In a February 29 letter to NASA, House appropriators have challenged the Obama administration’s decision to shut down the agency’s Mars planetary program.
An analysis of the most recent Kepler data suggests that Earthlike planets in orbits like our own are extremely rare.
Set your calendar: The last transit of Venus across the face of the Sun for the next century is only three months away.
A massive fireball was seen by countless observers yesterday as it streaked across the United Kingdom. With video.
JPL has issued a press release “reality check” on the impact possibilities of asteroid 2011 AG5 in 2040.
“In September 2013, we have the opportunity to make additional observations of 2011 AG5 when it comes within 91 million miles (147 million kilometers) of Earth,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It will be an opportunity to observe this space rock and further refine its orbit. Because of the extreme rarity of an impact by a near-Earth asteroid of this size, I fully expect we will be able to significantly reduce or rule out entirely any impact probability for the foreseeable future.” Even better observations will be possible in late 2015.
In other words, we really will not know anything more about these possibilities until late next year.
Kepler today released an updated catalog of candidate exoplanets observed during the space telescope’s first sixteen months of observations. In this release, they list more than a thousand new exoplanet candidates, almost two hundred of which are Earth-sized. Among the new exoplanet candidates, twenty-five are in the habitable zone!
Now for some details.
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Preview of a someday supernova: Hubble takes its best image yet of Eta Carinae.
A supernova twenty-five years later.
SN 1987A, it turns out, was like a dust-bomb, with estimates of the total dust it threw into space, based on the infrared brightness of the dust … implying enough dusty material to build the equivalent of 200,000 Earth-mass planets. Mingled within the dust are elements as diverse as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, silicon, carbon and iron. This immense amount of dust has been beyond expectations and, if all supernovae spew out this much dust, it helps explain why young galaxies that we can see existing in the early Universe, which have high rates or star birth and death, are so dusty. The dust, however, isn’t a nuisance to be wiped away – this is the material that goes into building new planets, moons and even life. The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones all came from supernovae like SN 1987A, as mostly did the oxygen we breath and the carbon in our constituent molecules.
Buckyballs in space. And they’re solid too!
A world made of water.
And it ain’t in our solar system.
A look at the universe’s dark side.
