Programming computers to find Antarctic meteorites.
Science magazine explains how that big southerly continent has become the best place to find meteorites, and how those ancient fallen rocks offer priceless clues […]
astronomy
Something in space is getting really bright three times an hour.
Science Daily reports on a deep space mystery that the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research is trying to figure out – namely, what this […]
Science Art: Section of a Comet’s Path, 1933
This illustration, from Natural History Magazine, shows the way the comet of 1843 (or Comet 1843, if you prefer) reached its closest point to the […]
Science Art: Comet observations from Libra astronomica, y philosophica by Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, 1690.
I can’t make out exactly what this is illustrating. My Spanish is barely good enough to tell, in section 309 of Carlos de Siguenza y […]
SONG: Fast Blue Optical Transients
SONG: “Fast Blue Optical Transients”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News 13 Dec 2021, “The cosmic ‘Cow’ may have produced a new neutron star or black […]
Bright and really heavy: What “The Cow” caused in deep space.
Science News shares an explanation for an intense puzzle that’s had astronomers searching for solutions since June 2018. Now, astrophysicist DJ Pasham and his team […]
Science Art: Exocomets Around Beta Pictoris – Artist View, 2013.
This is a painting for NASA of the formation of a distant solar system, used to illustrate the article “Formation of the Solar System: Birth […]
Science Art: Total Eclipse of the Sun (from a painting by Kranz), 1897
This is the frontispiece to A New Astronomy for Beginners, by David P. Todd, an 1897 textbook on the latest astronomical breakthroughs. The passage on […]
SONG: Curling at the Edges
SONG: “Curling at the Edges”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science, 1 Aug 19, “The Milky Way is more warped than astronomers thought,” as used in the […]
Our galaxy is warped. Just a little.
Science reports that the Milky Way isn’t quite as flat, edge-on, as we thought. It’s got a slight but detectable S-curve, like a piece of […]
Why haven’t we found aliens? Maybe because the most common star type is lousy at sustaining life.
Inverse looks at a potential answer to the puzzle of why, in a universe filled with so many stars, we haven’t found any evidence of […]
Betelgeuse burped.
New Scientist explains that reason Betelgeuse recently appeared to dim in the sky was that it was expelling gas: Miguel Montargès at Sorbonne University in […]
Farfarout is as far, far out as you can get (and still be in the Solar System).
NSF’s NOIRLab looks at a body that the Gemini Observatory spotted in 2018 and that astronomers working at Hawaii’s Subaru telescope nicknamed Farfarout. Now, they’ve […]
Alpha Centauri’s possible planet: a warm Neptune, a very large Earth.
Scientific American wonders whether we’ve just spotted a new planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, our sun’s nearest neighbor. If it’s there, that potential planet is in […]
Science Art: Perihelion Parts of Orbits of the August and November Meteor-showers
Click to embiggen Where the meteors come from in August and November, as pictured in A new astronomy for beginners, 1898, as found on archive.org. […]