Space

NGC-4945: A Lot Like Our Milky Way...

A new image of nearby galaxy NGC 4945 shows that it looks a lot like our own Milky Way. NGC 4945 seems to be a spiral galaxy with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region, though NGC 4945 has a brighter center that likely harbors a supermass ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 2 2009 - 3:00am

Discovery: Supermassive Black Hole Is One Billion Times The Size Of Our Sun

A giant galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way and contains a supermassive black hole with at least a billion times as much matter as our Sun. The discovery, in a paper in the journal Monthly Notic ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 2 2009 - 12:00pm

200 Grams

A TubeSat picosatellite lifts 200 grams of payload. That's about 7 ounces. Looked at one way, that's less than half a can of soda. But it's enough to lift an entire Nintendo DS game handheld into orbit. 200 grams can be a lot of electronics. ...

Article - Project Calliope - Sep 2 2009 - 12:12pm

Wildfires near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was closed Monday as wildfires came within two miles of the facility.  The decision to give most of the 5,000 employees the day off was made Sunday evening.  At that point the fire was no longer a threat to the lab (yo ...

Blog Post - Dan Coe - Sep 4 2009 - 12:16pm

Traceback for August

Welcome to Traceback, where I find articles other people have written on Project Calliope.  Having publically announced less than a week ago and with just 2 pieces written, I can safely paraphrase Oscar Wilde: the only thing worse than being blogged about, ...

Blog Post - Project Calliope - Sep 8 2009 - 2:57pm

HD49798 White Dwarf Companion Rotates Every 13 Seconds

ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova. Well, in a few million years. Astronomers use these supernovae as beac ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 6 2009 - 10:28am

Sunspots, The Colaninno Minimum And Pascal's Wager

We have been in an anomalously long Solar Minimum.  The sun has an 11 year cycle from Minimum to Maximum.  But the cycles are (like most things in nature) not exact, and some are longer than the others.  We are coming out of Solar Minimum... or are we? Eve ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Sep 8 2009 - 3:04pm

Magnetic Fields Get Some Respect In Star Formation

Old notion: Giant clouds of gas and dust to collapse inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until igniting nuclear fusion and forming stars.  New notion:  It's more than just gravity and cosmic magnetic fields play a more important role in s ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 9 2009 - 12:19pm

Hubble Shows Off Images From New Camera

NASA's 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve!   New images were released today  from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.   Installed back in March, WFC3 extends Hubble's capabilities well into the infrared, al ...

Article - Dan Coe - Sep 9 2009 - 5:05pm

Are The New Hubble Images Better?

New beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have been released recently, and they are, as always, a pleasure to behold. The HST was serviced in a mission by the Space Shuttle Atlantis crew last May, to replace some broken gyroscopes and drai ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 11 2009 - 2:33pm