Tag: astronomy

Baptistina family fingered in mass killing

Sounds like a lurid headline from a New York tabloid, doesn’t it? Except in this case the “Baptistina family”refers to asteroids, and the victims were the dinosaurs.

Amazing photo of the International Space Station…

…snapped by high school students from the ground.

Hubble’s greatest hits

Gorgeous.

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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What a setting for a science fiction story!

A Neptune-sized planet made of hot ice and shrouded with steam, orbiting a star just 30 light years away. More important than its fictional possibilities, of course, is the fact that it seems to have a lot of water, albeit it in ultra-dense, ultra-hot solid form. A little further out from its sun, and it …

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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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A comet 6,000 times brighter than Hale-Bopp is on its way

Trouble is, it probably won’t show up for about a billion years.

If you enjoy Google Earth…

…but you’re tired of looking down on everyone, trying looking up instead, via WikiSky. From New Scientist Space Blog: The site features a map of more than half a billion astronomical objects. You can navigate around it easily by clicking and dragging the map and using a zoom-in/zoom-out sidebar. You can also search on specific …

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Amazing video of a solar flare…

…here. It was captured by Japan’s Hinode spacecraft in January: “I managed to stay in my seat,” says solar physicist John Davis of the Marshall Space Flight Center, “but just barely.” Davis is NASA’s project scientist for Hinode, Japanese for Sunrise. The spacecraft was launched in Sept. 2006 from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan …

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The future of the sun

Think the sun is kind of boring, just hanging around up there burning brightly? Well, just wait. In about five billion years it will look something like this: Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI) Acknowledgement: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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