Featured Posts
NASA Space Station Blog
6 Apr 2020, 19:32 UTC
A Russian rocket rolled out to its launch pad today as a new crew gets ready for liftoff to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the Expedition 62 crew will send off a U.S. cargo craft on Tuesday packed with science and hardware.
Station Gets Ready to Send off Cargo Ship and Welcome New Crew
6 Apr 2020, 19:32 UTC
A Russian rocket rolled out to its launch pad today as a new crew gets ready for liftoff to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the Expedition 62 crew will send off a U.S. cargo craft on Tuesday packed with science and hardware.
Bad Astronomy
6 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
What with everything going on in the world at the moment you might be forgiven if you’ve forgotten about something going on well outside it: A comet from another star is blasting through our cosmic neighborhood right now.
An alien comet dropped something off on its way out of the solar system
6 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
What with everything going on in the world at the moment you might be forgiven if you’ve forgotten about something going on well outside it: A comet from another star is blasting through our cosmic neighborhood right now.
SciTech Daily
6 Apr 2020, 08:04 UTC
‘Curious and Curiouser!’ – Meteorite Chunk Contains Unexpected Evidence of Presolar GrainsAn unusual chunk in a meteorite may contain a surprising bit of space history, based on research from Washington University in St. Louis.
Meteorite Chunk Contains Unexpected Evidence of Solid Interstellar Material Formed Before the Sun Was Born
6 Apr 2020, 08:04 UTC
‘Curious and Curiouser!’ – Meteorite Chunk Contains Unexpected Evidence of Presolar GrainsAn unusual chunk in a meteorite may contain a surprising bit of space history, based on research from Washington University in St. Louis.
Bad Astronomy
3 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
The closest star in the Universe to the Sun is Proxima Centauri. It's a red dwarf: Tiny, cool, faint, orbiting a pair of more Sun-like stars we collectively call Alpha Centauri. Unremarkable, even more so for being one of hundreds of billions of such stars in our Milky Way alone. Were it not so close to us — a mere 4.244 light years away, in a galaxy 120,000 light years across — we'd hardly pay it any attention.
A *second* possible planet for Proxima Centauri!
3 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
The closest star in the Universe to the Sun is Proxima Centauri. It's a red dwarf: Tiny, cool, faint, orbiting a pair of more Sun-like stars we collectively call Alpha Centauri. Unremarkable, even more so for being one of hundreds of billions of such stars in our Milky Way alone. Were it not so close to us — a mere 4.244 light years away, in a galaxy 120,000 light years across — we'd hardly pay it any attention.
NASA Space Station Blog
2 Apr 2020, 18:39 UTC
The International Space Station expanded its research capabilities overnight after robotics controllers installed a new external science platform. Meanwhile, the Expedition 62 crew is packing cargo for return to Earth while getting ready for its own departure.
Science Expands on Station, Dragon Departs on Monday
2 Apr 2020, 18:39 UTC
The International Space Station expanded its research capabilities overnight after robotics controllers installed a new external science platform. Meanwhile, the Expedition 62 crew is packing cargo for return to Earth while getting ready for its own departure.
Astronomy Now
2 Apr 2020, 16:27 UTC
Not so long ago, astronomers thought of the Milky Way’s central bulge as an old folks home where mostly ancient stars congregated and slowly moved about. But more recent observations, including this spectacular view captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and an analysis of about 10,000 suns in the bulge reveal a much more dynamic environment where stars of various ages move about at different speeds. The faster, younger stars may have been captured as the Milky Way cannibalised smaller galaxies, mingling with older, slower-moving suns.
The Milky Way’s central bulge offers a jewel box packed with glittering stars
2 Apr 2020, 16:27 UTC
Not so long ago, astronomers thought of the Milky Way’s central bulge as an old folks home where mostly ancient stars congregated and slowly moved about. But more recent observations, including this spectacular view captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and an analysis of about 10,000 suns in the bulge reveal a much more dynamic environment where stars of various ages move about at different speeds. The faster, younger stars may have been captured as the Milky Way cannibalised smaller galaxies, mingling with older, slower-moving suns.
Bad Astronomy
2 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be a revolution in astronomy. It sports a whopping 6.5-meter wide mirror, the largest that will ever have been flown into space, and will examine the Universe in infrared light, where asteroids, exoplanets, dust, black holes, and distant galaxies glow. It may reveal evidence of the first stars ever born, peer into atmospheres around planets orbiting other stars, and see the dying light of exploding stars farther than ever before.
Watch as the James Webb telescope unfolds its 18 gold-plated hex mirrors
2 Apr 2020, 13:00 UTC
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be a revolution in astronomy. It sports a whopping 6.5-meter wide mirror, the largest that will ever have been flown into space, and will examine the Universe in infrared light, where asteroids, exoplanets, dust, black holes, and distant galaxies glow. It may reveal evidence of the first stars ever born, peer into atmospheres around planets orbiting other stars, and see the dying light of exploding stars farther than ever before.
Universe Today
31 Mar 2020, 17:34 UTC
I know you’re Googling “flocculent” right now, unless you happen to be a chemist, or maybe a home brewer. You could spend each day of your life staring at a different galaxy, and you’d never even come remotely close to seeing even a tiny percentage of all the galaxies in the Universe. Of course, nobody knows for sure exactly how many galaxies there are. But there might be up to two trillion of them. If you live to be a hundred, that’s only 36,500 galaxies that you’d look at. Puts things in perspective.
