SONG: Under Orion’s Arms
SONG: “Under Orion’s Arms”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: SPACE.com, 3 January 2020, “Will Bright Star Betelgeuse Finally Explode? A Look at the Dimming Red Giant in […]
astronomy
So Orion’s shoulder might be about to explode.
Something’s going on up there. SPACE.com actually says it’s a good idea to watch the skies “just in case” Betelgeuse is about to blow up: […]
Last Thursday, a “city-killer” asteroid buzzed by Earth, and we had no clue it was coming.
LiveScience was among the outlets breathlessly describing our close encounter with a giant speeding space-rock that took us all by surprise: Ranging in size from […]
Science Art: Galileo’s Moon Phases, 1616.
Click to embiggen slightly Galileo drew pictures of the moon – pictures that included imperfections on the surface. The moon, he observed, had texture. Hills […]
Science Art: Map IX: The Constellations of June and July by William Peck.
Click to embiggen An image of the summer sky (in the Northern Hemisphere) by William Peck, F.R.A.S., from his book, The constellations and how to […]
Weird water might exist across the universe – as a supersolid.
Wired reveals a new way to look at the stuff life relies on – and gives a reason why it could be a lot more […]
Science Art: Chandra X-ray Observatory close-up of the core of the M87 galaxy, by NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen
Click to embiggen This is not the famous Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) black hole image that you’ve probably seen by now. It’s a visualization of […]
We’ve got a photograph of a supermassive black hole.
Science News has a historic snapshot that it took a long while to take – and from a long, long way away: A world-spanning network […]
Science Art: Four views of the Alvan Clark & Sons workshop…, from Scientific American, Sep. 24, 1887
Here, an astronomical family is building a 36-inch refractor telescope known as the Great Lick Refractor in the 1880s. It’s named for James Lick, an […]
Science Art: Ancient Roman time keeping, sun path hora by Darekk2
Click to embiggen A chart of the sky, showing how Ancient Romans measured time in the year 8 CE – meaning, what hora it was […]
The Hubble is broken, and the gov’t shutdown means no one’s fixing it.
Nature shows us how politics is blinding science: Hubble’s mission operations are based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where most employees […]
Science Art: Tiny planets….
Click to embiggen Something appropriate for the season and, maybe, for Comet Wirtanen… from nemfrog: Tiny planets, visitors from other worlds, become white-hot and are […]
SONG: Black Star (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Black Star” (penitential cover) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This has no scientific source; it’s a penitential cover for being late for a song a month […]
Solar flares set off underwater mines in the Vietnam war – and we just figured it out.
Popular Science can reveal the disturbing solution to a minor military mystery with the story of how space weather made a bunch of military mines […]
Looks like real-life astronomers found Spock’s home planet right where it was supposed to be.
Nature asks the question raised by University of Florida astronomers: how did Roddenberry know there’d be a hot, heavy, but Earth-like planet orbiting 40 Eridani?: […]