Space

Newly Discovered Red Giant Fills Gap In Galaxy Evolution

Astronomers have discovered a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, S1020549 has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way&# ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:04pm

Cannibal Galaxies Ate Their Neighbors?

Cosmic oddities have set astronomers onto ‘the case of the missing neighboring galaxies’. Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17 is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky known as a fossil group. Astronomers use that term ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 4 2010 - 11:38am

Astronomy & Bud Light

The Bud Light commercial about astronomers is astoundingly accurate.  Details they get right include: we like celebrating just about anything, good or bad we drink beer in large groups we sometimes make mistakes but, hey, that's science playing with f ...

Blog Post - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Mar 5 2010 - 9:40pm

$300m Interstellar Space Dust Discovered by Citizen Scientist

Most people think that science is done behind closed doors with expensive equipment, fiddling around with complicated technology by scientists wearing cheap lab coats. The rest of us merely stand on the outside waiting for some interesting discoveries to b ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 6 2010 - 8:27am

Earthquake Rocks the World Off Axis

The recent earthquake in Chile was so big, it altered the earths rotation.  So if you notice the days getting shorter, blame the quake.  According to NASA scientist Richard Gross, the earth has been knocked about 3 inches off of its axis!  This resulted i ...

Blog Post - Nicholas Horton - Mar 6 2010 - 10:46am

Life In Deep Space? Organic Molecules Found In The Orion Nebula

ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum, obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 8 2010 - 11:51am

HM Cancri: Binary Star With Shortest Known Orbital Period

A team of astronomers writing in Astrophysical Journal Letters has shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes, making HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:04pm

Late Is The New Early

A reader was aghast-- outraged, I say-- at my suggestion that this precious music satellite, Project Calliope, might launch a few months late. Now, the rocket people at InterOrbital Systems are rock-solid and haven't had any reason to announce a delay ...

Article - Project Calliope - Mar 9 2010 - 4:19pm

Star Birth In SMM J1237+6203 Halted By Catastrophic Explosions

Scientists writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society say they have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in SMM J1237+6203, a galaxy in the early Universe. The researchers ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:04pm

A Cosmic Test For General Relativity

An analysis in Nature of more than 70,000 galaxies by a team of physicists suggests that the universe – at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth – plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Re ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 10 2010 - 2:55pm