Space

Water On The Moon, Where Have You Been Hiding All This Time?

If you have seen pictures of the Moon, you see a giant ball of dust with astronaut footprints etched into the surface- but information garnered from missions such as NASA's 2009 Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (L-CROSS) lunar-impact pr ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 19 2013 - 12:36pm

Giant Sun Spot The Size Of 6 Earths Grows In 48 Hours

Sunspots on the surface of the Sun happen when magnetic fields rearrange and realign, forming dark spots Over the course of the last 48 hours, scientists watched a giant sunspot form- it has grown to over six Earth diameters across but its full extent is ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2013 - 4:11pm

Some Coronal Rain On The Sun

The Sun's eruptive events can change even more radically than the weather in Kentucky. Some eruptive events come just with a solar flare, while some provide additional ejection of solar material, a coronal mass ejection (CME). Some even involve compl ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2013 - 4:30pm

Simple Gravity Doesn't Explain Distribution Of Stars In Crowded Clusters

Gravity works, it is a dominant force in physics, but at the very large and very small scales it holds a lot of mysteries left to be solved.  Foe example, when it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be s ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2013 - 4:30am

Exciting Possibilities In (And About) Space!

First some exciting news about space-flight.  Then I'll finish with a followup (and speculative) reflection on our recent multiple encounters with space rocks. = NASA's NIAC: New and Innovative Advance Concepts = ...

Article - David Brin - Feb 20 2013 - 7:48pm

Mercury 's Molten Magma- 4 Billion Years Ago

 By analyzing data gathered by MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging), a NASA probe that has orbited the planet since March 2011, researchers looking at X-ray fluorescence identified two distinct compositions of rocks on ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2013 - 8:01pm

Calculating The Birth Of An Asteroid's Trail

Unlike comets, asteroids don't have a trail- with some exceptions. Spanish researchers observed using the Gran Telescopio Canarias and discovered that something happened around July 1st, 2011 that caused a trail to appear on P/2012 F5 (Gibbs)- perhap ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2013 - 12:43pm

Journey To The Limits Of Spacetime. Hypothetically. With A Computer

Last month, physicists predicted the formation of accretion disks and relativistic jets that warp and bend more than previously thought, shaped both by the extreme gravity of black holes and by powerful magnetic forces generated by their spin.  Black hole ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2013 - 4:29pm

Saturday in Space: Solar Coronal Rain

My favorite star, our very own Sun, has a multitude of spectacular features she shows off with grandeur. In fact, the Sun was the subject of my thesis and so she is extra special to me. When you think about all the billions and billions of stars out there ...

Blog Post - Bente Lilja Bye - Feb 23 2013 - 10:35am

NGC 1365 Black Hole 2 Million Miles Wide And Spins At Almost The Speed Of Light

Astronomers using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array- NuSTAR- and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellites have measured  the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365, more than 2 million ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 28 2013 - 1:34am