The discovery of a near 10,000-year-old lunar calendar in Scotland has archaeologists scrambling to rethink the beginnings of history. The implications are huge, too. It turns out that the men of the Stone Age weren’t as primitive as we’d previously thought.
     |
They stretch 50 miles into Earth’s upper atmosphere. They shower the night sky with shimmering bursts of light. They emit a crackling "ping" over radio. And because they’re so fast, scientists have only known about them for a few decades. Today, Wired Science introduces us to the world of Transient Luminous Events—and the Santa Fe astronomer who has pioneered the art of photographing them.
| |
Astronomers have spotted a new moon orbiting Neptune—the first to be discovered in over a decade—by studying images that were archived all the way back in 2009.
| |
In about a billion years the Sun will be too hot and bright for water to exist on Earth. We will probably mosey on at that point or perish. But if we’re still alive and somewhere in the neighborhood when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes a red giant we can observe it looking something like this.
| |
While exoplanets are seemingly a dime a dozen, their looks have been mysteries; they often exist only as measurements. Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have partly solved that riddle by pinpointing the visible color of an extrasolar world for the first time. By measuring reflected light, they can tell that HD 189733b (conceptualized above) is a cobalt blue, much like Earth’s oceans. Not that we can claim much kinship, though. The planet is a gas giant 63 light-years away — its blue tint comes from an atmosphere likely full of deadly silicate. As disappointing as that may be, the discovery should at least help us understand planet types that don’t exist in the Solar System.
Source: ESA
For several years, scientists and researchers have been witnessing mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from billions and billions of light-years away. So mysterious, in fact, that astronomers simply thought they weren’t real and it was just a glich in their equipment, or maybe just EMI. However, researchers now think that something cataclysmic is causing these strange bursts.
The only problem is, researchers don’t exactly know what kind of phenomena is causing the radio wave bursts, but it could most likely have to do something with stars, whether stars are merging, or dying, or being eaten alive is still a mystery, although it appears something like that is occurring in order to have such strange bursts of radio waves being discovered.
Scientists says that the first mysterious burst was discovered around six years ago, with a bright beam of light lasting for just a few milliseconds and would never show up again. Researchers had no idea where it was originating from or why it was happening, and only a few of these burst have been discovered over the past few years.
However, astronomers later found out that these bursts were originating from billions of light-years away after measuring the distance the bursts had traveled, meaning that the events causing the bursts must have been pretty powerful if they’re able to reach Earth. From this data, astronomers believe that these bursts are from well over 5 billion years ago, at least.
As for the significance of these mysterious bursts, scientists say that it may reveal new insights into the medium used for these bursts of radio waves, and how exactly they travel through the universe. It’s said that these radio bursts are actually going off around every 10 seconds, but researchers say that it’s just a matter of looking into the sky at the right time and place in order to discover one.
VIA: LA Times
SOURCE: Science
Strange radio wave bursts in space caused by star phenomena, say researchers is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
SETI’s best known for its search for sentient life in the cosmos, but when the Hubble space telescope found a pair of new moons orbiting Pluto (at SETI’s behest), it decided to do some planetoid naming, too. Today, SETI announced those names: Styx and Kerberos. The institute didn’t grant titles to the moons itself, however. Instead, it put the onus on the public to come up with the proper names — with instructions from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that the nomenclature have something to do with the mythological underworld known as Hades. Voting lasted for two weeks, and SETI received over 450,000 regular votes and around 30,000 write-ins. Though many wished for the moons to be named for Stephen Colbert or the Romulan home world, the IAU found those choices to be unfit for the new moons. Instead, we have Styx (the river that separates earth from the underworld) and Kerberos (the three-headed dog that serves as the guardian to Hades) — who said studying Classics was a waste of time?
Source: SETI Institute
The past two days have been full of what’s called “Supermoon” sightings due to the fact that the Earth has been as close to our moon as it’s going to be all year long. While the past two days have brought on a flood of “oh my goodness that’s the biggest moon I’ve ever seen”
It’s kind of hard to scope things out on Venus because the surface probes we send get obliterated pretty quickly by the heat. Pictures of Venus’ surface do exist, though, and this one shows "large circular domes" that look pretty darn hot. The domes are thought to be magma erupting through vents, in a process that happens on Earth too, called volcanism. Get it? Volcanoes? Get it? Okay. Moving on.
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
