Seems like whenever a star is discovered, it’s just a countdown until the inevitable crash and burn. It happened to Lindsay Lohan and Macaulay Culkin, and tonight it’s happening to the just-spotted star Nova Del 2013. Located yesterday by an amateur astronomer, the erupting white dwarf is getting brighter and hotter as it heads for a violent nova explosion, and Slooh Space Camera is livestreaming the whole stellar meltdown.
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The average human lifespan is a lot longer than it used to be. But we’re barely into triple digits here and if we individually want to see anything awesome we’re gonna have to stick around for a few degrees of magnitude longer. That immortality thing or whatever. Why haven’t we done that again?
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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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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.
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While Rovio still leans very heavily on one game franchise for its success, there’s no question that it’s a big company these days — big enough, in fact, that it’s venturing into publishing for the first time. Its new Rovio Stars division will look for a handful of promising third-party games to support, giving them both the resources and exposure needed to shine. The first titles to make the cut are Nitrome’s upcoming puzzler Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage and 5 Ants’ Tiny Thief. We don’t know if Rovio’s guiding hand will be enough to give these games a major boost, but we can get a taste of what’s to come through the Icebreaker trailer after the break.
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming
Via: Rovio
Source: Rovio Stars
GM-owned automotive manufacturer Opel hasn’t sold cars in the United States in decades. However, in Europe, Opel has been selling vehicles continuously for quite a long time. One of the vehicles that Opel offers that I’ve never heard of is the subcompact Opel ADAM.
Today, word of an unusual new option for the car has surfaced. People who buy the Opel ADAM will be able to purchase an optional headliner and features LED lighting elements that look like stars.
The Starlight Sky headliner is said to be a unique option for the entry-level automotive segment in Europe.
The special headliner allows for five different textile cover options with a variety of headliner designs. The headliners can be single color, autumn foliage, a checkered flag, stylized clouds, and other things. The Starlight Sky option is the one that gets the 64 LEDs as can single colored versions. The headliner weighs 200 g and consumes only 4 watts of power, and the LEDs can actually twinkle like the night sky.
Of course you could just get a skylight, and look up at the actual stars.
NASA’s Kepler telescope has discovered three “super-Earth-size” exoplanets that are close enough to their stars to make them possibly suitable for water. Two of the planets (Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f) orbit a K2 dwarf estimated to be around 7 billion years old. Measuring at two-thirds the size of our sun, this cosmic lantern is orbited by a total of five planets, three of which are too close to be habitable for life. Kepler-69c, the biggest of this newly discovered trio is estimated to be 70 percent larger than Earth and takes 242 days to revolve around its sun-like star Kepler-69. While there’s great excitement surrounding these new findings, this isn’t the first time we’ve spotted a potentially habitable planet. A little over a year ago Kepler discovered Kepler-22b, an exoplanet about 600 light-years away from Earth believed to be covered in liquid. Like their predecessor, NASA has yet to determine if these newfound planets actually have water or a rocky composition. Until then, Ridley Scott might want to hold off on naming them as locations for his sequel to Prometheus.
Via: Wired
Source: NASA
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 »
As digital displays are becoming more common than ever, good old-fashioned projectors are getting rarer and rarer. That includes the hulking beasts that are planetarium projectors, those often massive, rotating behemoths that spout out views of the entire sky. Fortunately, the antiquated gadgets have a home at the aptly named Planetarium Projector Museum. More »
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