Space

There is water inside the moon. A lot, it turns out, according to the first measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions, which show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth’s upper mantle. Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globu ...

Article - News Staff - May 30 2011 - 6:24pm

NGC 6744- New Image Looks Like Milky Way's 'Twin'

The MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope has captured an image of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). And in the image, NGC 6744 looks a lot like our Milky Way. We see NGC 6744 almost face ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 1 2011 - 11:43am

Follow The Space Money?

NASA historically has received 0.5% to 1% of the federal budget, a penny or less per dollar. I don't want to make that sound small-- I'd love a penny for every federal dollar-- but in terms of government programs, it's not the largest. We a ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Jun 4 2011 - 11:25am

Big Bang Not To Follow Pluto

There are often heated discussions about the Big Bang. The Big Bang is well defined as the high density state that you get if you extrapolate the today observable cosmic Hubble expansion backward into the past. This definition has been the same one al ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Mar 14 2013 - 6:34am

ULAS J1120+0641 Is The Most Distant Quasar Yet

A quasar named ULAS J1120+0641, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe- yet. ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 29 2011 - 10:01am

"Zombie" Stars Explode, Revive, Then Suck Matter Out Of Other Stars

According to an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, 'zombie' stars may be a way to measure dark energy. Type Ia supernovae are stars that have been observed since 1054 A.D., when an exploding star formed the crab nebula, a supernova remnant. Th ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2011 - 6:30pm

Topical Index For The Sky By Day

Looking back at over 2 years of writing, this column has covered a lot of ground. Here's a topical index as proof. ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Jul 1 2011 - 10:56am

Happy Birthday Neptune

Tomorrow, that is. On July 12th, 2011, Neptune will have completed exactly one orbit around the Sun since it was discovered on September 23rd, 1846. So, Happy Birthday, Neptune ...

Blog Post - Robert H Olley - Jul 11 2011 - 4:06am

How To Activate A Supermassive Black Hole

There were concerns among people who don't understand physics that the LHC might create a black hole and swallow the Earth. Obviously in an infinite Universe anything can happen but the precautionary principle taken to such extremes is really only ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 13 2011 - 5:00am

The Pending Space Weather Catastrophe

Fact #1: There will be a solar event in the next five years that wipes out the electrical grid for the US. Fact #2: Solar and space weather prediction is about as accurate as hurricane predictions-- lots of maybes and false warnings, but great after-disast ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Jul 15 2011 - 2:05pm