Space

NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. "Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an a ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 18 2009 - 4:21pm

RCW 38: Did Our Solar System Originate In A Supernovae Hell?

RCW 38 is a dense star cluster about 5500 light years away in the direction of the constellation Vela (the Sails). Like the Orion Nebula Cluster, RCW 38 is an embedded cluster, in that clouds of dust and gas still envelop its stars. Inside RCW 38, young s ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 19 2009 - 4:37pm

Going Back In Time Using Gravitational Waves, Probes The Early Universe

The Big Bang is believed to have created a flood of gravitational waves that still fill the universe with information about its existence immediately after the Big Bang. These waves would be observed as the "stochastic background," analogous to ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 19 2009 - 2:39pm

Quenching The Sun, For Fun

My kids asked me if there was enough water in the universe to quench the Sun. I voted yes, but of course science isn't about voting, but about verifiable facts. So now the explanation. The Sun has a mass of around a third of a million Earths. Steal ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Aug 22 2009 - 2:28am

The Petabyte Problem

What do you do with a petabyte of data? The question came up during a lunch today with two NASA computing people, on in IT and the other in supercomputing. Modern satellites are returning petabytes of data, and there are many satellites. This is far mor ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Aug 25 2009 - 4:35pm

Mythbusters Of Stellar Birth

A team of researchers say long held beliefs about how stars are formed have been just a myth, and they say this astronomy myth got busted using a set of galaxies found with CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope. When interstellar gas collapses to form stars, ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 27 2009 - 9:18pm

Debris Disks Around Some Stars Are Just Plain Warped

People sometimes think the space between stars is 'empty' but that's not the case. That area is filled with patches of low-density gas and when a relatively dense clump of gas gets near a star, the resulting flow produces a drag force on a ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2009 - 10:15am

Finding The Next Earth

I recently watched a show about alien planets orbiting distant stars. It emphasized the differences between these planets and Earth – too hot, too cold, iron rain, noxious gas – places where humans couldn’t live, but maybe some organisms might. What I, and ...

Article - Kimberly Tyree - Aug 31 2009 - 4:13pm

Music From Space

Dear Diary, It was a secret for a while, but I'm going to launch my own satellite! It's going to make music from space. Curious? It is dangerous to write about neat things. That makes you want to do them yourself. After writing about satellites, ...

Article - Project Calliope - Aug 31 2009 - 5:06pm

On Citizen Science, Citizen Journalism, and Satellites

This here, "The Sky By Day", is my science writing column. I write about current news and cultural issues in space and computer science. Very simple, very journalistic: See Alex write. Write, Alex, write! I have started a new project, to l ...

Blog Post - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Sep 1 2009 - 2:56pm