When “Nice” Peter Alexis Shukoff and “EpicLLOYD” Lloyd Ahlquist combined their comic genius, knowledge of pop culture and intimate love for rap battles, YouTube sensation Epic Rap Battles of History was born. Now with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions watching for their next historical pairing, the musical artists (for lack of a more descriptive term) struck a chord with geeks online.
For those unfamiliar with rap battles here’s how it works. First, close your eyes and picture Eminem in the movie 8-Mile. Now the rules. Two rappers stand on a stage armed with microphones in front of an audience hungry for confrontation. Then the battle begins. It generally starts with a funny quip about the rapper’s target, the other rapper. Then after a few extemporaneous (yeah, I went there) rhyming verses the battle heats up and gets personal…but never mean.
Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking, Epic Rap Battle of History
As Ahlquist told Geek Out, a CNN blog recently, “While battling is confrontational, most times the people battling are doing so just for the sake of the rapping or the show.” His rap name is EpicLLOYD and his specialty is taking on characters from history — real or imagined.
Why do it?
EpicLLOYD says, “We’ve always liked rap and free-styling. Battle rap is something that is inherently engaging and funny because it’s based on punch lines about the other person.”
Their most famous Epic Rap Battle of History has two well known figures throw down. It’s a classic what if scenario. What would Adolf Hitler say to Darth Vader if he had the chance? Over 45 million people tuned in to find out.
While they have no problem pitting non-fictional character against fictional, occasionally they do put two real life people into a fantasy rap battle. And they even pay homage to science.
Shukoff who prefers the rap handle NicePeter says, “Neither of us knew much about physics going into the Hawking-Einstein battle. We knew it was a cool pairing, a cool matchup that appeals to a section of the Internet who appreciate science and mathematics. We dove into it as much as we could, found out about Einstein and talked to people about Stephen Hawking.”
Now the video the duo debuted last year has garnered over 35 million views.
What’s next for NicePeter and EpicLLOYD? Well, historical twosomes. First up — Mario Brothers v. Wright Brothers. That’s sure to be a high-flying rap battle.
NicePeter says, “We’re gonna explore new stuff. I made a pledge to my father to use a Russian character. That will have to happen. There’s a lot of really good rappers from Russian history.”
Now the science
Okay, this is just a fun little ditty and rather light on the science. But there are a couple of things worth mentioning.
3-D image of 6-dimension Calabi-Yau Spaces That May Lie at the Smallest Scales of Unseen Dimensions in String Theory
1. Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. One tenet of his theory of general relativity is that the Universe is expanding, and the far parts of it are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. That’s a mind-blowing concept which the famous physicist alludes to in the opening salvo of the rap battle.
2. Einstein takes a few personal jabs at Hawking who is confined to a wheelchair and speaks through a computer because he is almost entirely paralyzed by a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
3. Hawking comes roaring back later in the battle to scald Einstein with his wit, calling him a p-brane. This term is a witty physics retort, referring to the size of Einstein’s brain compared to Hawkings while also making a reference to a theoretical physics concept. Here p-brane is a spatially extended mathematical concept that appears in string theory.
4. Einstein retorts with a veiled reference to Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time as he mildly threatens him before attacking his black hole theory, which he continues to revise.
5. But Hawking deals the final blow, starting with a Your Momma insult (a common rap battle tactic) couched in math. He refers to all the known particles in the observable universe — a googol, which is estimated to be more than the 1079 and 1081 atoms. Or as mathematician Edward Kasner famously said a googol is “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” His nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta coined the term. Then in 1980 cosmologist Carl Sagan famously said writing out a googol “would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.”
6. Hawking goes on to reference the historical myth that Einstein’s famous E=MC2 formula led to the atom bomb. Then he invokes Sagan from The Cosmos once more, who said, “If you want to bake apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Hawking delivers the final punch to Einstein by insulting his intelligence (another common rap battle tactic) comparing him to a 1993 Texas Instruments graphing calculator while calling himself a supercomputer. Ouch!
Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking
by NicePeter and EpidLLOYD
[Albert Einstein]
When I apply my battle theory minds are relatively blown
So take a seat Steve
Opp, I see you brought your own
What’s with your voice?
I can’t frickin tell
You sound like WALL-E
Having s** with a Speak & Spell
I’ll school you anywhere
MIT to Oxford
All your fans with be like:
“um, that was Hawk-ward”
I’m as dope as two rappers
You better be scared
Cause that means Albert E
Equals M C squared[Stephen Hawking]
You’ve got no idea what you’re messing with here boy
I got 12 inch rims on my chair, that’s how I roll y’all
You look like someone glued a mustache on a troll doll
I’ll be stretching out the rhyme, like gravity stretches time
When you try to put your little p-brane against this kind of mind
I’m the best
I’m the Snoop Dogg of Science
I’ll be dropping mad apples on your head from the shoulder of giants[Albert Einstein]
I’m a giant whose shoulders you’d have stood on, if you can stand
I’ll give you a brief history of pain with the back of my hand
You can’t destroy matter or me, for serious
Ripping holes in you bigger than the hole in your black hole theory was[Stephen Hawking]
There are 10,000,000
Million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe
Your mama took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd
You wanna bring the heat
With the mushroom clouds you’re making
I’m about to bake raps from scratch, like Carl Sagan
And while it’s true
That my work is based on you
I’m a super computer
You’re like a TI-82
Created by NicePeter
]]>Just a couple of weeks after announcing the discovery of a planet within a distant solar system that is orbiting in what astronomers called the habitable zone for life, another exciting announcement adds two more confirmed planets to the list.
Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning hundreds of thousands of distant stars, looking for the slightest wobble, which would indicate the gravitational pull of planets as they orbit their sun. The Kepler team has been studying and investigating dozens of Earth-like candidates, including two around Kepler 20 in the constellation Lyra.
The star Kepler 20 houses two planets nearby that are Earth-like in size. One is just three percent larger in diameter than Earth and the other is nine-tenths the size of Earth. But unlike the previous discovery of Kepler 22b — a watery world with a temperature of about 72 degrees — these are rocky planets with scorching temperatures too hot for any life we can imagine.
They are situated in a tightly packed planet pile with three other known planets, all very near the host star. Kepler-20e has an orbit of six days, while Kepler-20f has an orbit of 19.6 days.
Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f are the closest sized planets to Earth discovered to date. The confirmation of these two planets is significant because planets the size of Earth are just hard to find and this shows that Kepler is up to the task. This gives scientists hope that they will find life outside of our solar system.
Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f Compared to Earth and Venus
It may be a bacteria, mold or single-celled life form but astrobiologists are encouraged by this news.
Linda Elkins-Tanton, who studies planetary formation at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington says the larger of the two planets, Kepler-20f, is especially intriguing. She says, “If it was formed with water, which I think is possible, it could have been habitable in the past.”
Alan Boss, also an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution says science would be remiss not to look for life-inhabiting planets outside of our solar system. He says, “That does not mean that we necessarily think that only exact Earth twins could be inhabited, just that we at least had better be able to find Earth twins, and then along the way we will be certain to uncover all sorts of other types of exoplanets that should be habitable, and perhaps even inhabited.”
Francois Fressin is the lead author of the paper announcing the discovery which appears in the journal Nature. He says though the planets are about the right size they are definitely not right for life. Kepler 20e is about 1,400 degrees F while Kepler 20f is 800 degrees.
In his paper, he writes, “Theoretical considerations imply that these planets are rocky, with a composition of iron and silicate.” And he notes, “The outer planet could have developed a thick water vapour atmosphere.”
Boss puts this discovery and the Kepler 22b discovery a couple of weeks ago in perspective as he tells ABC News, “In less than 20 years, we have gone from not knowing if any other planets exist in the universe, to being able to look out at the night sky and realize that essentially any star we can see has at least one planet, and a good number of those are likely to be habitable.”
He adds, “That is a revelation that has not yet dawned on the general public, and even astronomers are having their minds blown when they think about it.”
Just ten years ago University of Washington astronomers Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee created the Rare Earth hypothesis, which suggested that the conditions for life are so particular that for us to find any sign of life elsewhere would be nearly impossible. In that time, astronomy as a whole has revised that theory.
But Ward and Brownlee’s also posited the idea of a habitable Goldilocks zone around a star which is neither too hot nor too cold and where the conditions for life are just right. That planet must orbit its star at a distance similar to that of Earth or Kepler 22b.
So far Kepler has found 54 planets that lie in the habitable zone around distant stars. But the team is backlogged with another 2,000 probable planets that await further study.
]]>
Comet Lovejoy has Close Encounter with the Sun
The comet was discovered earlier this month by an Australian amateur astronomer, named Terry Lovejoy. He spotted the comet, first called Kreutz sungrazing Comet C/2011, in broad daylight with his Celestron C8 telescope and a Canon camera.
