Tag: astronomy

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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Wow!

Check out these spectacular images of Saturn and environs just released by the Cassini team.

A manned mission to an asteroid?

It’s being seriously considered. There’s interest in asteroids for a range of reasons…for exploration, for pure science, resource utilization, as well as learning how to mitigate the threat from a sniping space rock that has its crosshairs on Earth. Neither Bruce Willis nor Clint Eastwood, I hasten to add, will be involved in any putative …

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Scientists watch black hole munch star

Did anyone besides me see this story about scientists catching a black hole in the act of munching a star and think of “The Beast Shall Rise from the Pit,” the two-part Dr. Who episode (the first half of which just aired in Canada on Monday night)? Speaking of which, I just learned from The …

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Old sci-fi movies got it right!

It used to be a staple of B-movie science fiction involving travel in outer space or landing on another planet: the meteor shower, rocks flying through space and threatening our heroes with explosive decompression (see yesterday’s post!) or worse. Turns out, they may have been on to something. A recent episode of The Backyardigans (our …

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Transit of Mercury: The Movie

I think it’s probably impossible for us to truly understand the size of a star, even an ordinary, not particularly big star like our sun. Check out this page from NASA with images from the recent transit of Mercury across the face of the sun. In particular, take time to download the movie. Watch the …

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Blue moons

Have you ever wondered why we consider “once in a blue moon” to be the epitome of rare occurrence? This is a good time to ask, because July 2004 is one of those rare months when there are two full moons: one on July 2, and a second on July 31. According to folklore, the …

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Cassini-Huygens

If you’re a kid interested in astronomy, as I was, there are few thrills to compare with your first view of the rings of Saturn. So you can imagine how excited astronomers (and ex-kids like myself) are with the imminent arrival of the International Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. The $3 billion space probe, launched October …

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SETI @ Home, revisited

Every day, I help search for extraterrestrial intelligence…or, at least, my computer does. It’s one of more than 4,287,000 computers worldwide called SETI@Home (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which constantly examine data collected by the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for signals that could have come from extraterrestrial civilizations. Any signals …

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Extrasolar planets

The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and proof of other solar systems (stars with more than one planet …

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Asteroids, again

On March 8 an asteroid between 40 and 80 meters in diameter passed with 480,200 kilometres of Earth. No one saw it until four days later. In 1908, something about the same size blasted into the atmosphere above the Tungaska forest in Siberia in 1908 and exploded with force of 15 million tons of TNT, …

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Solar maximum

  Our sun is perturbed. It’s throwing off huge flares and erupting with spots like a teenager. That’s because this year marks the “solar maximum”–and that could mean trouble on Earth. The discovery of sunspots coincided with the invention of the telescope. Galileo was quick to turn his on the sun, focusing the image on …

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