The Hubble zooms in on a globular cluster called Messier 9. Click image to enrapture.
The Hubble zooms in on a globular cluster called Messier 9. Click image to enrapture.
The Cassini spacecraft wandered near Saturn’s icy moon Rhea last week and grabbed some eye candy of the frozen satellite. [Read more…]
Astronomers are watching the sun closely after it released a powerful flares Tuesday, some of the ejecta may be heading close to home: [Read more…]
A new study finds strong evidence that an asteroid or comet hit the earth about 13,000 years ago and may have played a role in a dramatic climate shift around that time. A 16 member team from UC Santa Barbara has found nanodiamonds and other artifacts of the theoritical impact which fits like a glove with a sudden cold snap at the end of the most recent ice-age called the Younga Dryas: [Read more…]
Mars is in opposition, meaning it’s closest approach to earth and it is glorious! But for people trapped by city lights with no large telescope, have you heard about SLOOH? What’s that you ask? Only the coolest online streaming telescope in the world, because you control it! [Read more…]
Sign the petition for Pluto’s encounter with New Horizons to be honored with a new stamp
From the scientific vantage of medicine to the politics of abortion, low cost accessible contraception makes sense all the way around. Healthier women with more money to spend, fewer abortions and unwed mothers. But conservatives and a tiny handful of democratic enablers, who can’t seem to read polls or just don’t give a goddamn, continue to dream of the Republic of Gilead:
Any women who votes for these bozos is probably too far gone. For men, the last time birth control was illegal, there was no such thing as genetic testing and court mandated child support. Then again it wouldn’t take a theocracy long to strip those laws and ban genetic testing. After all, it’s the always women’s fault, and babies are always a blessing … just ask any Handmaid.
Most of my male conservative buddies pretend not to care about the issue while whining that we’re not going along and playing solely on their rhetorical terms. But I got a call from another reliable GOP voter this week — after Rush’s tirade — and herfirst three words were, “You were right.”
NASA scientists are closely monitoring the sun as it heads into the most active phase in its sunspot cycle. The sun’s magnetic poles flip every 22 years, meaning the field strength maxes and wanes in each polar hemisphere a little over once a decade. Each 11 year cycle produces large flares and other phenomena, and if the earth happens to lay in the path of a big one it can cause problems. That’s what happened in 1859, when large flare disrupted early communication networks and lit up skies as far south as Jamaica with rare, ghostly aurora. If something like the Carrington Event were to happen today, the consequences could be even more catastrophic: [Read more…]
Titan has always excited planetary astronomers and science-fiction writers. For good reason. It’s a romantic place, orbiting lovely Saturn, the ringed celebrity of the solar system, and its the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Titan has an active surface carved by wind and rain dotted with oceans and rivers where natural gas falls in big fat droplets and volcanoes spew water like lava. In fact Titan is composed of so much icy stuff that if it were as close to the sun as Mars about half the moon would evaporate into a giant puffball, by some guestimates growing to half the size of Uranus, before the volatile gases took flight on the solar wind and blew away in a massive cometary tail. It would make for a spectacular sight!
But those icy layers offer a possible alien refuge for life, and to understand a hypothetical Titanian biosphere we don’t have to look into deep space for evil green slime, we only have to look beneath our own oceans for exotic microbes and bizarre metazoans. [Read more…]
NASA’s SOHO mission team has posted some beautiful images of our local star under the fitting header The Sun as Art with descriptive captions. Some of the images have been reworked, but most are simply composites or color filters. They’re remarkable, and a reminder of the enormous power of a massive hydrogen fusion reactor (And potential energy source) pumping out 4 trillion terawatts a mere 93 million miles away. Now if only I could find the original slideshow link … [Read more…]
Eta Carinae, 7th sun in its constellation, is not your ordinary star, or even a familiar crusty old red-giant. At the heart of the gorgeous double lobed cloud are at least two massive stars, and one of them is one the most unusual kinds of stellar objects in the universe: an unstable, misshapen blue-white colossus that could burst open and shower this section of the galaxy with deadly gamma rays any day. It almost happened once before, in 1843, when the object suddenly became the second brightest star in the sky for a few weeks. What’;s neat is astronomers have now found a way to study that original light, once thought long gone at the speed of 300,000 KM/sec: [Read more…]