This is the first time since the 1970s that a ground-based telescope has spotted a comet of this class. Thanks to Lovejoy’s observations space-based telescopes could be trained to watch what scientists thought was going to be the demise of the newly discovered comet.
It was set to be a routine comet suicide. Astronomers had watched this happen 2,000 times before and no comet had ever survived a brush with the broiling sun. They thought that the comet would melt away on December 15 when it entered a zone around the sun where temperatures reach several million degrees.
NASA had a front row seat, with telescopes pointed at Comet Lovejoy as it made its final solar approach. First astronomers reported they saw the sun’s corona “wiggle” as the comet got close to the sun.
Karl Battams tells the Associated Press, “I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun.” It’s quite a treat to witness a relatively infrequent event like this live. But he says, “I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge.”
Comet Lovejoy was a shadow of its former millions of tons self. Dean Pesnell, a NASA scientists who tracked the comet’s hair-raising journey says, “It looks like the tail broke off and is stuck” in the sun’s magnetic field. The comet spent more than an hour in the sun’s grip.
The comet came within 90,000 miles of the sun and didn’t disappear, leaving astronomers scratching their heads and scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory excited to study the phenomenon.
Some say to survive the dirty snowball was much bigger than originally thought and others say the comet may have a rocky core.
Pesnell equates this event with an ice cube being placed on a hot barbeque grill. He says this comet is related to a comet that buzzed Earth back in 1106.
After surviving its perilous trip to the sun, it now continues to make its wide orbital swing through the solar system. Astronomers think it’ll be another 800 or 900 years before it gets close enough to the sun again. That’s plenty of time for it to build back up and regrow its missing tail.
]]>The question is the subject of movies, science fiction novels and our own curious minds. Are we alone in the universe? Prevailing scientific wisdom says yes but more and more the answer appears to be no.
With the advent of more sensitive cosmological equipment to scan the night sky, astronomers are able to see smaller objects with ever greater detail. The Kepler space telescope has been focused on a region of space containing over 100,000 stars. Scientists have been watching those stars for the tiniest hint of a wobble, indicating those stars could be hiding planets.
Now, the hunt for exoplanets — planets being discovered outside of our own solar system — is on and the results are startling.
Ten years ago, two University of Washington astrobiologists postulated that Earth is a rare planet indeed. In their book Rare Earth, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward suggested that for life to exist elsewhere in the universe very specific conditions must be met. They called this the habitable or Goldilocks zone, where a planet wasn’t too hot or too cold to support life. It had to have a certain amount of sunlight from its nearby star. So it had to be located in a solar system with other planets a certain distance from its star.
Building on that set of criteria, professional astronomers, undergraduates, citizens and curious skywatchers are all becoming planet hunters. Now the science is improving to the point where a new discovery yields the planets size, mass and even its average surface temperature.
Finding a Planet in a Star Stack
Kepler 22 Star System, Showing Kepler 22b in the Habitable Zone
British author and astronomy expert Ian Ridpath explains the way astronomers find new exoplanets.
“NASA has this space telescope called Kepler which has been staring for the past couple of years at this one particular area of sky containing over 100,000 stars. And it’s been looking for very slight dips in the star’s brightness as something goes across in front of the stars.
“It’s called the transit method. Now if it does that three times in succession then the NASA scientists think that is good enough to conclude that what is causing the dip in light is a planet.”
That’s why astronomers are so excited about the confirmation of a new exoplanet, Kepler 22b. By all calculations it is located in a habitable zone around its star, known as Kepler 22. The star, which is smaller and cooler than our sun is located between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler 22b orbits around the star and may be the right distance from the star to support life. But the size of the planet — about 2.4 times that of Earth, really excites scientists. It is rare for a discovery to find a planet in the same size range as our own blue planet. Of the 28 planets found so far his is the smallest planet ever confirmed by Kepler.
Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA says, “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.”
It’s much easier to spot a big planet, like a gas giant the size of Jupiter. But those are not likely candidates for the search for life, microbial or intelligent. Kepler 22b is about the right size and appears to have a liquid water surface. In fact, it looks like the entire planet is covered in water.
That coupled with measurements pointing to the temperature being about 72 degrees gives astronomers hope that life may exist there.
NASA Artist Rendering of Kepler 22b, Covered in Water and with Clouds
William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center says the Kepler team got very lucky in detecting this planet. He says, “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”
]]>On Saturday, a $2 billion science project will begin what NASA is calling a flagship mission to Mars to see if the red planet is capable of sustaining microbial life.
Equipped with 17 cameras, an on-board science lab, the six-wheeled rover named Curiosity will do what its predecessors Spirit and Opportunity failed to do — determine if there is liquid water on Mars that has the building blocks of life.
With the countdown at just over two days, team members are ready for launch. They say the robot-like rover will not be able to determine if there is life on Mars, unless something jumps out in front of the camera once the rover has safely landed in what scientists believe could be a dry lake or sea bed.
The Mars Science Laboratory has four mission goals, including determining if life ever arose on Mars, characterizing the climate, understanding the geology and preparing for human exploration in the future.
The Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments to search for evidence about whether Mars ever had environments favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life like carbon. The rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gases so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.
Gale Crater, Where Curiosity Will Land
While Curiosity begins where Spirit and Opportunity left off, a second Mars space orbiter nicknamed MAVEN will join the new roving science lab in 2014 to take upper atmosphere samples in an effort to understand what caused the Martian atmosphere -and water- to be lost to space, making the climate increasingly inhospitable for life.
Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says, “The ultimate driver for these missions is the question, did Mars ever have life? Did microbial life ever originate on Mars, and what happened to it as the planet changed? Did it just go extinct, or did it go underground, where it would be protected from space radiation and temperatures might be warm enough for liquid water?”
Curiosity will answer those questions.
]]>An aircraft carrier-sized asteroid is hurtling through our cosmic neighborhood. 2005 YU55 is going to be zipping by on November 8 in what scientists are calling a close encounter. The asteroid is not going to hit Earth but it will be about 15 percent closer to Earth than the moon, making it quite an astronomical event.
This is the first time that scientists will have a front row seat to view an asteroid that they know is on close approach.
Barbara Wilson, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells the Daily Mail in the UK, “While near-Earth objects of this size have flown within a lunar distance in the past, we did not have the foreknowledge and technology to take advantage of the opportunity.”
For the occasion NASA is pulling out the big radio telescope guns to get a clear picture of what will whiz by next week. Radar, visual and infrared imaging will follow the track of the big space rock and gather as much information as possible. This will help scientists better track its course, which does pose a minor threat to Earth. The next time this asteroid will be close to Earth will be in another hundred years.
NASA says, “Although 2005 YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity of Earth (and Venus and Mars), the 2011 encounter with Earth is the closest this space rock has come for at least the last 200 years.”
The next time a rock of this size will buzz Earth will be in 2028.
Scientists have been following 2005 YU55 and for six years and have been preparing for its near-Earth arrival for months. Generally space-based telescopes and instruments study asteroids up close. But this will be a “science target of opportunity” for spacecraft Earth to scan the asteroid.
Dr. Wilson says, “When it flies past, it should be a great opportunity for science instruments on the ground to get a good look.”
Starting November 4, the Deep Space Network antennas in Goldstone, California will begin tracking the asteroid from the ground. Then on November 8 — the day the asteroid makes its closest pass of Earth — the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico will begin bouncing radio waves off the giant rock to understand its composition, size, surface features and other physical properties.
Asteroid 2005 YU55 Approach Animation, Showing Relation of Earth and The Moon (click image to view)
The closest 2005 YU55 will get to Earth is about .85 lunar distances or 201,000 miles. That distance is not enough to have any affect on anything here on Earth, including tides or tectonic plates.
Radar observations made in April 2010 by the Arecibo telescope show the asteroid to be about 1,300-feet wide and sphere shaped. It slowly spins, with one rotation about every 18 hours. The asteroid’s surface is likely dark. And amateur astronomers who want to get a glimpse at 2005 YU55 will need a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or larger.
NASA Goldstone Antenna Points Skyward
The Arecibo radar is 30 times more sensitive than Goldstone but not fully steerable. Goldstone is fully steerable but not as sensitive. Together, the two instruments are complimentary.
JPL radar astronomer Steve Ostro says, “The closer the target, the better the echo.” Using the radio wave echos astronomers generate detailed three-dimensional models of the asteroid, define its rotation and get a good idea of its internal density distribution. Dr. Ostro says, “You can even make out surface features. A good echo can give us a spatial resolution finer than 10 meters.”
2005 YU55 will be close enough for astronomers to get high resolution, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 meters, which means scientists will be able to see any features that are just over six feet across on the surface of the asteroid, including any moons that might be accompanying the big rock.
The last time a space rock as big came this close to Earth was in 1976, although astronomers did not know about the flyby at the time.
NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them, and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
]]>It’s already the largest telescope in the world but by the end of 2013 the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Telescope will be able to see dust that was formed 13 billion years ago. Comprised of 20 high-powered antennas the project will add another 46 over the next two years.
Sitting 16,000 feet above sea level, high on a plateau in the Andes Mountains of Chile, the array will have the capability to witness the formation of stars and galaxies toward the beginning of the universe. This telescope will specialize in mapping gas and dust in the Milky Way and other galaxies, studying stars formation, analyzing gas from an erupting volcano on Jupiter’s moon, Io and studying the origin of the solar wind.
When the telescope array is completed and working at full capacity astronomers will be able to glimpse the Cosmic Dawn, a period of time when galaxies began to form out of the debris of massive stars which died explosively shortly after the beginning of the Universe.
Dr Diego Garcia, one of the operations astronomers at ALMA says that a “new golden age of astronomy” began when the scientists switched on the new array on September 30.
ALMA’s First Image
Dr. Alison Peck, a radio astronomer and ALMA Deputy Project Scientist during construction and testing says the team chose the Antennae Galaxies for ALMA’s first image not just because of the name but “because it is in the process of undergoing the type of spectacular, violent merger that many galaxies may have undergone since their formation, but that we can rarely catch in action.”
The Antennae Galaxies are two spiral galaxies that are in the process of crashing into one another. They are the youngest and nearest colliding galaxy pair ever found.
Dr. Brad Whitmore of the Space Telescope Science Institute says, “The collision of these two galaxies has turned them into an impressive star-making factory. With Hubble, we’ve seen the formation of thousands of massive super star clusters, each with thousands or even millions of young stars in them.”
He says with with ALMA, astronomers will focus on the heart of the collision. They will be able to then study the formation of the Antennae’s “most impressive fireworks and look into the cores of the giant molecular clouds where the star clusters are born.”
The first image from ALMA is vastly different from the pictures from the Hubble Telescope and for good reason. Hubble is in space while ALMA is a ground-based array. ALMA also detects wavelengths about a thousand times longer than those of visible light. The longer wavelengths allow for the study of cold objects like the clouds of dust and gas from which planets and stars form, as well as very distant objects in the early universe.
The ALMA project began in 2003 and as more antennas have been added astronomers have been able to see further back in time by looking deeper into space with ever more clarity.
Dr. Garcia tells BBC News, “We are going to be able to see the beginning of the Universe, how the first galaxies were formed. We are going to learn so much more about how the Universe works.”
One of the projects on ALMA’s docket is the study of AU Microscopii, a young star about one percent the age of the sun with a ring of matter around it that may be in the process of coalescing into planets.
]]>For scientists it doesn’t get any bigger than the Nobel Prize. This year’s winners in the Physics category receive the honor for work they did on the biggest subject available to them or anyone — the universe.
Three U.S. scientists are sharing the prize for their theory of a rapidly expanding universe. Saul Perlmutter receives half the prize for his role in discovering that the light from a specific kind of supernova was dimmer than predicted. Fortunately, another team studying the same thing made up of Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss came to the same conclusion.
For over 100 years physicists — most notably Albert Einstein — had been working with the idea that the universe was expanding, stretching outward as a result of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. But until the new Nobel Prize winners used better technology, more powerful computers and telescopes in the 1990′s the theory lacked observation.
In 1998, the universe was still rapidly expanding and the answer to that big question was literally written in the stars.
In a telephone interview this morning with the Nobel Prize committee, Dr. Reiss remembered first seeing the sign that proved Einstein and others’ theory.
After sifting through all the data he gathered for his experiment looking at class 1a supernovae, he says, “I remember thinking the sign of the answer was I would have said, wrong. I remember thinking, ‘uh, I made a terrible mistake.’”
At the time, Reiss and his team at John Hopkins were seeing the same thing that Perlumutter and his team at University of California Berkeley were observing. Both teams thought there were errors in their calculations and it took a long time to confirm the results. Once the teams shared their results with each other, they knew their discovery was big.
Now the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The trio was honored Tuesday for their work confirming that the universe is indeed expanding but also for realizing that the rate is ever-accelerating over time.
]]>According to the Nobel press release, “The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.
“The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.”
Far far away, toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy sits a true diamond in the rough. Astronomers haven’t been able to see a newly discovered exoplanet but it may prove to be a real gem.
Using deductive reasoning based on crucial pieces of evidence, an international astrophysics team led by Australian space scientists believe they have discovered a planet, five times the size of Earth that weighs about the same as Jupiter. They have decided that the planet is made up of crystallized carbon. In other words, it’s the galaxy’s largest diamond.
Just like diamonds on Earth, the formation of this big bit of bling took some unusual circumstances. The planet used to be a star. That is until a neighboring pulsar stripped the faraway sun of its outermost layers, leaving just its carbon core as a remnant. Acting as a high powered diamond cutter, the pulsar likely absorbed the nearby sun while heat and pressure turned the carbon core into a diamond.
A pulsar is a tiny, dead neutron star that is just over 12 miles across and spins hundreds of times per second, emitting radio waves. In a binary star system like this the pulsar starts to spin faster as it consumes the neighboring star’s plasma. This increases the speed of the pulsar until it becomes a millisecond pulsar, spinning at more than 10,000 times per second. Once the star is stripped it is called a white dwarf and is only one percent of its former self, turning from a star to a planet.
Those radio waves that pulsars emit periodically reach Earth, allowing radio telescopes in Australia, Hawaii and Britain to detect pulsar J1719-1438. Astronomers have also detected a slight modulation in its movement, indicating the gravitational pull of an as yet unseen planet.
Taking detailed measurements of the planet’s chemical composition, pressure and dimensions astronomers determined that the diamond planet is largely made of carbon but because it is so dense it must be in a crystallized form.
Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia says the new planet is far denser than any yet discovered.
He says, “The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon — i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun.”
Before De Beers goes into the deep space business to get a closer glimpse of the diamond planet, they should know that it lies about 4,000 light years away from Earth.
And it might not look like your run of the mill diamond here on Earth.
Astrophysicist Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester says, “I don’t imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we’re looking at here.”
]]>A space probe carrying some Lego astronauts is on a five-year trip to Jupiter. The Juno mission launched without a hitch on August 5 and began its journey to the largest planet in the solar system.
With the end of the 30-year space shuttle program, the new face of NASA is space probes not astronauts. Messenger is circling Mercury. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is searching for signs of water on the red planet. The Dawn space probe is orbiting Vesta, a large asteroid. And the New Horizons deep space probe is racing toward dwarf planet Pluto.
And now, the Juno Project is sending a solar-powered probe to figure out how Jupiter came to be. There it will try to find a solid core in the center of the gas giant and it will study its clouds to try to figure out how the planet formed.
Juno’s science mission is:
After Juno arrives in 2016 it will circle Jupiter 33 times over the course of a year and then the $1.1 billion space probe will de-orbit (or crash) into the gas giant in 2017.
]]>“We’re looking for the recipe about how the planets are formed. And Jupiter holds the ingredients.” — Rick Nybakken, Juno Project Deputy Manager
In 1978, Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife duo who are known for their mid 20th Century furniture, movie making and other design projects, decided to map the visible world.
Their film, Powers of Ten showed the perspective of moving one order of magnitude every ten seconds. Beginning with a picnic in a park in Chicago, the clever team shows the vastness of the universe, reaching toward the furthest point of our understanding at 10 to the 24th meters.
Then a quick two-second per power return to the picnic before plunging into the microworld beneath the skin of a picnicker and into the subatomic world of electrons and their component parts.
Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, is the curator of the Eames Office and has recently launched the Powers of Ten website where he placed an interactive journey of each step shown in the film.
In 2007, to mark the 100th Birthday of his grandfather, Charles, Eames paid a loving tribute to the creative genius of his grandparents.
Pluto may no longer be a planet but it still has moons. Between 1978 and 2005 the little icy world formerly known as the ninth planet in our solar system has revealed moon after moon. Most people may not realize that Pluto has any moons or probably thought it just had one, like Earth.
First there was Charon, which for several decades was believed to be Pluto’s only progeny. Then in 2005, tiny moons Hydra and Nix were discovered.
And last month, while searching for potential rings or other hazards near Pluto the Hubble Space Telescope caught a glimpse of the dwarf planet’s fourth moon. It’s known as P4 for now but the mythological name game has already begun.
Scientists working on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto have been looking for possible dangers the probe may encounter on its way to Pluto. A little blur that was dismissed in 2006 was confirmed to be the a new mini moon, which is estimated to be just 8 to 21 miles in diameter.
Alan Stern, the director of the Southwest Research Institute’s New Horizons program told MSNBC.com’s Alan Boyle P4 was discovered on June 28 and confirmed by looking at archived images and by conducting follow-up observations this month.
