Science Art: Nebulae in the Pleiades, by the Yerkes Observatory
Click to embiggen This is an old photograph taken through the largest refracting telescope (no mirrors, just a really big lens) in the world, the […]
astronomy
Darker than Nemesis: Was it dark matter that killed the dinosaurs?
Nature tries to see what was behind the comet that killed the dinosaurs – and other mass extinctions that seem to happen every 35 million […]
Science Art: An X-class Solar Flare, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
A scientific visualization from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio, who have this to say about it: An X-class solar flare erupted on the left side […]
Largest space telescope is ready to… observe.
PhysOrg has the skinny on ESA’s Gaia telescope and its quest to catalogue a billion stars: Gaia will be able to discern objects up to […]
SONG: “The Impossible One”
SONG: “The Impossible One” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Earth-mass exoplanet is no Earth twin,” Nature, 6 January […]
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 […]
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 […]