Space

Like Diamonds? 55 Cancri Super-Earth Could Be A Girl's Best Friend

A rocky planet twice Earth's size, called  55 Cancri e, that orbits a nearby star is likely a diamond planet, according to new research. 55 Cancri e has a radius twice Earth's and a mass eight times greater, making it a "super-Earth." I ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 12 2012 - 5:52pm

Discovery: An Earth-Mass Exoplanet Orbiting Alpha Centauri B

A planet around the mass of the Earth has been found, orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system; the nearest to Earth and also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2012 - 5:11pm

Life as we don't know it on a planet like Alpha Centauri B's nearest?

How would we recognize truly alien life on a planet that is probably like a half molten Venus, and why we don't even bother trying.  How could we detect any kind  life on any extrasolar planet at all?    Given what we know about chemistry, astronomy, ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Oct 17 2012 - 2:25pm

Radioactive Titanium In Supernova Remnant 1987A

Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud was close enough to be seen by the naked eye when its light first reached Earth in February of 1987.  During the explosion's peak, fingerprints of elements from oxygen to calcium were detected, representin ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2012 - 7:30pm

NGC 660 And A Rare Polar-Ring Galaxy

A Gemini Legacy image has captured the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention.  ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2012 - 8:30pm

Galaxy Evolution- An 8 Billion Year Pattern Emerges

Star-forming galaxies take the form of orderly disk-shaped systems, like the Andromeda Galaxy or the Milky Way, where rotation dominates over other internal motions. The most distant blue galaxies in the study tend to be very different, exhibiting disorgan ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2012 - 2:23pm

Shock Diamonds In Space: Extragalactic Afterburner From PKS 0637-752

Blasting over two million lights years from the center of a distant galaxy, PKS 0637-752 is a 'supersonic jet' of material that looks a lot like the afterburner flow of a fighter jet- but in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 22 2012 - 10:18am

9 Gigapixel Image Shows 84 Million Stars In The Center Of The Milky Way

International astronomical photographers have created a catalog of over 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way; 10X more stars than previous catalogs and a great leap forward in making some sense of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 24 2012 - 9:52am

Why Don't We Know If There Are More Planets Around Alpha Centauri?

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to Earth other than our own sun.  So one would think if it had planets, we would know by now, right?  Wrong, apparently.  Astronomers just announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in Alpha Centauri, althoug ...

Article - Robert Cooper - Oct 24 2012 - 6:55pm

Why Is There More Light In The Universe Than There Should Be? A New Hypothesis

When is a theory not a theory?  When no one can even agree on what the theory is and competing ones are disproved once a year. Astronomers disagree about why they see more light in the universe than should be seen; that is, why the infrared light they obse ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2012 - 7:23am