Boyle, who is the science editor for MSNBC.com and writes the blog Cosmic Log says, “The find is also a testament to Hubble’s amazing vision.” Using its Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed in 2009 and designed to study dark energy, it can capture images in the near-infrared, visible light or near-ultraviolet spectrum.
And, now it’s helped spot a moon in Pluto’s orbit.
Mark Showalter of the California-based SETI Institute says, “I find it remarkable that Hubble’s cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles.”
When the New Horizons probe reaches Pluto in 2015, scientists are excited for what awaits them.
Stern says, “Pluto’s satellite system is truly knocking our socks off with surprises — it’s magnificently complex, and getting more crowded all the time. I can’t wait till we get there to see what other surprises this planet and its moons have in store for us!”
Pluto's Satellite System Including New Moon P4
Get used to hearing the name Vesta. It’s one of the largest asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt, a wide area of spinning rocks located between Mars and Jupiter. After four years of slow and steady travel, NASA’s Dawn space probe finally reached the orbit of the big spinning rock, also known as a protoplanet.
Since June it has been sending back pictures of ever-increasing resolution as the probe approached its destination. Scientists are hoping to learn about the early formation of the solar system by studying asteroids in orbit. And Vesta may just be a target for manned spaceflight, now that a return trip to the moon seems to have been scrubbed.
Dawn reached Vesta’s orbit on July 16. It will spend one year circling the rock learning all it can before heading to the dwarf planet Ceres — also in the asteroid belt — next July. Dawn, which launched in September 2007, is on track to become the first spacecraft to orbit two solar system destinations beyond Earth.
For the next couple of months, Vesta is actually visible with the naked eye from Earth. It’s the brightest asteroid in the night sky. Just look in the tail-end of the constellation Capricorn, a little northeast of Neptune.
Vesta was spotted in 1807 and is the fourth asteroid discovery, made by German doctor Heinrich Olbers at his private observatory in Bremen, Germany. It is named after the Roman goddess of the hearth.
To celebrate this milestone, NASA is encouraging citizen scientists to throw Vesta Fiestas all over the country Aug. 5-7.
It took the Dawn space probe four years to reach Vesta because it used an ion propulsion system to power the craft. This type of propulsion is known as patient propulsion because it starts slow and builds speed over time. It requires solar energy to activate the fuel, in this case Xenon. This allows Dawn to perform like a bigger engine but still have the maneuverability to stay in low orbit over Vesta before dashing to Ceres, which was re-classified a dwarf planet along side Pluto in 2007.
]]>“Today, we celebrate an incredible exploration milestone as a spacecraft enters orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt for the first time,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “Dawn’s study of the asteroid Vesta marks a major scientific accomplishment and also points the way to the future destinations where people will travel in the coming years. President Obama has directed NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and Dawn is gathering crucial data that will inform that mission.” — NASA Chief Administrator, Charlie Bolden
All of the space data that the Hubble Telescope is broadcasting is far too much for a handful of scientists to sift through in a timely manner. So using the power of technology and the time and interest of citizen scientists several space-based science projects are underway through a project called Zooniverse.
The latest program is a joint effort with NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. The space agency is enlisting the help of thousands of citizen scientists to analyze images to identify Kuiper Belt Objects.
The Kuiper Belt is a field of icy rocks that begins where Neptune’s orbit ends. Pluto is no longer a planet but it is still the destination in 2015 for the New Horizons program. Once the space probe passes Pluto it will study two other large Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). And that’s where Icehunters comes in.
Citizen Scientists circle white dots in the search for Kuiper Belt Objects to help NASA find targets
The new Zooniverse citizen science initiative starts with all different quality images of the Kuiper Belt, complete with bright stars that wash out images, cosmic rays, asteroids and other noise. People from all over the world log in and pour over pictures, circling potential KBOs.
Scientists look at the objects that many independent participants circle and conduct further analysis in hopes of spotting a good target for the New Horizons misison to study.
Zooniverse has nine live projects looking at different scientific questions relating to the universe. Planethunters is perhaps the most well known, giving citizen scientists the opportunity to find a new extra solar planet.
]]>New evidence of muon neutrinos turning into electron neutrinos could pave the way for spotting differences between matter and antimatter. That may not mean much to most people but scientists think it might be a big clue in the search for why matter is everywhere and antimatter is not.
Physicists believe matter and antimatter should behave the same way to preserve the symmetry outlined in the standard model of physics. But matter dominated over antimatter following the Big Bang.
Here are the basics on neutrinos. They are tiny, invisible particles that pass through our bodies millions of times a day. They leave no trace because they are so fast and so light, traveling constantly through space all the time. This characteristic also makes them very difficult for physicists to detect.
Generally, a neutrino detector has to be constructed in an underground bunker where cosmic rays can’t penetrate. One such experiment was just barely underway in Japan when the big 9.0 earthquake disrupted the island nation and brought an abrupt halt to the big physics experiment.
There are three types of neutrinos theoretical physicists have determined but direct observation of Muon neutrinos, electron neutrinos and tau neutrinos has been fleeting to say the least.
The Japanese T2K experiment, which was pushing neutrinos from one coast of Japan to another may have captured the first evidence of the three neutrinos changing into one another en route.
In physics that’s a big deal. And now that physicists have observed the three types of flip-flopping neutrinos scientists just need to study how often this happens so they can apply the same experiments to anti-neutrinos.
The Japanese experiment should be back online by the end of the year.
]]>“People sometimes think that scientific discoveries are like light switches that click from ‘off’ to ‘on’, but in reality it goes from ‘maybe’ to ‘probably’ to ‘almost certainly’ as you get more data. Right now, we are somewhere between ‘probably’ and ‘almost certainly’.” — Dave Wark, Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom and Imperial College London and head of the UK Group at the T2K experiment
How black holes form is one of the biggest questions facing astronomers. For years super-massive black holes have provided a laboratory for physicists to study the light-strangling phenomenon.
Now a six-week study has revealed the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. Using the high-powered orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory pointed into deep space, scientists looked back in time to when the universe was just under one billion years old.
This composite image combines the deepest X-ray image ever taken with optical and infrared data from Hubble. Astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South by pointing the Chandra telescope at the same patch of sky for over six weeks of time. The Chandra sources of this small section of the CDFS are shown in blue. Two "stacked" images, which represent a technique used to find the most distant galaxies in X-ray light, are on the right. The results from this dataset include that black holes are found to be actively growing between 800 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang.
They were surprised to discover that black holes were very common. A team of top astronomers from around the world stumbled onto an x-ray signal from the early universe. Using the deepest x-ray image ever taken, the team led by University of Hawaii’s Ezequiel Treister discovered that massive black holes were present near the beginning of the universe.
Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so great that not even light can escape from them. Before this discovery astronomers had no idea what black holes in early galaxies did or if they even existed.
Treister says, “This is a big step, not a baby step, getting us closer to understand[ing] where the black holes form and when they were created, when they started.”
The new x-ray image not only gave these astronomers a never-before-seen peek into a younger universe but it revealed the presence of black holes that had been previously obscured.
Mitchell Begelman, an astronomer from University of Colorado says, “We never saw before now the smaller black holes that must have existed before these quasars formed.”
Quasars are the brightest spots in the universe. After being mistaken for stars the strange cosmological phenomenon was discovered in the 1960s. Since then further study has shown astronomers these luminous dots are actually powered by massive rotating black holes.
Looking deep into space is like looking back in time because of the finite speed of light. So the higher the power of telescopes and imaging technology the better glimpse we will get of the earliest universe.
This discovery confirms decades of theory.
Begelman says, “Now, we are seeing the first direct evidence of these smaller black holes.”
Astronomers study the developmental stages of black holes in the same way as sociologists study people. They put the lifespan of a black hole into phases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These observations are the first images of young black holes. They are like seeing their high school pictures.
But like gawky teens these black holes grow quickly and powerfully, eating up all matter within reach.
Kevin Schawinski from Yale University says, “These hungry black holes are feeding on material — gas — at the centers of these galaxies and they will continue to grow from adolescence to adulthood.”
Now astronomers can move much close to the moment of birth and understand where both galaxies and super massive black holes come from.
Schawinski says, “We’ve only just scratched the surface of the first billion years of the universe with their help and there are great prospects of further discovery.”
]]>Scientists say particles from a solar flare will rain down on Earth and possibly cause problems. NASA caught incredible images of the sun as it released a medium-sized solar flare and a spectacular coronal mass ejection. It appeared to cover at least half of the sun with its plasma cloud.
Now it is speeding toward Earth and could disrupt communication satellites and power grids. While the possibility of solar flares always comes with the warning, few think this particular plasma burst will do much to us on Earth this weekend.
Because the flare shot out of the sun away from Earth, we will be spared the brunt of its impact. But the giant super-heated gas cloud is speeding away from the sun at about 3 million miles per hour. So scientists aren’t ruling out the possibility of some disruptions, especially to satellites.
