A user has found a 'huge asteroid' while scanning the virtual heavens using Googly Sky. Youtube user planetkrejci, who has investigated other anomalies on NASA pictures, claims the object – found using the Google website which transports the heavens to desktop computers and smartphones – is an asteroid which is heading towards Earth. He [...More...]
A rare transit of Venus across the Sun occurs Tuesday. It is a spectacle that won't repeat for another century. The passage of Venus in front of the Sun is among the rarest of astronomical events. Only six transits are known to have been observed by humans before: 1639, 1761, 1874, 1882 and 2004. [...More...]
On June 4th, 2012, there's going to be a full Moon. According to Native American folklore it’s the Strawberry Moon, so-called because the short season for harvesting strawberries comes during the month of June. This Strawberry’s going to have a bite taken out of it. At 3:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, not long before sunrise [...More...]
On Sunday, May 20th, the sun is going to turn into a ring of fire for it's annular solar eclipse. It is the first annular eclipse to be seen from the United States in 18 years and the first one to be visible from earth in more than 2 years. The eclipse will also be [...More...]
A fragment from the fireball that exploded over California and Nevada on April 22, 2012. Photo Credit: NASA, Lunar Science Institute Scientists are on an epic treasure hunt for meteorite fragments from a spectacular fireball that lit up the daytime sky over California last month. The space rocks came from a minivan-size asteroid that plunged [...More...]
Meteor 1-1, the Soviet Union's first fully operational weather satellite, fell in Antarctica on Tuesday after more than four decades in orbit, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Fragments of the Meteor 1-1 satellite entered the Earth's atmosphere at 02:17 a.m. Moscow time on Tuesday [22:17 GMT Monday]. The defunct satellite fell in the Queen Maud Land [...More...]
An asteroid spotted by amateur astronomers only after it had skimmed the Earth will come even closer next February, but without posing a threat, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday.
A rare rectangular-shaped galaxy has been discovered by astronomers. The star gazers – from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Finland – discovered the quirky cosmic phenomenon within a group of 250 galaxies some 70 million light years away. ‘In the Universe around us, most galaxies exist in one of three forms – spheroidal, disc-like, or [...More...]
A decade ago, Houston businessman and philanthropist George P. Mitchell was so certain there were big discoveries to be made in physics and astronomy and that they should come out of Texas A and M University, he put money on it, endowing the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy to bring the world’s most eminent minds in physics and astronomy to Aggieland.
Astronomers have known for some time that the earliest galaxies were much smaller than the impressive spiral and elliptical galaxies that now fill the Universe. Over the lifetime of the cosmos galaxies have put on a great deal of weight but their food, and eating habits, are still mysterious. A new survey of carefully selected galaxies has focussed on their teenage years – roughly the period from about 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang.
Using radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers have obtained a first tantalizing look at a crucial early stage in star formation. The new observations promise to help scientists understand the early stages of a sequence of events through which a giant cloud of gas and dust collapses into dense cores that, in turn, form new stars.
An afternoon whirlwind on Mars lofts a twisting column of dust more than half a mile (800 meters) high in an image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Glowing green and red, shimmering hypnotically across the night sky, the aurora borealis is a wonder to behold. Longtime sky watchers say it is the greatest show on Earth. It might be the greatest show in Earth orbit, too. High above our planet, astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been enjoying an up-close view of auroras outside their windows as the ISS flys through geomagnetic storms.
Osteoporosis is a harsh disease that reduces the quality of life for millions and costs Europe around 25 billion euros ($31 billion) each year. It typically affects the elderly, so the rise in life expectancy in developed countries means the problems inflicted by osteoporosis are increasing.
The myriad faint stars that comprise the Antlia Dwarf galaxy are more than four million light-years from Earth, but this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image offers such clarity that they could be mistaken for much closer stars in our own Milky Way. This very faint and sparsely populated small galaxy was only discovered in 1997.
A team of astronomers has discovered the most distant example of a galaxy cluster lying in the middle of one of the most well-studied regions in the sky. Galaxy clusters are the ‘urban centres’ of the universe and may contain thousands of galaxies. This cluster is located 10.5 billion light-years away from our own Milky Way galaxy and is made up of a dense concentration of 30 galaxies that is the seed for a much bigger ‘city’.
The Summer Olympics could be crippled by a solar storm far more potent than the one currently wearing away at Earth’s magnetic field, a British physicist said. “We have the potential this year to see what planners call a Black Swan event — one that is unlikely but if it happens will have an extraordinary impact on our lives.”
A new version of the city-building computer game that factors in real-world consequences of energy choices has won endorsements from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and the director of the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Three months before the last transit of Venus this century, scientists are gathering at the Observatoire de Paris to finalise their observation plans in a workshop supported by the Europlanet Research Infrastructure and the EGIDE/PHC Sakura Program.
In the grand scheme of the solar system, Venus and Earth are almost the same distance from the sun. Yet the planets differ dramatically: Venus is some 100 times hotter than Earth and its days more than 200 times longer.
Many of us see a man in the moon-a human face smiling down at us from the lunar surface. The “face,” of course, is just an illusion, shaped by the dark splotches of lunar maria (smooth plains formed from the lava of ancient volcanic eruptions).
Researchers say a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of a lake in central Mexico suggests a cosmic body crashed into Earth.
There is light at hand for those who toil away in a poorly-lit office. Scientists at the CeBIT high-tech fair have developed a system that gives the feeling of working outside under blue skies.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has “sniffed” molecular oxygen ions around Saturn’s icy moon Dione for the first time, confirming the presence of a very tenuous atmosphere.