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 […]
Scientists Find Jupiter’s Younger Sibling
A group of scientists have discovered a new exoplanet they say resembles a young Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the gas giant is about 100 light years away, has twice the mass of Jupiter, orbits its star – 51 Eridani – at a distance comparable to between Saturn and Uranus in our solar system and […]
Close Call for ISS; Threat to Polar Bears; Binary System Cannibal
ISS Crewmembers Back to Work after Close Call with Space Junk Fear that a floating piece of space junk could impact the ISS sent astronauts the station’s crew scrambling onto a docked Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft on Friday (07/17). Luckily, the debris passed the station harmlessly, and the crew was back at work. Houston’s Mission Control […]
Extrasolar Object’s Ring System is 200 Times Larger Than Saturn’s
One of our solar system’s most fascinating planets is Saturn. It’s the 2nd largest planet, after Jupiter. But what makes Saturn stand out from the others is the dazzling system of rings that surround it. Recently, a Dutch and an American astronomer found that an extrasolar object, discovered back in 2012, is surrounded by a […]
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IRIS: New NASA Spacecraft to Study Mysterious Region of Sun’s Atmosphere
Did you know that the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is much hotter than its surface? Scientists have been quite curious about a mysterious interface region of the Sun’s atmosphere that amplifies energy from about 5,800 degrees Kelvin on the surface, or photosphere, to around 1,000,000 degrees Kelvin in the corona. With Thursday’s launch of […]
Hubble Spots Farthest Supernova Yet
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest known supernova discovered to date. Nicknamed “SN Wilson,” after the American President Woodrow Wilson, scientists say supernova UDS10Wil, exploded more than 10 billion years ago, about 3.77 billion years after the Big Bang. SN Wilson is in a special class of exploding stars known as “Type Ia […]
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