This means that cell phones and GPS units may not operate as they are supposed to so why not unplug this weekend and wait for the solar storm to pass.
The sun goes through 11-year cycles of activity. It is just emerging from an unprecedented quiet period and appears to be exploding into the active phase of the cycle. The first major solar flare since 2006 appeared in February, followed by another big one in April.
]]>Albert Einstein predicted that large enough objects had the capability to bend light. He was right and astronomers used this technique called microlensing to make an out-of-this-world discovery. It seems that not all planets orbit neighboring stars.
A international team of scientists has found ten planets that are orphans without stars to orbit, roaming freely in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, astronomers believe that these rogue planets may be more numerous than main-sequence stars like our own Sun.
In the latest issue of the journal Nature, astronomers describe how they used microlensing to determine the number of homeless planets floating around in deep space. First, they identified ten Jupiter-size planets that were too far from any light-giving stars. Then they estimated the total number of such rogue planets, based on detection efficiency, microlensing-event probability and the relative rate of lensing caused by stars or planets. They concluded that there could be as many as 400 billion of these wandering planets, far outnumbering main-sequence stars such as our Sun.
This number stunned the study authors.
Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer says, “This is an amazing result, and if it’s right, the implications for planet formation are profound.”
Her colleague and study co-author Takahiro Sumi, an astrophysicist from Osaka University says, “The existence of free-floating planets has been predicted by planetary formation theory, but nobody knew how many there are.”
Now that microlensing has helped find wandering Jupiters, the team is setting its sights on spotting Saturn and Neptune-sized orphan planets. There may be some Earth-sized, rocky planets out there capable of supporting the ingredients for life.
In the future, NASA’s planned space-based Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), will be able to decipher the rapid light blips associated with smaller mass planets detected using microlensing.
Ohio State University astrophysicist Scott Gaudi says, “Detecting Earth-mass unbound planets? That would be very interesting.”
This discovery is likely to open up a whole new sub-discipline in astronomy, the study of unbound exoplanets.
]]>When the Juno spacecraft blasts off this August, it will embark on a mission to understand the origin and evolution of our largest planetary neighbor, Jupiter.
Scientists believe that Jupiter and the sun may be formed by the same heavy elements. So NASA is sending a solar-powered probe to determine if the gas giant has a solid core.
The Juno mission will investigate Jupiter’s origins, its interior structure, its deep atmosphere and its magnetosphere from an innovative, highly elliptical orbit with a suite of seven science instruments. The five-year mission will also include a JunoCam to take the first pictures of Jupiter’s polar regions.
During a year-long experiment, Juno will map the magnetic field of Jupiter in a series of orbits around the poles, wrapping it in a net. This will help scientists determine the dynamics of Jupiter’s interior and of the three-dimensional structure of the polar magnetosphere. NASA animation shows how this will be achieved.
Jupiter’s Magnetic Field
Seattle marketing director Nick Risinger quit his job to travel the world in search of the perfect picture of the night sky. The 29-year-old amateur astronomer took a year and traveled from the southwestern U.S. to South Africa, taking thousands of digital color photos of all billions of stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
After months of painstaking work to stitch them all together, he released his work of art online a few weeks ago. Photopic Sky Survey is the largest true color composite image of the entire night sky as viewed from Earth.
His purpose is to get kids to look up in the sky more and wonder what’s out there. He admits that this giant 5,000 megapixel image can’t be used for scientific purposes but that wasn’t his goal.
Now the astrophotographer has built a website where you can see the photo and even interact and zoom in on particular stars at skysurvey.org.
]]>NASA engineers in California are working around the clock to put the finishing touches on the new Mars mega-rover before shipping it off to Florida for launch later this year. Wearing his clean suit, AP’s John Mone got an inside look at the vehicle named Curiosity.
After launch to the red planet at the end of 2011, Curiosity will be lowered on cables from a descent vehicle to explore Mars. Part of its mission is to determine if Mars ever housed life. The SUV-sized rover is better equipped than it’s two predecessors and even includes remote sensing equipment to analyze a soil sample with a laser from up to 30 feet away.
The much smaller Opportunity and Spirit ended their five-month exploratory mission of Mars’ surface years ago. First landing on opposite sides of the red planet in 2004, NASA lost communication with Spirit just over a year ago after it lost power in a Martian sand trap. Now hope is fading that the rover will power itself up and continue on its extended mission.
Arizona State University astronomer Jim Bell says the loss of Spirit’s communication came at exactly the wrong time because it was doing some very valuable science, even though it was immobile and tilting away from the sun.
Opportunity continues chugging away, feeding off the solar power that drives them during the Martian spring and summer. During the winter, the rovers hibernate and NASA engineers hope they will be able to re-establish communication when they awake.
Though Spirit’s odometer is stuck at 4.8 miles, Opportunity fully explored one crater and is on its way to another, having logged over 16 miles.
Curiosity is more than a remote controlled rover. It’s a roving science laboratory. The Mars Science Laboratory has four goals: determine if life ever arose on Mars, characterize the climate of Mars, characterize the geology of Mars, and prepare for human exploration.
This latest mission is part of a multi-decade series of missions to send probes to Mars. The data collected will eventually lead to a manned mission to Mars where a settlement could be established.
Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
]]>After a six-and-a-half-year and 93-million-mile journey the Messenger spacecraft has reached its target — Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.
After a tricky maneuver to use gravitational force to enter into the fast-spinning orbit of Mercury the probe began sending back the clearest and closest pictures of the little planet.
Messenger now begins a one-year mission of snapping about 75,000 pictures of Mercury’s surface, which is hot enough to melt iron but may contain ice in permanently shadowed craters that dot its exterior.
The only other time we’ve seen images from Mercury was 30 years ago, when another probe — Mariner — did a brief flyby. Then only blurry, low-resolution pictures captured a tiny bit of the planet’s surface.
Messenger’s second look at the first planet from the sun will be much more detailed and give scientists a treasure trove of new information to better understand Mercury and other planets in our solar system and beyond.
“We are already seeing Mercury with a new eyes and with eight sets of eyes.” — Eric Finnegan, Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins University
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Scientists say they have seen evidence of a manmade crater in images of comet Tempel 1 taken during a Valentine’s Day flyby. The crater was created by another NASA craft that visited Tempel 1 in 2005. Scientists found signs of scarring left by the Deep Impact mission.
This is the second time NASA has been able to intercept the same comet twice to study how it changes as it moves through its orbit, especially what happens when a comet–made of rock and ice–approaches the sun.
NASA says that all four of its science missions were successful. Three of the goals involved imaging while the fourth collected dust samples which will be brought back to Earth for analysis.
]]>What weighs less than three pounds, fits into a shoe box and can fly around the Earth? The answer is, a CubeSat. These are the newest generation of satellites that will help NASA conduct educational and science missions in low-Earth orbit.
NASA has selected 20 of these nanosatellites to fly as auxiliary cargo aboard rockets planned to launch in 2011 and 2012. The proposed CubeSats come from a high school in Virginia, universities across the country, NASA field centers and Department of Defense organizations.
]]>During winter most people feel lucky to see the sun. But even when it’s out and blazing across a crisp landscape we are only seeing the half that is pointed toward Earth. Even with high-powered, Earth-based telescopes we only see half of our star’s story at a given time.
Now for the first time ever, we can finally see the whole sun.
NASA just released the first 360-degree images showing the complete surface of the sun after it was captured by orbiting space telescopes. Thanks to Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory or STEREO satellites A and B which are now on opposite sides of the sun, we get the first ever 360-degree image of the sun, which looks remarkably like a navel orange.
This unprecedented look at the sun will last for about eight years. During that time we will be able to see what’s brewing on the side of the sun that’s not facing Earth.
Until now we’d have to wait 27 days for the sun to expose its other side. This will be useful for scientists studying coronal mass ejections, solar flares and other activity that have big implications here on Earth.
]]>An orbiting NASA telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, spotting more than 50 potential planets that appear to be in the habitable zone.
One star has at least six planets orbiting it in what astronomers say is the most densely packed cluster of planets they have seen to date.
]]>The Aurora Borealis is a cosmological phenomenon that originates 93 million miles away — on the sun. When solar winds carrying plasma come into contact with Earth’s magnetic shield a spectacular light show becomes visible.
Generally best seen in the higher latitudes of the U.S. and Canada during winter a powerful solar storm can send rainbow ribbons of light far to the south.
The auroras — called the Aurora Australis in the Southern Hemisphere — can be easily seen but some people also claim to hear them.
The frequency and intensity of the night light show depends on the activity level on the sun. Often called the sunspot cycle the sun sees increasing and decreasing sun spots over an 11 year period. Right now, the sun is waking from an unusually long quiet period so the Northern Lights are likely to get brighter before peaking in about 2014.
