Tag: planets

Planets, planets everywhere

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2013/01/Planets-Everywhere.mp3[/podcast] You don’t have to be very old to remember a time when we didn’t know if there were any planets anywhere else in the universe beyond those in our own solar system. Oh, sure, scientists and science fiction writers had long assumed these extrasolar planets existed, but the stars were so distant it seemed …

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Odd craters on Mercury

They’ve found some very odd craters on Mercury, some with dark halos, which they at least have a tentative explanation for, and one they cannot explain at all: Superficially, the bright patch resembles an expanse of ice glistening in the sun, but that’s not possible. The surface temperature of the crater at the time of …

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Paging all those "Face on Mars" believers…

…there’s a new formation for you to sink your conspiritorially minded teeth into: a “doorway” in an unusually shaped mountain on the Red Planet. (That’s it at left.) (Via Futurismic.)

Paging all those "Face on Mars" believers…

…there’s a new formation for you to sink your conspiritorially minded teeth into: a “doorway” in an unusually shaped mountain on the Red Planet. (That’s it at left.) (Via Futurismic.)

A sound that’s out of this world

Download the audio version of this column. Get my science column weekly as a podcast. **** Summer is the season for outdoor music festivals. Here in Regina, for example, the Folk Festival will fill Victoria Park with music this weekend. But as you sit on the grass at your favorite festival listening to your favorite …

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No puddles now…

…but Mars may once have been covered by ocean.

No puddles on Mars

That story I blogged about postulating possible puddles on Mars? Fuhgeddaboutit. Turns out the photo in question comes from the side of a crater–on terrain too steeply sloped for puddles to be possible. So neither the depressions in the photo, nor the startling hypothesis put forward concerning them, hold water. Too bad!

Mars…

…as art. Gorgeous! (Via Instapundit.)

Planets, planets everywhere

It’s been about five years since I last wrote about the search for extrasolar planets–that is, planets orbiting other stars. As I noted then, the idea that the universe is full of planets has been so firmly established in our minds by science fiction that it’s amazing to realize that we only found the first …

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Spock’s home planet in our sights?

I haven’t posted anything Star Trek-related in, oh, days, so here’s something: Science fiction may soon become science fact. Astronomers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recently concluded that the upcoming planet-finding mission, SIM PlanetQuest, would be able to detect an Earth-like planet around the star 40 Eridani, a planet familiar to “Star Trek” fans …

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Possibly habitable world found

Astronomers have found the first extrasolar planet where carbon-based “life as we know it” could conceivably exist: A planet of about five times Earth mass, one whose radius is only 1.5 times that of our own world. Moreover, a planet that’s smack in the middle of its star’s habitable zone, with a mean temperature estimated …

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Ocean planets on the brink of detection!

But not, alas, any kind of ocean planets that could be the planet I conjured up for Marseguro (if that ends up being its title), my new SF novel I’m still anxiously awaiting editorial reaction to. Still, this is a pretty cool concept and would make a great setting for some kind of SF story: …

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