NASA Will Have Cassini Working Hard Right Up to Fiery Finish
As the saying goes all good things must come to an end and the same will go for the Cassini mission to Saturn as it begins its final year of operation. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has big plans for the orbiter as it makes its year-long swan song. Dubbed the Grand Finale, the space agency […]
Where are Ceres Large Craters?
After NASA’s Dawn spacecraft had passed by the asteroid Vesta, on its way to rendezvous with Ceres, mission scientists noticed that its surface was banged up with a lot of very large craters. Its biggest impact crater is Rheasilvia, which measures 505 km in diameter. They expected that Ceres would also be seriously pitted with giant impact basins too. […]
One Third of the World’s Population Unable to See Milky Way
Among my fondest memories of being a kid back in the 1960’s was taking a week or so of summer vacation to visit relatives at my grandfather’s farm in Herman, PA (about 65 km northeast of Pittsburgh). During my stay I would spend evenings lying on the freshly cut grass of my grandpa’s back yard, just looking up into […]
Did our Sun Snatch Planet 9 from Another Solar System?
Is it possible that the new-found theoretical Planet 9 is actually an exoplanet, a planet from another solar system? According to astronomers at Sweden’s Lund University, it’s “highly likely” that Planet 9 was actually “snatched” from another solar system by our young sun some 4.5 billion years ago, or within 100 million years after its formation. […]
Scientists Find Traces of Early Earth in Volcanic Rock
According to most scientists, Earth was formed between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years ago after gravity forced gas and dust left over from the creation of the Sun accreted into an object called a planetesimal. Over time, the planetesimal continued to gather more and more material and eventually became a planet. Scientists say heat produced […]
Dwarf Planet Moon Discovered; Supplements Boost Antidepressants; Kepler Back in Business
Hubble Spots Moon Circling Distant Dwarf Planet Out in the far reaches of our solar system lies the Kuiper Belt. This region of space is occupied by icy objects left over from the creation of the solar system. Several dwarf planets, such as Pluto, also occupy the Kuiper Belt. Astronomers studying images gathered by the […]
Happy 26th Birthday Hubble Space Telescope!
Sunday, April 24, 2016 will mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the space shuttle Discovery mission STS-31. It was deployed from the shuttle’s payload bay the following day, April 25, 1990 Over its 26 years of service Hubble’s numerous discoveries and the breath-taking and detailed images it has […]
Nearby Supernovae Showered Earth and Moon With Radioactive Iron
Artist Animation of Star Explosion (NASA/JPL/Australian National University) Two new studies suggest radioactive bits of a nearby star or stars that exploded into a supernova or supernovae showered the Earth and Moon with radioactive iron a couple of million years ago. Both studies found the stellar evidence in concentrations of an isotope of iron called […]
20 Years to Alpha Centauri; NASA’s Expandable Habitat; Elements of an Apology
Proposed Spacecraft Will Take 20 Years to Reach Alpha Centauri Renowned physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Russian internet investor and physicist Yuri Milner recently announced an ambitious new project they hope will someday send thousands of tiny spacecraft to the stars to explore space and search for life in the universe. Called ‘Breakthrough Starshot,’ […]
Learning More About Mysterious Planet 9
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology generated a lot of excitement in the science world back in January when they announced that they had found evidence of a giant planet traveling in an odd, drawn-out orbit in the far reaches of the solar system. So far the new found planet, […]