]]>Call it the astronomer helper. Since 1998, the giant digital camera that has been the heart of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has done many things. It has helped identify over half a billion new astronomical objects to study. Now the camera that captured the largest color image of sky is ready to retire.
That image, which would require 500,000 high-definition television sets to see at full resolution, only accounts for one-third of the sky. Yet the archiving and study of the images will keep scientists going for years.
A sampling of the largest color photo of the universe ever made
And the camera leaves a legacy in the form of an interactive website where professional and amateur stargazers can study the billions of images the camera snapped during its many years of service.
Now it’s heading to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. where it will become a museum attraction after making astronomy history. For 12 years scientists lugged the three-foot tall, 1,200-pound camera every night and attached it to a telescope that was scanning the night sky.
It will be replaced by an infrared camera to help scientists get a better picture of what’s going on in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
“It’s done a tremendous job for us and for the astronomy community as a whole.” — Mark Kleane, director of the project at Apache Point Observatory in Sun Spot, New Mexico.
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News that the stars have shifted alignment, astrologically speaking, is leaving Horoscope readers atwitter. Many are hearing that their sign might have changed and there is even a neglected 13th constellation. This is not news, however. Astronomers (and anyone who has taken an astronomy class) will know that the Earth wobbles on its axis thanks to the gravitational tug from the moon.
As the Earth moves through a 26,000 year precessional cycle it travels in an out of different constellations of stars. The Zodiac calendar was derived over 2,000 years ago when the sun traveled through 13 constellations. But even the ancient Babylonian–who conceived the Zodiac–opted for a cleaner, 12-symbol calendar divided into equal 30-degree segments.
Since a Minnesota astronomer made an offhand comment about the 13th symbol of the Zodiac last week astrologers and those who live by their horoscopes have been thrown a celestial curve ball.
To be astronomically accurate Ophiuchus needs to join the ranks of Taurus, Aquarius and the rest. Known as the snake annoyer, this fellow–who Greek mythology says was about to heal the world of its ills when Zeus struck him with a lightning bolt–is annoying the Zodiacally dependent. The new sign fits in between Scorpio and Sagittarius.
Astronomers consider astrology to be a pseudoscience and now they argue that the arbitrary decision in ancient times to remove one constellation from the list and the failure to take the shifting of the heavens into account proves the point. Never mind the part that there is no evidence of a relationship between the position of the sun on the day of your birth and your personality.
Parke Kunkle created quite a stir during an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last week. The 13th Zodiac sign has been widely reported but perhaps the stars aligned this time because the news traveled fast and before the weekend was over, a full controversy was well under way.
If you are keeping track and want to know if your horoscope changes in light of this new-old news, here’s the astronomical rundown of the Zodiac as it stands now.
Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17.
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.
]]>“Astrology tells us that the sun is in one position, whereas astronomy tells us it’s in another position,” — Joe Rao, Hayden Planetarium
Although it may have looked impressive to people in Arkansas, scientists say that Tuesday’s meteor sighting wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. A bright flash of light in the night sky panicked people in seven southern states, from Oklahoma to Florida. They all reported seeing a bright light. Some even say they saw flames.
But astronomers say it was just a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere. And it wasn’t even a big one. It probably started out the size of a four-door sedan car but as it entered our atmosphere it began burning material so fast that it was probably the size of a tennis ball when it got close enough to do any damage.
Bruce and Beverly Faulkner were turning into their driveway on Roberts Chapel Road near the Mississippi state line when they saw what looked like a big ball of fire. Video from WKRG in Mobile, Alabama.
WKRG.com News
Scientists say that every day about 100 meteors this size strike Earth but most of them hit in the ocean where there is no one nearby to see it. Reports are still flooding in about Tuesday’s close encounter with a rock from space.
]]>“Somewhere around the world it occurs every hour.” — Dr. Alexander Ruzick, Portland State University
A high-powered, space-based particle detector has found the first evidence of antimatter being produced naturally on Earth — in thunderstorms. We generally think of antimatter as cosmic rays that are produced by the sun or during a nuclear reaction. But it is used commonly in medical brain scans. Until recently, scientists had never captured any sign of natural antimatter being produced terrestrially.
At this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, astrophysicist Michael Briggs unveiled his findings. NASA’s Fermi telescope caught thunderstorms ejecting bursts of antimatter into space. Now scientists believe that the antimatter was created during a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF).
Gamma Ray Burst Sets off TGF along Earth's Magnetic Field during a Big Thunderstorm
The phenomenon has something to do with lightning although scientists don’t quite understand why antimatter is made in the process. But the process goes something like this.
A TGF produces high-speed electrons and positrons, (the antimatter equivalent of electrons) which then ride the arc of Earth’s magnetic field where they intercept the orbiting telescope.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has been circling the Earth for less than three years, is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately annihilate and transformed into gamma rays. In the case of thunderstorms, the gamma-ray burst is called a TGF.
While TGFs create beams of electrons and positrons, not all thunderstorms produce TGFs. Though most aren’t detected by the space telescope, NASA believes that about 500 TGFs occur every day around the world.
Most of the time, we think of antimatter as something that exists only in the deepest corners of the cosmos or in science fiction.
The universe is filled with matter — everything that has mass is matter. But scientists don’t know what happened to all the antimatter. Conventional wisdom holds that matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But when one comes into contact with the other, they annihilate instantly. Yet the universe is filled with matter but has no large source of antimatter.
Now we see there is at least one natural way to produce antimatter here on Earth — giant thunderstorms.
]]>According to an ongoing MSNBC.com poll here’s what almost 30,000 people think. (You can vote here).
13.2%
God created everything in seven days as the Bible says, no Big Bang necessary.
3,891 votes
23.6%
There is no God and the Big Bang was probably responsible for all creation.
6,987 votes
38.9%
I agree with the Pope. If there was a Big Bang, it was God’s work.
11,507 votes
24.3%
No one really knows and likely never will.
7,180 votes
The Pope said, “The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe. Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.”
The church has been trying to shed its anti-science label that first stuck when Pope Urban VIII accused Galileo of heresy for Adopting the Copernican view– against Bible teaching — that the Earth revolved around the sun. Since then most recent two popes have been reaching out to bridge gaps between the church and science.
Pope John Paul II said the theory of evolution didn’t contradict the teachings of the church. But rarely does a Pope comment on a scientific theory like the formation of the universe. By saying that the Big Bang got the universe rolling, the church is extending another olive branch to the scientific community.
But the church believes that the mind of God was responsible for the Big Bang and for our scientific understanding of how the universe began.
Pope Benedict said January 6 that some scientific theories were “mind limiting” because “they only arrive at a certain point … and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality …”
In 2009, a senior Vatican delegation visited CERN, the giant European atom smasher, where particles are smashed together at near light-speed in an effort to simulate conditions of the very first moments following the birth of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago.
“The Church never fears the truth of science, because we are convinced that all truth comes from God,” Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City’s governor, Told USA Today during that visit.
]]>First, physicist Dr. Michio Kaku looks back over the natural disasters that rocked the world and does some future disaster forecasting as well.
2010 started with a major earthquake that killed 200,000 and 3 million homeless in Haiti. Then later in the year a gigantic quake in Chile knocked the Earth off its axis and shortened our 24-hour day by one micro-second. Dr. Kaku insists that the planet is not trying to seek revenge on the human species, which has also been very busy this year.
Top Bio Stories
According to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 2010 was a big year for biology. Last year third-generation gene sequencers came to market which opened the door to generate DNA sequences as well as epigenetic information with single-molecule sensitivity in real time. This was also the year that synthetic biology became mainstream. J. Craig Venter created a bacteria from scratch, making Synthia the first fully synthetic, self-replicating cell.
2010 Also saw the gene patent wars heat up. In the Spring a New York court declared the patent on the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and 2 invalid. This case will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court before it’s finished but the Justice Department now supports the lower court’s ruling, saying that naturally occurring phenomena such as genes should not be subject to intellectual property laws.
Stem cells, aging and cancer rounded out a full year for biotech. After President Obama repealed former President Bush’s ban on research involving embryonic stem cells this year a federal court judge placed the future of embryonic stem cell research in limbo again.
After all the excitement about the anti-aging benefits of sirtuins, the chemical found in red wine, is still not well understood. A couple of drug candidates involving the activator and inhibitor are in clinical trials but haven’t made the medical strides they promised last year.
A cancer vaccine called Provenge made it to market this year to help treat prostate cancer. Several other treatments are in late stage clinical trials and could be ready next year.
Top Physics and Space stories
One of the most inspiring space endeavors to finish a rocky trip in 2010 was the Japanese Hayabusa mission. It rendezvoused with asteroid Itokawa in 2005 after being pummeled by a large solar flare in 2003. The goal was to gather dust from the asteroid and bring it back to Earth.
