Space

CIR Pulses 'Pumping Out' Mars's Atmosphere

An international team of space physicists reports that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space as a result of pressure from solar wind pulses. Their new study in Geophysical Research Letters should help scientists better understand the ev ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 12 2010 - 11:36am

Asteroid RQ36 Could Tell How Solar System Came To Be

The asteroid 1999 RQ36 may be able to tell scientists how the solar system was born, and perhaps, shed light on how life began. The chunk of rock and dust, about 1,900 feet in diameter, also might hit us someday, according to NASA researchers studying the ...

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

Super Supernova: SN 2007if Exceeds Chandrasekhar Limit

Until recently, it was thought that white dwarfs could not exceed what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a critical mass equaling about 1.4 times that of the Sun, before exploding in a supernova. Since 2003, four supernovae have been discovered that wer ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 15 2010 - 6:32pm

Calliope Art Attack

I'm launching a satellite to make music from the ionosphere. But what would that look like, in a dramatic sense? In an evocative sense? In a perfect world, I could just ask a couple of children to draw me their impression of what 'a satellite mak ...

Article - Project Calliope - Mar 16 2010 - 2:41pm

Thermal Images Reveal Details About Jupiter's Great Red Spot

New Thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and c ...

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

Water On Jupiter-Like Corot-9b?

The newly discovered gas giant Corot-9b may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, according to a new paper published today in Nature. Some evidence also suggest that the exoplanet, discovered last Spri ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:05pm

Crowdsourcing Science

Anyone can help discover new stuff in Galaxy Zoo- but why do people bother in the first place? In the podcast "Why Go to the Zoo?", Jordan Raddick responds with some unexpected insight into why people donate their time for open science. Anyone ca ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Mar 19 2010 - 1:35pm

Star Factories In SMM J2135-0102 Viewed Up Close

The combination of a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array has given astronomers the clearest view to date of the "star factories" in SMM J2135-0102, a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. The distant galaxy, th ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:05pm

Helium Rain Explains Neon Mystery On Jupiter

Scientists claim that helium rain is the best explanation for the scarcity of neon in the outer layers of Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet. Neon dissolves in the helium raindrops and falls towards the deeper interior where it re-dissolves, d ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:05pm

The First Galaxy Builder

"To Contribute to Mankind" Dr. Beatrice Hill Tinsley invented the galaxies that I crash. Before I was born, she laid the foundations for the work that changed our view of galaxies as mere bundles of stars into the current cosmological view of pr ...

Article - Project Calliope - Mar 23 2010 - 1:56pm