Aug 28
Whether or not you think that certain endangered animals are worth all the fuss— *cough*pandas
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Aug 25
This looks like your brain on drugs, but it’s actually a rare solar eclipse from last June in which Venus moved between the Sun and the Earth the way the Moon usually does. Venus looked like a thinner and thinner crescent until it was perfectly aligned with the Sun, creating a Venusian annular eclipse with a ring of fire. The Solar Dynamics Observatory imaged the Sun in three colors of UV light, producing data for this image. The next Venusian solar eclipse will occur in 2117, so you’ll have time to enjoy this photo for awhile before it’s challenged by something even crazier. [APOD]
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Jul 31
Not only is this Jupiter cake just a marvelous sight, it’s an astronomically correct model of Jupiter.
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Jul 26
Scientists believe they may have stumbled upon a planet that currently circles its sun at twice the distance Pluto’s does ours. And should they be able to confirm that, yes, this is in fact a planet we’re dealing with, astronomers may have to redefine the entire way we think about planet formation.
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Jul 23
These striking images might only just look like faces—but that’s OK, because they’re made up of images acquired by the Hubble space telescope.
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Jul 02
A new study suggests that there are as many as 60 billion habitable planets orbiting red dwarf stars in the Milky Way alone—twice the number previously thought and strong evidence to hint that we may not be alone
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Apr 09
NASA’s Kepler space telescope hasn’t exactly been a slouch when it comes to planet hunting, but that effort will soon be getting a considerable boost courtesy of a new mission selected by NASA as part of its Explorer program. Dubbed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS), this new space telescope will one-up Kepler with the ability to perform an all-sky survey (an area 400 times larger than previous missions) to search for transiting exoplanets, with an eye towards planets comparable to Earth in size. TESS was developed by an MIT-led team, and will be placed in what they describe as a new “Goldilocks” orbit, allowing it to travel close enough to the Earth every two weeks for a high-speed data downlink while still remaining safely beyond the harmful radiation belts. It’s now set for launch in 2017, when it will be joined by the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an addition to the International Space Station also selected as part of the Explorer program last week that will use a process called X-ray timing to study neutron stars.
Via: New Scientist
Apr 01
Though we’ve seen plenty of our beautiful blue marble from space before, here’s what Earth looks like from a hundred million miles away. That’s roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Sun. More »
Mar 28
French astronomers think they found Tatooine in real life and we didn’t even have to travel to a galaxy far, far away (well, it’s still kind of far). The fictional home of Luke Skywalker is called 2MASS0103(AB)b in real life and it revolves around two suns that move relatively close together. Basically, this planet is in the binary star system just like Tatooine. More »
Feb 22
While Curiosity’s off drilling into the surface of Mars, plenty of other man-made, space-bound machines are surveying the rest of the solar system, and coming with some pretty cool stuff. NASA’s MESSENGER, for instance, put together quite the mesmerizing footage of Mercury’s spin. More »
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