After all the technical mishaps Japanese researchers didn’t hold much faith that the probe would return with any dust. But after a triumphant return to Earth in June, a few specks of the asteroid were identified. Now scientists have another tool to understand the beginnings of our solar system.
But 2010 was all about space water. Remember water on Mars? That was so last year. This year confirmed water on the moon and on one of Saturn’s moons.
Saturn's Moon Enceladus, as viewed from NASA's Cassini Spacecraft
The ever-impressive NASA Cassini Equinox mission continues to blow us away with amazing imagery from the Saturnian system, including what appears to be liquid water shooting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The spacecraft has been orbiting the ringed gas giant since 2004, buzzing past its many moons and delivering some of the most detailed observations of this iconic planet we have ever seen.
But closer to home, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found that the moon not only has water ice stored in the shadows of its deepest and darkest craters, but there appears to be a lot of water just below the surface.
Discovery News asks how much water is there.
Writer Ian O’Neill says, “Bucketloads. 600 million gallons stashed away in 40 craters as measured by a NASA instrument that flew on board the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission. But how much water is 600 million gallons? That’s enough water to fulfill Seattle’s water needs for a whole year… or enough water to manufacture 588 billion bags of Cool Ranch Doritos (according to one commenter who obviously has way too much time on his hands).”
(Artist rendering of moon landing...not a real picture)
2010 was the year that President Obama canceled the Constellation manned space program and scrapped plans to go to the moon. But it was also the year that commercial space flight became a reality. Leading the way into space is Virgin Galactic. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are helping to privatize the space industry and will be fulfilling space services for NASA once the shuttle program is retired in early 2011.
But the biggest space story of the year was happening right here on Earth. Or rather under the Earth at the European nuclear science lab CERN. There particle physicists in search of the elusive Higgs Boson or God particle have successfully trapped antimatter for the first time.
Physicists capture antihydrogen for the first time in 2010
Capturing antihydrogen will allow physicists to study the beginning of the universe and try to figure out why if both matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang that matter is all that mattered for its formation.
Top Stories by Accident
Science makes some its greatest discoveries through accidental encounters and without looking. A few stories found their way to us that way this year, mostly from the animal kingdom.
The most distressing story resulted from pictures of oil covered seabirds struggling in the slimy Gulf of Mexico after the BP Horizon Deepwater oil rig explosion and disaster. Months later, clean up efforts are still underway and scientists are looking at long term consequences of the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
But across the world, a two-foot long isopod — that looks like something Hollywood cooked up for a sci-fi movie — hitched a ride to the surface aboard a deep sea submarine, giving the world a glimpse of this rare giant creature.
Deep Ocean Submarine Finds Giant Hitchiking Isopod
NASA’s Kepler mission positioned a powerful telescope outside Earth’s atmosphere last year to begin taking pictures of a section of space known to house about 200,000 stars. For Yale astronomers this presents an incredible opportunity — to discover which of those stars have planets orbiting them.
Debra Fischer is an expert planet hunter. She says, “The Kepler mission will likely quadruple the number of planets that have been found in the last 15 years.”
These exoplanets — as planets outside our solar system are called — also provide a great opportunity to enlist the services of the public to help sift through the massive amounts of data in search of new planets.
Dr. Fischer adds, “And it’s terrific that NASA is releasing this amazing data into the public domain.”
To help analyze data, astronomers created Planet Hunters, a website where anyone can help discover new planets. It is part of Zooniverse, an online set of citizen science projects relating to space and weather.
Kevin Schawinksi, one of the founders of Galaxy Zoo, the first Zooniverse project says with the help of the Internet the project has assemble the largest distributed supercomputer dedicated to pattern recognition.
He says, “We’ve linked up over 300,000 human brains and turned it into a science machine.”
The whole Zooniverse is made of the following projects: (WARNING: Participation may be fun)
Planet Hunters
The Milky Way Project
Old Weather
Moon Zoo
Galaxy Zoo: Hubble
Solar Stormwatch
Galaxy Zoo: Mergers
Galaxy Zoo: Supernovae
A NASA probe orbiting Saturn has spotted what scientists think is a giant ice volcano on one of its moons, Titan. Astronomers believe they have discovered a cryovolcano — a volcano that expels water and ammonia or methanol instead of molten rock.
For years astronomers felt that if any sort of life was living somewhere in our solar system it would likely be on one of Saturn’s moons. Now Titan is looking like a better candidate for some form of life with the discovery of this new ice volcano.
]]>A celebrated team of planet hunters were back peering into the cosmos only two months after announcing to the world they had discovered the most earth-like planet to date. Called the “Goldilocks” planet because it’s not too hot or too cold but rather just right, Gliese 581g has sparked a little cosmological controversy over who found it first.
The red dwarf star Gliese 581 is located in the constellation Libra about 20.3 light years from Earth. Since 2007, astronomers have found six planets orbiting this star. But the recently announced discovery by Keck Observatory astronomers in Hawaii seems to be the most Earth-like planet found to date.
The discovery of Gliese 581g is located between two previously discovered planets on either end of what astronomers call the habitable zone. Scientists will get a better look at the star in the next few months when our sun moves out of the way. Right now astronomers think the new planet has a 37-day orbit but they need more telescope time to see what else is out there.
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LHC Machine in tunnel at CERN, photo by Maximilien Brice
Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is smashing atoms in hopes of recreating the moments just following the big bang. And, in the process scientists are learning more about particle physics than ever before. They are even close to capturing the elusive Higgs boson, also known as the God particle.
Now the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN is facing something far less elusive—budget cuts. And those proposed cuts could slow down science, jeopardize the project and prevent important discoveries from being made.
Europe is going on a spending diet. In late August a meeting at CERN weighed the best way to proceed in the growing climate of fiscal austerity.
There the Director-general proposed cutting just over $430 million from the program between 2011 and 2015.
A spokesman for the research facility says, “Management felt it could slow things down without compromising the future.”
But Gianni Deroma, the head of CERN’s 2,200-member staff association says that deep cuts could lead to a repeat of the 14-month shutdown shortly after the large hadron collider went online in 2008.
“Budgetary cuts are going to slow down our accelerators.” — Gianni Deroma, President of the CERN staff association
In the last few months, scientists say the LHC is setting new milestones with the amount of data being collected from crashing particle beams at nearly the speed of light.
Any interruption to the progress, especially as the program ramps up its accelerators to full power, could pose a problem.
Deroma says, “Budgetary cuts are going to slow down our accelerators.”
On Labor Day, CERN officials released a statement saying that all nine particle accelerators would be put on ice for a year, beginning in 2012.
Director-general Rolf Heuer admits it will now take a little longer to answer some of these big scientific questions.
A planned shutdown of the LHC in 2012 was already in the works before this week’s announcement. The purpose of that was to upgrade the accelerator so it can reach its full power potential and dive deeper into the unknown corners of science. But that upgrade was intending to take just one of the nine accelerators offline for that year. Now all accelerators will sit idle, allowing scientists to catch up on their data analysis. And a new experiment set to begin in 2015 might also get pushed back a year or two, according to officials.
After the Greek debt crisis this summer, Europe is feeling the economic pinch and science is among the latest casualties.
Science has been somewhat of a sacred cow in Europe, which allows for expensive, internationally-funded mega projects, including the large hadron collider at CERN.
Other projects are also facing deep cuts.
According to the Washington Post, the new coalition government in Britain is leading the European austerity charge while other member nations like Italy and Spain just have no more money for science.
This threatens several planned projects.
Aerial View of Britain's Diamond Light Source, courtesy of Diamond Light Source
ISIS Muon Spectrometer, courtesy of ISIS Neutron Source
The Post reports that Britain may not be able to commit to another, more powerful telescope in Chile that can discern the atmosphere of distant planets. British officials also warn that planned science cuts could force the closure of either the Diamond Light source particle accelerator or the ISIS neutron source.
Germany has been covering shortfalls from other countries to maintain the European Space Agency. But the organization that runs the International Space Station is set to cut administrative costs by 25 percent. And it is unclear whether other European governments will agree to extend funding of the space station through 2020.
Scientists at CERN are particularly frustrated by the new budget climate, especially since they can practically taste one of the biggest achievements in atomic physics—the ability to trap a particle of antimatter long enough to study it.
Leading antimatter physicist Michael Doser says if that project goal isn’t met before the year-long shut down that 12 months may seem like an eternity.
]]>Pluto may be out a full-fledged member of the planet pack, but NASA officials said they’ve discovered two new planets for the first time outside our solar system.
The two new worlds circling a nearby star are hot and gassy so incapable of sustaining life as we know it. While the discovery isn’t terribly exciting for alien hunters, the science that allowed the discovery is pretty exciting.
Scientists confirmed the discovery using the transit timing method to capture radial velocity observations conducted at the W.M Keck Observatory in Hawaii. This is the first time scientists have found two planets in a system around the the same star.
