Science Art: Solar Interstellar Neighborhood, by Andrew Z. Colvin
Click to embiggen. Hi, neighbors. Map found on Wikimedia Commons. It’s part of a larger series showing where we are relative to everything. Everything.
astronomy
We’ve got a neighbor (in Alpha Centauri).
The nearest solar system to ours, National Geographic confirms, actually has a planet in it: The planet orbits very close to Alpha Centauri B—the smaller […]
Amateur astronomers find planet with four suns.
BBC has one for the planet hunters – or, indeed, for Planethunters.org, which has just discovered a truly bizarre solar system using a pretty offbeat […]
Once-in-a-lifetime comet comes around.
Watch the skies next year, warns Scientific American, or you’ll miss something you’ll never see again: As it flares out of the distant Oort Cloud, […]
Don’t tell DeBeers: Diamond twice the size of Earth found.
AsiaOne has more on the new planet made of hot, compressed carbon: The rocky planet, called ‘55 Cancri e’, orbits a sun-like star 40 light […]
Buddhist “Iron Man” found by Nazis is from space.
Once again, New Scientist delivers a headline I can’t beat. A statue the Nazis brought to Germany from Tibet has been found to have been […]
Titan is making DNA. Or could be.
The Daily Galaxy says Saturn’s big moon, Titan, could be a life-making machine: Saturn’s moon Titan has many of the components for life without liquid […]
Science Art: Orbits of the Planets by Asa Smith, 1850
This hypnotic image seems to have traveled out of Asa Smith’s book, into David Rumsey’s cartography collection and from there into a Zazzle poster collection […]
Science Art: Irregular satellites of Saturn by Cocu.
Click to embiggen Saturn has more moons than many give it credit for. Wikipedia user Cocu knows, though. He writes: Orbits of the irregular satellites […]
Solar balloon wins NASA award
A new day is dawning, SpaceDaily.com has announced, with a sunny space balloon rising to new heights: The “High Energy Replicated Optics to Explore the […]
They found threads of dark matter
…spinning between clusters of galaxies. That’s how the Christian Science Monitor describes the remarkable discovery of the scaffolding that holds together the universe: Three-dimensional astronomical […]
Why don’t we know what blew up in 774?
Nature asks a question that gets more peculiar the more one considers it. A Japanese researcher looking at tree rings from two ancient cedars found […]
According to Public Enemy, I should now be very afraid…
National Geographic unveils Kepler’s latest discovery – a really black planet: Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant […]
A zeppelin for hunting space rocks.
No, McClatchy ain’t making this up. Members of SETI and NASA are using an airship to seek traces of meteorites – and, possibly, alien life: […]
Science Art: Where the sun sets twice, by NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hunt
Click to embiggen This is an image of a transit of Kepler 16. What that means is that, from where we’re sitting, it looks like […]