NASA has discovered a strange asteroid using the Hubble space telescope. The asteroid is called P/2013 P5 and NASA describes it as “weird and freakish.” What’s so odd about this asteroid is that it’s spewing six different streams of material into space. NASA discovered the asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter spewing […]
One of the most damaging meteor strikes in recorded history occurred earlier this year over the frigid Russian town of Chelyabinsk. The meteor injured as many as 1000 people when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Russian city creating shockwaves that shattered windows and rained shards of debris on people in the city. Scientists […]
Kepler keeps finding more and more potentially habitable planets in our Universe
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This is frightening. Nature just published a study by astronomers who have reanalyzed and recalculated the estimate of asteroids that could hit Earth and it’s a lot worse than we thought. Ten times worse.
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When mission commander James A. Lovell uttered his gut-wrenching warning, "Houston, we have a problem," neither he nor the army of NASA engineers back on Earth really knew if his crew would—or even could—make it back home.
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In the early 1960s, when the Apollo missions were underway and America was hellbent on reaching the moon, NASA researchers faced a nearly endless litany of technical hurdles and engineering obstacles nobody had even dreamed of up to that point. Chief among them: Once you shoot three guys across 238,900 miles across space at an orbiting body with just a fraction of the mass of Earth, how do you put them safely on the surface? That answer: lots and lots of practice in this gangly hardware simulator.
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Not all Earth-sized planets are Earth-like. Take for instance the planet Kepler 78b, it’s Earth like in size but orbits too close to its parent star for any chances supporting life as we know it. That doesn’t mean there’s not a huge number of Earth-like planets orbiting in the right temperature zone around their stars in our solar system alone that are both Earth-like in size and orbit a parent star in the Goldilocks zone.
In fact, astronomers have issued a new study created using data NASA has collected to estimate that in the Milky Way galaxy alone there are 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets that orbit in a habitable temperature zone. That means scientists believe there at least 8.8 billion planets of the right size, in the right temperature for life to exist in our galaxy alone.
To put that into perspective, that’s more Earth-like planets orbiting stars in the correct temperature zone and there are people on the Earth. Scientists say that the next step in locating the most Earth-like worlds is to look for atmospheres on these planets using powerful space telescopes. The biggest problem facing this now is that these telescopes have yet to launch.
Scientists calculate that in the Milky Way galaxy where we live, about one in five stars are like our Sun in size, color, and age. Many of these suns are also thought to have planets orbiting in the habitable zone where water could be liquid according to calculations performed by scientists. This is important because this marks the first time scientists have actually calculated the number of stars that are believed to have planets like Earth rather than estimating. Though they did look at only 42,000 stars to extrapolate their figures. The scientists calculate that 22% of the stars in our galaxy have planets similar to Earth with a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points.
[via Fox News]
The on-screen adaptation of Ender’s Game is already filled with enough gorgeous cinematography to get space nuts drooling, but no scene hits that space envy button quite as hard Ender’s Zero-G stint in the battle school war room. Design FX for Wired talked to the film’s graphic team to see what it took to make those near-operatic sequences match up to the physical constraints of space.
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The odds of finding a habitable planet elsewhere in the universe just get better and better. A new study claims that one in five Sun-like stars has an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone. That adds up to about 20 billion Earth-size planets in the Milky Way alone.
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A few weeks ago, Russian divers extracted a 1,250-pound chunk of the infamous Chelyabinsk meteorite from a lake where it landed on February 15. The massive space stone ended up cracking into three pieces—and though scientists may have cursed the clumsy divers, I was interested in something else: What was inside the rock?
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