Hasta La Gadget!

Good news for anyone who’s stared in envy as NASA sends rover after rover to explore and study Mars. You no longer need countless millions and a team of rocket scientists to perform your own experiments on the red planet. For just $25 ThinkGeek will sell you your very own shard of our celestial neighbor. More »

Melding past with present, the Teluria Candelabra’s designers were inspired by a centuries old device that used the earth, moon, and sun’s rotations to predict the seasons. Note Design Studio created the piece for Klong with the hopes that their candelabra would visualize the “cause of night and day, solar and lunar eclipses, and the phases of the moon.” More »

Scientists have discovered a planet orbiting a sun-like star called 55 Cancri. The planet is known as 55 Cancri e and is a so-called “super-Earth”. 55 Cancri e is 40 light years from the Earth and its light is visible to the naked eye.

The coolest thing about 55 Cancri e is that it is completely different in chemical composition from Earth. Rather than being mostly covered in water and granite, 55 Cancri e is believed to be covered with mostly graphite and diamonds. A research team led by Yale University scientists discovered the rocky planet, which is roughly twice the Earth’s size, with an estimated mass eight-times that of our planet.

The newly-discovered planet orbits its parent star at an incredibly high speed with each year lasting only 18 hours. The planet is also incredibly hot with the surface temperature estimated to be 3900°F. The scientists believe that at least a third of the planet’s mass could be diamonds.

[via Yale]

Unleash your inner Galactus with Vintage Confections’ “Planets solar system space ball style hard candy lollipop”. SEO-riffic! The lollipops feature images of the Sun and its planets, plus dwarf planet Pluto. It’s okay dude, we love you all equally, save for Earth. It just edges you all by a tiny bit, what with the oxygen and water and stuff.

My only complaint is that the most awesome-looking planet – Saturn – made for the lamest-looking lolly. Also I can’t differentiate the three bluish ones.

Vintage Confections is selling the lollipops for $17.50 (USD) per 10 pieces. You can specify the flavor of each candy, so be sure to make Earth extra delicious! Whoops, as Vintage Confections mentioned in the comments, you can specify the flavor per order of 10 pieces, not for each piece.

[via Svpply]

It’s taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system for the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in the search for planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets). With the suitably mysterious name of “Project 1640,” the new instrument is the first of its kind that’s able to directly spot planets orbiting distant suns — as opposed to existing systems that use indirect detection methods to determine the orbit of exoplanets. To do that, Project 1640 effectively blots out the light from stars, which allows astronomers to more clearly observe what might be around them, including objects up to 10 million times fainter than the star itself (the image on the right above is a nearby star captured with the imaging system in place, compared to the same star captured without the new system on the left). Those curious can find more specifics on just how that’s accomplished in the official announcement linked below.

Filed under: Science

Project 1640 offers new way to search for planets beyond our solar system originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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