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Well ladies and gentlemen, you’d better fasten your seat belts, because we’re in for quite a spin. The Milky Way is spinning a bit faster than scientists believed; with about 100.000 miles / hour that is. What does that mean, basically?? Well, we’re faster, heavier, and there’s a bigger chance that we’ll collide with… something. […]
Recently, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered no more, no less than 12 pulsars, and it also detected gamma ray pulse from 18 others. These findings are forcing scientists to rethink what we know about dying stars, as they totally underestimated the power of these stellar cilinders. “We know of 1,800 pulsars, but until Fermi […]
Astronomy & Astrophysics has published spectroscopic observations of one of the hottest stars discovered so far – a white dwarf called KPD 0005+5106. The observations were made using the space-based Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), showing that the temperature can reach 200 000 K at the surface of the star. Temperatures can get so high that […]
Two of the biggest and most impressive stars from our galaxy have been “surprised” in some really amazing poses by the the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope. Until now, a cloud of mystery surrounded them, but these pictures in greater detail than ever before. The pair of colossal stars (named WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the […]
Beta Pictoris (β Pic / β Pictoris) is part of a group of hot young stars that have the same age and motion through stage. It’s best known for the fact that it’s surrounded by a dusty ‘debris’ disc. This disc is a result of collisions between planetary ’embryos’ and asteroids, or other such objects. […]
A while ago we were a bit worried about the future of Hubble, but it seems the people at NASA managed to once again do an amazing job, so the most well known telescope is back in business, and up to big things actually. Just a few days after it was brought back online, Hubble […]
As a proud student in geophysics, I can tell you that opal is hydrated silicon dioxide mineral with many astounding properties, but it’s also water hydrated. Since water hydrated minerals have been found on Mars we are led to the logic conclusion that when these minerals was formed, there was water on Mars. Opals have […]
According to Murphy’s Law, all great discoveries happen by mistake. This is not the case here, but scientists had the opportunity to observe something they weren’t expecting at all. Astronomers at the University of California-Santa Cruz had the fortune of witnessing the birth of a young galaxy. They were the first to observe the onset […]
Chandrayaan-1 is the name of the first mission India has ever launched towards the moon, and it was launches succesfully in the morning of October 22, from inside their country. This started the journey which will also imply a major manoeuvre – the lunar orbit insertion – about 2 weeks from the launch date. After […]
Despite the fact that they have worked round the clock for fixing Hubble, it seems NASA engineers have once again hit a snag and they’re currently trying to figure out what is the next step. The telescope stopped sending pictures three weeks ago, and at first it was believed that it wouldn’t take that long […]
A very small asteroid exploded over the continent of Africa this week, confirming the prediction of astronomers. Despite the fact that nobody has seen and photographed the asteroid due to the fact that it entered in a very remote area, it was detected with an infrasound array in Kenya; it exploded without striking the Earth. […]
Using the RHESSI spacecraft, scientists managed to calculate the Sun’s roundness with a level of precision that surpasses anything of this type that has been attempted before. They found that the star which the Eart rotates around is not quite a sphere, but it has a thin “cantaloupe skin”. This skin causes the equatorial radius […]
Chinese researchers confirmed the theory that they are building an “impossible” space drive, and at this stage they are building a demonstration version; if things go according to their plans, this could revolutionize space exploration and the economy of satellites, giving China a significant military and economical advantage over other countries. This year, “Emdrive” (short […]
A few days ago, something remarkable has been captured by NASA’s telescopes, as an unusual set of Gamma rays were picked up by the Swifst satellite. What’s so remarkable about the find is that the respective burst of Gamma rays is the farthest such discovered, and, according to NASA’s specialists, originated from an explosion near […]
Our old Sun has broken a milestone that has not happened for almost a hundred years, as an entire month has passed without a single sun spot being noted. This is relevant because many climatologists believe there is a tight connection between solar magnetic activity which is responsable for the sun spots and climate on […]
Astronauts definitely don’t have it easy; preparing and training for most of your life, to go on a mission that is dangerous in most cases, and that has many difficulties to say the least. But perhaps the most interesting aspect in the life of an astronaut is eating. Because there’s not any room for your […]
Actually, it’s not about the brightest star of all, but the brightest star in our galaxy. It seems there’s a new contender for the title of Milky Way brightest star; it’s near its dusty center, and infrared observations performed by NASA have revealed how bright it is by piercing the dust that surrounds it. The […]
