of impact. STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) was launched in 2006 and consists of identical spacecraft orbiting the sun, one ahead of Earth and one behind Earth, providing a stereo view of the sun.
After tracking the comet, the team studied data from the ground-based Mauna Loa Solar Observatory in Hawaii,…
Is the Sun going to enter a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas?
A group of scientists are suggesting that the Ribbon of enhanced emissions of Energetic Neutral Atoms(ENA) discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble.
If their hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.…
I read with pleasure today a proceedings writeup of the Moriond 2010 talk given by S. Andringa on behalf of the Pierre Auger Observatory. It is too bad that I did not visit La Thuile this year: the venue of the Moriond conferences is always a very pleasant place to spend a week, with talks scheduled in the morning and evening which leave the central hours of the day free for skiing. My last trip there was in 2005: I need to make the case for another visit next year!
Ahem, anyway -the proceedings. The Pierre Auger Observatory is a large array of detecting elements scattered around several…
Using a super-sensitive camera/spectrometer on the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have mapped the skies as they appeared 10 billion years ago, giving them a better look at the bright galaxies in the distant universe that appear to be forming stars at phenomenal rates.
They found that these glistening galaxies preferentially occupy regions of the universe containing more dark matter and that collisions probably caused the abundant star production. Results of the research were published in Astronomy&Astrophysics.
"Thanks to the superb resolution and sensitivity of the SPIRE […
WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured. The discovery has been documented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-12 is a yellow dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga. The exoplanet was discovered by the United Kingdom's…