SONG: Collisions
SONG: “Collisions” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on BBC, 2 Sep 2020, “Black holes: Cosmic signal rattles Earth after 7 billion years”, as used in the […]
astronomy
Phosphine gas means there might be life on Venus.
Science News explains the strange chemistry that’s behind the new discovery, and why it means that Venus can get added to the same list as […]
A black hole bigger than a hundred suns.
BBC peers into deepest space to find the origins of a gravity “shockwave” from 7 billion years ago that was still strong enough to shake […]
We just had the closest asteroid fly-by ever.
Space.com shares what we learned about how Earth’s gravity has affected 2020QG, a car-sized asteroid that became the closest to approach Earth without slamming into […]
Supernovas have caused mass extinctions. (As if asteroids weren’t bad enough.)
Science Daily reports on radioactivity research that has found evidence that at least one mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused not by an […]
SONG: Campfires
SONG: “Campfires” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Science Daily, 16 July 2020, “Solar Orbiter’s first images reveal ‘campfires’ on the Sun”, as used in the […]
Ceres shines brightest where there’s salt water under the surface.
Science Daily looks to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the dwarf planet Ceres spins – and may serve as a vast reservoir […]
Science Art: The many faces of the Sun from Solar Orbiter’s EUI and PHI instruments, 2020
Click to embiggen It’s my mother’s birthday today. Here, nine glorious suns for a Leo. They were photographed by the European Space Agency’s Extreme Ultraviolet […]
We’ve got a new way to predict solar flares.
Science Daily shares research from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, that gives us a new handle on predicting when the worst solar flares will […]
Science Art: Phases of the Moon, 1844.
Click to embiggen The moon is a body in space that reflects the light of our sun back at us. Which might sound a little […]
Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]
There are campfires on the Sun.
Science Daily shares some of the discoveries from the first images of the Solar Orbiter mission – including the presence of “mini-flares” that astronomers have […]
Radio telescopes have spotted four very strange… things.
LiveScience has more on the entirely new, bright-edged circular objects, the so-called “odd radio circles” or ORCs that astronomers are struggling to figure out: In […]
Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg. Not a comet. Not an asteroid. Hydrogen.
Scientific American has an unexpected explanation for the mysterious interstellar object dubbed “‘Oumuamua” that drifted into our solar system in 2017. Maybe the monolithic object […]