Scientists have believed for years that the moon doesn’t have water, only to find that its interior proved them wrong, challenging our current understanding on how the satellite was formed The current most accepted theory is that it formed in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.But if this had been the case, […]
It’s not a bird, it’s not a planet, it’s not Jupiter… it’s super earth. Actually, there’s 3 of them. What are they? Well they’re three planets that astrophysicists have found orbiting the same star. They were located with the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.These Super Earths are […]
The Phoenix Lander was definitely a marking moment for scientists and researchers, who now have the opportunity of actually seeing what they could have just speculated about before. For example, just take a look at this picture the probe sent back on Friday. Phoenix scientist Ray Arvidson said there may be ice directly […]
The ball aproaches the field and… touchdown! NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived the fiery dive into Mars’ atmosphere Sunday to make a three-point landing in the planet’s arctic regions. This is absolutely a fantastic achievement which included an impressive amount of work and so many people that struggled for this common magnificent objective. “It looks […]
Let’s start with the beginning, shall we ? A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. That means that electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light) is unable to break away from the […]
Recently, the NASA observatory published some great images of some cities. For a man looking at those cities at night, man’s work seems both impressive and insignificant. But the view would be fantastic: regular patterns of irrigated cropland, straight lines of roads and railways running across continents, reservoirs on river systems, and the cement rectangles […]
Our life may be better or worse, our health may be better or worse, but one thing has definitely improved over the past decades: technology; and that’s a really big thing. So what better way to prove the progress of technology than 2 pictures of Earth? The first was taken from the weather […]
Recently, a team of researchers (with the help of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and a host of international telescope partners) have managed to get the clearest observation yet of the “core” of a black hole. A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field […]
Two years ago, the Finnish Meteorological Institute made public the fact that they had created an electric solar wind sail. Now, scientists believe that this kind of propulsion could benefit space travel significantly, throughout the Solar System. Doctor Pekka Janhunen who invented the sail, believes it could revolutionise travelling in space, as using solar winds […]
The date of March 19, 2008 will be remembered as a very important day in astronomy and science; it’s the day mankind had its first chance of witnessing the birth of a black hole. It all started when the “Pi of the Sky” telescope detected the brightest ever optical outburst from a distant place, about […]
Recently, a small Aerospace company located in California has announced a new type of sub-orbital spaceship that can make your dream come true; that is, if you’ve got the right amount of money and you want to travel into outer space. This spaceship is claimed to provideaffordable front-seat rides to the edge of space for […]
Scientists from the American Geophysical Union published some fascinating findings concerning some unexpected luminous spots on Jupiter caused by its moon Io, which they have observed. Io is in fact in some ways similar to Earth, in that it causes auroras on its mother planet. It also has the most spectacular volcanic activity in the […]
Nature published these findings of scientists from Houston, Texas, about the original proportion of oxygen isotopes in the Sun. This problem is still not fully solved, and it has even split the science world into two groups, which published contradictory results from analyses of lunar soils, believed to contain embedded solar oxygen because the Moon […]
Back in September, a meteorite crashed somewhere in Peru, scaring locals and digging a hole in the ground, but pleased scientists which had the opportunity of studying it. But it behaved so strangely that in fact it forces scientists to rethink the way alien objects behave when entering Earth’s atmosphere and when they hit out […]
The Cassini spacecraft has made numerous valuable discoveries along the time, such as the ‘building blocks’ of life on Titan, as well as the mountains there, and the partial rings of Saturn, and now scientists eagerly await the dive of the probe into the water plum of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. This will be […]
Astronomers from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario have spotted (with the aid of cameras, of course) a meteor falling to Earth; this is quite a rare occasion and scientists from many fields are eagerly awaiting the recovery of the meteorite and the start of the studies. They spotted a giant fireball Wednesday […]
Mars has fueled many speculations for many centuries, and just several decades ago it was proved that there is no macromolecular life there. But still, there are numerous phenomenae that make it resemble Earth, such as avalanches. Whatsmore, recently scientists studying images from The University of Arizona found never-before-seen impact “megabreccia” and a possibly once-habitable […]
