Space

Is the Sun going to enter a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas? A group of scientists are suggesting that the Ribbon of enhanced emissions of Energetic Neutral Atoms(ENA) discovered…

I read with pleasure today a proceedings writeup of the Moriond 2010 talk given by S. Andringa on behalf of the Pierre Auger Observatory. It is too bad that I did not visit La Thuile this year: the…

Using a super-sensitive camera/spectrometer on the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have mapped the skies as they appeared 10 billion years ago, giving them a better look at the bright…

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument…

In the last yen years, astronomers have discovered scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may point to new and unusual physics. Supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the…

Richard Dawkins suggested that the first measure of an intelligent species, should two chance to meet, would be whether they understood how they came to be. I imagine such a remarkable exchange of…

I will discuss Leibniz's ideas on complexity (Discours de metaphysique, 1686), leading to modern work on program-size complexity, the halting probability and incompleteness. Leibniz's principle of…

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the…

Given I'm a mad scientist building a satellite in my basement, who are my heroes?  Are they Carl Sagan, astronomer populist extraordinaire?  Neil Tyson, a dynamic yet media-saavy heir to…

A Texas A&M University-led team of astronomers has uncovered what may be the earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies ever detected. The group of roughly 60 galaxies, called CLG J02182-05102,…