Space

This morning, as I walked out of home headed to work, the sky was clear and still dark. As I looked up, I immediately noticed the bright light of Venus above the houses of Venice. Have you ever…

In a recent paper, by blah and blah, we have been asked to vote for an official definition of a galaxy. That's easy, I hear you cry: you proceed to draw me an S shaped squiggle on a piece of paper,…

Over at the Journal of Cosmology, an engaging open journal I've discussed before, there is a controversy over their book, "The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet".  Namely,…

Back when I was prepping for the ham radio test, I didn't think my skills would be needed so soon.  The 'missing' NanoSat-D solar sail mission has appeared, but it can only be heard via radio at…

Wanna go to Mars?  It's a one-way trip, and over 500 people have volunteered already. The Journal of Cosomology-- yes, them again-- became the accidental sign-up agency for us ordinary folk who…

When I was a younger guy, I read my astrology sign 'predictions' in the newspaper.  It was in the comics section, so clearly no one took it too seriously.  But astrology had at least a…

Little green men. Can they exist? Do they exist? And what do they look like? Published this week in Philosophical Transactions A is an extravaganza of papers about extraterrestrial life, and what we…

Observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea have found 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies. These black-hole pairs, also called binaries, are…

A new paper says that as many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected appear brighter than they actually are, because of an effect called "strong gravitational lensing." How…

Hanny's Voorwerp, a strange, glowing green cloud of gas that has mystified astronomers since its discovery in 2007, has gotten a better look by Hubble. The cloud of gas is lit up by the bright light…