This project was backed up by U.S., Italian and German partners and it promised to be the next step in taking pictures of celestial objects. It consists of a giant binocular telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz, and it recently made its first picture, using the its twin side-by-side, 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) primary mirrors together, achieving […]
For a whole lot of time Mars has fascinated scientists, which during the time made some crazy theories, of whch some included martians living there, or a lost civilization that used to live there, and that kind of stuff. Now, they are sure that nothing else except microorganisms live there, but who knows what tomorrow […]
There are still so many things we don’t know about our solar system, and if by some way we manage to acquire information about it, probably many mysteries would be solved. Still, it’s always nice to see that scientists are not wasting time and almost every week they find something incredible. For example, gaps in […]
What seemed to be a very natural and obvious conclusion needed a whole lot of studies and research to be proven; terrestrial planets might form around many, if not most, of the nearby stars which are similar to the sun, or at least resemble it greatly. These studies suggest that life may be actually quite […]
MESSENGER is a spacecraft which recently made a flyby near Mercury and it gave scientists a whole new perspective over the planet. Researchers are amazed by the wealth of images and data which show a surprising diversity of geological processes which took and are still taking place and a very different magnetosphere from the one […]
The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a very interesting and important rare flyby over the sun’s north pole. This spacecraft is different from anyother, being able to sample winds at the sun’s poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. However, this is not the first time it has been over the Sun’s poles; this […]
Not a Hollywood movie or something like that; not even a pun. The title is in the most literal fashion it could be. But how could this be? Worlds can’t collide, can’t they? Hard to say. Anyway astronomers have announced that a mystery object orbiting a star 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from […]
Life as we know has certain ingredients which are necessary for life to evolve and even exist. Such ingredients are the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide — two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids. Researchers found these molecules in a galaxy somewhere 250 million light years away; it’s not as a few more light years […]
Antimatter is a fascinating story; basically nobody knows for sure what it could do and scientists have been trying to understand it for years. The artificial production of atoms of antimatter (specifically antihydrogen) first became a reality in the early 1990s. For example an atom of antihydrogen is composed of a negatively-charged antiproton being orbited […]
Most people have a problem in looking at a problem from a different point of view than their own. Curiously enough the our species has the same problem; scientists have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life. But just recently did the whole astronomic community as […]
Titan is a constant point of interest and scientists find out more fascinating things about this moon of Saturn almost every week. By analyzing images from NASA’s Cassini Radar instrument, a Brigham Young University professor helped discover and analyze mountains on Saturn’s largest moon, additional evidence that it has some of the most earthlike processes of […]
The quest for understanding planets and stars seems to be more intense than ever. Things we could not have imagined not years but months ago are proven valid today. The problem of really big planets has especially fascinated scientists for hundreds of years for numerous reasons. A gas giant is basically a large planet that is not […]
In some ways Venus could be consider to be the twin sister of our planet but in other ways it is pretty much opposite. High temperatures and crushing air pressure make it resemble a place christians would rather not visit (or name) than a planet. But now scientists have received images which confirm the fact […]
We have another piece of evidence which goes to show that we fail to understand numerous things about our universe. Astronomers have discovered white dwarf stars with pure carbon atmospheres. It is something that probably nobody would have believed. The exact way these stars evolved is still pretty much a mystery for astrophysicists. They believe […]
A black hole is a weird and fascinating thing. There are few things we know about them. Astronomers are studying them round the clock and they job is made easier by the fact that they have unmasked hundreds of black holes hiding deep inside dusty galaxies billions of light-years away.They are massive and growing and […]
There is still some debate around how life appeared here on Earth and it is hard to find undeniable proof. But the findings from NASA‘s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that space dust — the same stuff that makes up living creatures and planets — was manufactured in large quantities in the winds of black […]
