Archive for the ‘Astronomy’ Category


Viking Experiment May Have Found Life’s Building Blocks on Mars After All

tweetleaks @ 12:37 PM on September 3, 2010

A new look at data from the Mars Phoenix mission suggests that Viking landers may have found the building blocks of life on the Red Planet after all way back in 1976. The surprise discovery of perchlorates by Phoenix could means the way the Viking experiment was set up actually would have destroyed any carbon-based [...]

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NASA Satellites and Spacecraft Look Into the Eye of Hurricane Earl

tweetleaks @ 12:07 PM on September 3, 2010

NASA scientists, instruments and spacecraft are busy studying Hurricane Earl from both the air and space, and an unmanned aircraft actually flew inside the giant storm. Above is a satellite image from NASA’s Terra satellite, and below is an image taken by one of the astronauts on board the International Space Station, Doug Wheelock. Three [...]

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New Horizons Mission Practices Telescopic Imager on Pluto’s Twin

tweetleaks @ 11:17 AM on September 3, 2010

This summer, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken for its annual systems checkout, and took the opportunity to exercise the long range camera by snapping pictures of Neptune, which at the time, was 3.5 billion km (2.15 billion miles) away. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped several photos of the gas giant, but Neptune [...]

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How to Crash Stars Together

tweetleaks @ 10:57 AM on September 3, 2010

The math is simple: Star + Other star = Bigger star. While conceptually this works well, it fails to take into account the extremely vast distances between stars. Even in clusters, where the density of stars is significantly higher than in the main disk, the number of stars per unit volume is so low that [...]

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Darwin’s Secret Island: A Model of How Human Exploration Could Transform Mars

tweetleaks @ 3:00 AM on September 3, 2010

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island, one of a number of volcanic islands in the middle of the South Atlantic, located 1,600km (1,000 miles) from the coast of Africa and 2,250km (1,400 miles) from South America was a barren volcanic…

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"The Universe Exists Because of Spontaneous Creation" -Stephen Hawking

tweetleaks @ 2:48 AM on September 3, 2010

In “The Grand Design,” Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow suggest that physics and metaphysics (and religion) are merging. The grand design which we have taken for granted since Newton is more complex than anything we ever dreamed o…

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EcoAlert: Will Earth Mirror the Fate of Easter Island?

tweetleaks @ 2:14 AM on September 3, 2010

“We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island.” Frank Fenner, virologist Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overp…

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Image of the Day: 3.8 Billion Year-Old Impact Crater on Moon’s South Pole

tweetleaks @ 2:10 AM on September 3, 2010

A new geologic map of the moon’s Schrodinger basin paints an instant, camouflage-colored portrait of the lunar surface after a huge object struck the moon, revealing a patchwork of material, including the peak ring (inner brown ring), recent volcanic a…

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From the X Files Dept: China -"The UFO Capital of Planet Earth"

tweetleaks @ 2:08 AM on September 3, 2010

Yet another UFO sighting has been reported in Eastern China on August 31st in the southwestern Haiyan County of Zhejiang Province. The object sightedwas very bright, according to eyewitnesses. It was visible for at least three hours. It drew the…

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Ultraluminous Gamma Ray Burst 080607 – A "Monster in the Dark"

tweetleaks @ 6:05 PM on September 2, 2010

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are among the most energetic phenomenon astronomers regularly observe. These events are triggered by massive explosions and a large amount of the energy if focused into narrow beams that sweep across the universe. These beams are so tightly concentrated that they can be seen across the visible universe and allow astronomers [...]

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