Space

Kepler 444's Known Planets Probably Can't Harbor Life.

To put it briefly, the habitability of a planet depends on it's distance from its star, the composition of its atmosphere, and the type of star its orbiting.  If our own solar system is at all typical then planets like those known around Kepler 444 an ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jan 28 2015 - 3:18am

Planck on BICEP2 "It turns out that the part of the dust had been significantly underestimated." UPDATED

A p parently, PLANCK says that BICEP2 did not detect gravitational waves.  The signal was mostly intergalactic dust.   That is my reading of a Google translate translation of an official Planck website.   This is even more tentative and un-reviewed than t ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jan 31 2015 - 7:23pm

BICEP2 Found Interstellar Dust, Not Primordial Gravitational Waves

The Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago and evolved from an extremely hot, dense and uniform state to the rich and complex cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets we see today. The key source of information about that history is the Cosmic Microwave ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 31 2015 - 9:30am

Red Galaxies And Premature Gaseous Ejaculation

Red galaxies may be 'dying' young because they have prematurely ejected the gas they need to make new stars.  There are two main types of galaxies; 'blue' galaxies that are still actively making new stars and 'red' galaxies th ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 2 2015 - 9:57am

Fossil Radiation Is Probably Dust, So Doubts Remain About Gravitational Waves

The third chapter in the ongoing saga of the "first direct image of gravitational waves through the primordial sky" has been written. The first chapter was in March of last year when the BICEP2 team announced that it had observed the portion of c ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 2 2015 - 1:04pm

2015's Triple Transit March Of The Moons

Last month, we got treated to three of Jupiter's moons- Europa, Callisto and Io- parading across the giant gas planet's banded face. There are four Galilean satellites- named after the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei who discovered them ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2015 - 4:26pm

R.I.P. Venus Express: Remembering Eight Years on the Brink of Hell

It was a hell of a ride to our hellish sister planet. Eight long years of studying Venus is way more than ESA scientists were expected from its mission. Venus Express spacecraft that launched on Nov. 9, 2005 and entered the orbit of its target planet on A ...

Blog Post - Tomasz Nowakowski - Feb 8 2015 - 10:26pm

How Big Is The Biggest Star?

Spot the biggest star. Rutherford Observatory By Jillian Scudder, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics at University of Sussex The universe is such a big place that it is easy to get baffled by the measurements that astronomers make. The size of U ...

Article - The Conversation - Feb 9 2015 - 11:14am

21st Century Sunspots A Lot Like The 18th Century

Some people believe we are in a new Enlightenment, with science making food plentiful and likely to make energy cheap enough to be unnoticeable in the next few decades as well. We share one other thing in common with the 18th century- solar activity. Scien ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 10 2015 - 9:30am

The Universe May have Existed Forever…Or Maybe Not

Yesterday, phys.org posted a story titled, “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning.” Coauthors Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das, “have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by ...

Blog Post - Steve Schuler - Feb 11 2015 - 7:13am