Earth-like planets might not be so Earth-like… as gassy Earth shows.
Nature examines he implications of a planet that *should* be a twin to Earth, but isn’t – because it’s a gassy Earth-sized planet: Not only […]
astronomy
Science Art: The Kepler Orrery II
Click to view animation. A visualization of every solar system discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope as of February 2012 – that’s 885 plaents in […]
The impossible planet.
SEN has us baffled by a recently discovered planet that shouldn’t be there: The new world is the farthest out from its home star of […]
Exomoon spotted. Maybe. (And, well, it probably won’t happen again.)
Nature celebrates (sort of) a discovery that makes it just a smidge more likely that there’s life somewhere else out there – a little blip […]
Science Art: Theoria Lunae from Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius.
Click to embiggen In 1660, Dutch-German cartographer Andreas Cellarius created an atlas of the stars. This map shows how people thought the moon moved in […]
Science Art: Cumulative Absorption Spectrum, Hubble Telescope by NASA/STScI.
This is how spectroscopy works – how you can tell what’s floating around in space even when you can’t see it, only light that passes […]
Wet planets – we’ve got their names.
Science Daily has Hubble’s latest clue to finding life elsewhere in space. The telescope has found five distant, watery worlds: The five planets — WASP-17b, […]
Science Art: Solar System by Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum
In the book Mysterium Comsmographicum, Johannes Kepler started mapping out how planets worked. The idea here is that the solar system is structured according to […]
SONG: “The Hardest of Carbon”
SONG: “The Hardest of Carbon” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Diamond drizzle forecast for Saturn and Jupiter,” Nature, […]
Remember that exploding meteorite? They just found a half-ton chunk of it.
That space rock that blew up over the Urals (and was captured on a few different cameras)… well, BBC reports that they’ve just hauled a […]
Sooty, with a chance of diamonds.
Pennies from Heaven? P’shaw! Nature looks over the vastly overvalued weather report on Saturn and Jupiter: …Mona Delitsky of California Specialty Engineering in Flintridge, and […]
Utopia or catastrophe: How long do civilizations live? (And how can we find another?)
Those questions were raised in, of all publications, Astrobiology Magazine. Why are astrobiologists so concerned about human culture? Because if civilizations can really die out, […]
A Super-Earth (with Plasma Water Skies).
Space.com reveals the weirdness of water – neither ice, nor liquid, nor vapor – found on a faraway planet: Astronomers have determined that the atmosphere […]
These guys are tracking the Space Station with coat hangers.
GigaOm has a great DIY project for space fans: Signals picked up by the antenna, which is made of a 10-foot wooden board and metal […]
Not solid, liquid, gas or plasma. Nuclear pasta.
Space.com looks hungrily to the stars… neutron stars, where a whole new form of matter makes seriously strange space spaghetti: A rare state of matter […]