William Borucki, the principal investigator for NASA’s Kepler program which made the discovery, says the transit timing method used will allow scientists to find even Earth-sized planets. Right now, most exoplanets are the size of Jupiter or larger. The two new planets are about 3-4 times the size of Earth and rotate around their sun every 19 and 38 days, respectively.
]]>“We’re announcing the discovery of two Saturn-size planets, which we’re calling Kepler 9B and Kepler 9C,” Holman said. And there’s evidence of a third planet, he said — a much smaller one. Its diameter appears to be just 50 percent larger than Earth’s. If it is confirmed, it would have a radius of about 1.5 times the radius of Earth.” — Matthew Holman, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Citizen scientists Chris and Helen Colvin from Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt from Mainz, Germany participate in Einstein@Home, a distributed computing program that involves a quarter of a million volunteers worldwide.
They donated their idle computer time to analyze data gathered by the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Without even realizing it they discovered a fast rotating pulsar.
The citizen scientists remotely join National Science Foundation’s Lisa-Joy Zgorski along with Einstein@Home director Bruce Allen and Cornell astronomer and Arecibo researcher Jim Cordes for a lengthy (38:47) discussion. Their findings are published in the online journal Science Express.
]]>Solar eruptions send gases directly toward earth but scientists say they pose no direct threat to us.
But for science, it was quite a spectacular cosmic display. On August 1, a large sunspot created a coronal mass ejection from the northern hemisphere of the sun. This discharge of gas and particles on the Earth-facing side of the sun began racing across the solar system toward Earth.
The magnetic field around the planet protects us from the harmful effects and allows us to see stunning colors in the night sky, also known as the Northern Lights at latitudes as far south as Wisconsin and Iowa.
After a very quiet period where the sun showed little activity it has now awoken and is creating a lot for scientists to see. In October 2006, a pair of satellites started orbiting to give NASA a three dimensional look at solar flares and CMEs that head toward Earth. Here’s a CBC story shortly after the launch of the stereo satellites.
NASA includes a full explanation of the event here. August 1, 2010 CME event
]]>An unmanned Russian space capsule carrying supplies to the International Space Station failed in a docking attempt. As a result, NASA says the Progress vehicle continued on its trajectory and glided safely past the space station.
At the time of the communication loss, the vehicle was approximately 3 km from the station. The unexpected cancellation was related to the KURS automated docking system. Russian ground teams are still analyzing data.
The ground team will attempt another docking on July 4.
]]>President Obama unveiled his new plan(PDF) for NASA. After scrapping the manned space program Constellation last fall the President pushed back plans to return to the moon and send a manned mission to Mars. This announcement and policy reversal struck some stargazers and scientists as disappointing.
The President’s plan reverses former President Bush’s plan for a new moon shot and focuses on private space flight, international cooperation and near-earth environmental observation.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke says the new space policy will be good for business and inspire new jobs in the burgeoning private space industry.
“This policy is about energizing competitive domestic industries through innovation, entrepreneurship and technological leadership in space. It recognizes the sea changes occurring in the space community, with federal budgets tightening at the same time that commercial space capabilities and markets are gaining momentum.”– Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke
The new plan includes robotic probes to the sun, a manned mission to an asteroid and to Mars. It also puts new emphasis on near-Earth monitoring satellites to study climate and other environmental changes.
“Fifty years after the creation of NASA, our goal is no longer just a destination to reach. Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn and operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time, ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite. And in fulfilling this task, we will not only extend humanity’s reach in space—we will strengthen America’s leadership here on Earth.”—President Barack Obama
Falcon Rocket, courtesy of SpaceX
Goals for Space Science, Exploration, and Discovery
The Administrator of NASA shall:
•Set far-reaching exploration milestones. By 2025, begin crewed missions beyond the moon, including sending humans to an asteroid. By the mid-2030s, send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth
•Continue the operation of the International Space Station (ISS), in cooperation with its international
partners, likely to 2020 or beyond, and expand efforts to: utilize the ISS for scientific, technological, commercial, diplomatic, and educational purposes; support activities requiring the unique attributes of humans in space; serve as a continuous human presence in Earth orbit; and support future objectives in human space exploration
•Seek partnerships with the private sector to enable safe, reliable, and cost-effective commercial spaceflight capabilities and services for the transport of crew and cargo to and from the ISS
•Implement a new space technology development and test program, working with industry, academia, and international partners to build, fly, and test several key technologies that can increase the capabilities, decrease the costs, and expand the opportunities for future space activities
•Conduct research and development in support of next-generation launch systems, including new U.S. rocket engine technologies
•Maintain a sustained robotic presence in the solar system to: conduct scientific investigations of other planetary bodies; demonstrate new technologies; and scout locations for future human missions
•Continue a strong program of space science for observations, research, and analysis of our Sun, solar system, and universe to enhance knowledge of the cosmos, further our understanding of fundamental natural and physical sciences, understand the conditions that may support the development of life, and search for planetary bodies and Earth-like planets in orbit around other stars
•Pursue capabilities, in cooperation with other departments, agencies, and commercial partners,
to detect, track, catalog, and characterize near-Earth objects to reduce the risk of harm to humans from an unexpected impact on our planet and to identify potentially resource-rich planetary objects.
Dutch professor and physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf says the idea of black holes falls right in between the two largest theories in physics–general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity describes large structures in the universe while quantum mechanics describes atoms and elementary particles.
At this year’s World Science Festival in New York, Dr. Stephen Hawking joined the audience as Dr. Dijkgraaf gave the New York audience a Black Holes 101 lesson.
“Can a black hole be the size of a particle? To answer the question you have to marry the two theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.” — Robbert Dijkgraaf
Later Dr. Hawking and his daughter Lucy sat down with Diane Sawyer at ABC News for an interview, ranging from the mysteries of the universe to the definition of God.
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NASA launched a new satellite, called WISE, which stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. It’s mission? Find asteroids or comets that could potentially hit Earth and map the whole sky by October. KMGH reporter Corey Christiansen has the story.
NASA Medley of WISE Images
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
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Astronauts can order books on Amazon or watch movies on Netflix, even while orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station. NASA just hooked up the Internet last week and already the astronauts have been tweeting up a storm.
NASA also unveiled live streaming aboard the space station, starting today.
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Here’s your chance to make scientific history. NASA is inviting the public to help choose sites on Mars to point a high-powered camera as part of a visual survey of the Red Planet.
The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shot over 13,000 images already. Now NASA is opening up the opportunity to the public.
Use the new HiWish online tool to study the Mars map, decide what would be a worth target and why. Then submit your suggestion to the mission and wait to see if it gets selected.
The yellow dot pinpoints the landing site of Viking Lander 2 on Utopia Planitia. Viking 2 landed within the ejecta of 65-mile wide Mie Crater.
REALscience submitted a target suggestion — the southern crater wall of the Mie Crater, seen above. This giant crater, likely made by a big asteroid or comet impact, could reveal clues to early Mars and probably hides some of its icy secrets in the shadowy part of the crater.
]]>The school bus sized chunk of space rock hurtled past Earth last week and a Utah astronomer caught the dot on video. It didn’t get dangerously close but did come within 80,000 miles.
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The head of the Russian space agency surprised scientists recently when he announced that his country needs to start figuring out how to deflect a big asteroid that will pass very close to Earth in about 20 years.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004 NASA thought there was a slight chance that the big rock could hit Earth when it passes by in 2029 and again in 2036. But studies since then have allowed scientists to rule out a direct hit in 2029 and they say it is highly unlikely that the country-busting asteroid will pose a threat in 2036 either.
With so many asteroids floating out in deep space, some do pose a threat to Earth. And, now scientists are going to take a closer look at ways to nudge dangerous rocks away from our planet.
Update: The asteroid known as 2010 AL30 zipped past Earth on January 13, staying about 80,000 miles away. But a Utah astronomer did capture the whole transit on video.
]]>The Hubble Space Telescope snaps new images of the oldest galaxies ever seen. A senior scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains to WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz and Simon Constable how he did it-and what it means.
The new infrared camera that was loaded onto the Hubble Telescope earlier this year snapped these photos with an extraordinarily long shutter speed time — four days. And with this new capability astronomers can begin to see 13 billion years back in time to when the universe was just 600 million years old.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2014 to replace Hubble and to peer back even further in time, when some of these barely visible galaxies were just forming.
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Composite image of Pluto, courtesy Eliot Young (SwRI) et al., NASA
For three years, Pluto–the ninth planet–has been given the cold shoulder by the astronomy community, which demoted it to dwarf planet in 2006.
What is it about Pluto that tugs at our heartstrings?
MSNBC.com Science Editor Alan Boyle explores our fascination with Pluto in his new book, The Case for Pluto.
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