by Rebecca Boyle – source: medium As Hurricane Florence makes landfall, scientist eyes are looking to the skies It may not be visible on the sodden Eastern Seaboard, but far […]
Tag: astronomy
Are Moon Colonies Possible or the Fantasy of Billionaires?
by Eric Niiler – source: medium The economy of lunar mining and tourism Growing up, my brother and I couldn’t get enough of Space: 1999, a mid-’70s series that hypnotized […]
The Path to Galactic Colonization
by Tony Deller – source: medium The foundation for humanity’s future must be built by our generation Using the newest data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, the ESA […]
The story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell
via Timeline In the winter of 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell pored over the near-frozen dials of a radio telescope. Between curses, she breathed on the instruments hoping to thaw them […]
Extragalactic origin confirmed
Cosmic rays — fast-moving, high-energy nuclei — pervade the Universe. We know that the lower-energy variety that we detect on Earth is funnelled by the solar wind. However, higher-energy cosmic […]
Space inspires people
Why do you think space inspires people so much? I guess that it’s our human nature to explore and we see it, at least most of us can see it, […]
Titan brighter at twilight than in daylight
Muñoz, Antonio García, Panayotis Lavvas, and Robert A. West. “Titan brighter at twilight than in daylight.” Nature Astronomy 1, Article number: 0114 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41550-017-0114 (arXiv) Investigating the overall brightness of […]
Sink holes and dust jets on comet 67P
by Paul Weissman from Nature 523, 42–43 (02 July 2015) doi:10.1038/523042a Analyses of images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft reveal the complex landscape of a comet in rich detail. Close-up […]
Bounty of dark galaxies found
from Nature 523, 9 (02 July 2015) doi:10.1038/523009b Astronomers have discovered more than 850 faint galaxies in a galaxy cluster that could be made mostly of dark matter. Using archived […]
Dust-poor galaxies at early times
by Veronique Buat from Nature 522, 422–423 (25 June 2015) doi:10.1038/522422a Observations of galaxies that formed early in the Universe’s history reveal much lower dust levels than are found in […]
‘Tatooines’ may be common
from Nature 523, 9 (02 July 2015) doi:10.1038/523009d Planets orbiting a binary star system — like Tatooine, the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars — could form […]
Stars seen forming in a far-off galaxy
from Nature 522, 259 (18 June 2015) doi:10.1038/522259a Astronomers have seen their best glimpse yet of stars forming in the early Universe. The ALMA radio telescope in Chile explored the […]
A Mars-sized exoplanet
by Gregory Laughlin from Nature 522, 290–291 (18 June 2015) doi:10.1038/522290a Analysis of Kepler data has yielded the smallest known mass for an exoplanet orbiting a normal star. Its mass […]
Megaflare seen on star surface
from Nature 522, 131 (11 June 2015) doi:10.1038/522131d Astronomers have spotted an enormous surge of light and magnetic energy on a nearby star. A team led by Wouter Vlemmings at […]