Here’s a new perspective on your home planet, helpfully provided by a NASA asteroid-sampling probe. Earth and the moon are two bright dots floating in an immense black void in the new view, which was captured by the space agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Jan. 17 from a distance of 39.5 million miles (63.6 million kilometers). By Mike Wall – Full Story at Live Science
An interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua has confounded astronomers ever since it passed through our solar system in October of last year. Scientists initially thought that the object — the first-ever visitor from another solar system spotted by Earth-based telescopes — was a comet. Later, they considered it an asteroid and even later described it as a possibly comet-like icy body with a rocky crust. Now, scientists have found that in addition to its confusing appearance, ‘Oumuamua — an up to 1,300-foot-long (400 meters), cucumber-shaped object — likely has a rather dramatic history. When astronomers from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern … Read more
The New Horizons spacecraft’s imager (called the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) captured these false-color images in December 2017 of Kuiper Belt Objects 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85. These are, for now, the farthest images from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. The photos don’t look like much: blurry green splotches against pixelated blue. But they’re arguably among the most amazing photographic images ever. That’s because they were taken from the farthest point from planet Earth of any images ever captured, snapped by a spacecraft just over 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That spacecraft is … Read more
Sometimes, in the course of innocuous browsing for a topic, one comes across a cool bit of science and an unexpected tidbit pops up that really gets the muse going. This happened to me today. Almost two decades ago, NASA launched a little satellite whose mission was to study our magnetosphere. The neat little guy, IMAGE, sent us back a lot of real photographic gems of our little mudball and information that added to our scientific understanding of our world. It showed us the unique qualities of the protective, living shield our core generates, and how it interacts with our … Read more
There are tiny comets orbiting foreign suns. And human beings can detect them. Six times, about 800 years ago, dark things passed between the bright-yellow dwarf star KIC 3542116 and Earth. They were small in cosmic terms, about 330 billion tons (300 billion metric tons). That’s about the size of Halley’s Comet, or just one-245 millionth the mass of Earth’s moon. But they were big enough. They blocked a fraction of a fraction of the light that was streaming outward from that star. Eight hundred years later, the sensitive lens of the Kepler Space Telescope — a nearly meterwide piece … Read more
Alien-life hunters should keep an open mind when scanning the atmospheres of exoplanets, a new study stresses. The time-honored strategy of looking for oxygen is indeed a good one, study team members said; after all, it’s tough for this gas to build up in a planet’s atmosphere if life isn’t there churning it out. “But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” study lead author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a doctoral student in Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. “Even if life is common in the cosmos, we have … Read more
You probably think about viruses only when you’re sick, but there’s a group of microbiologists who want to change that. In fact, they want you to consider the possibility that viruses may be found in space. In a recent review, published online Jan. 10 in the journal Astrobiology, a trio of scientists from the U.S. and Japan posited that viruses may be spread across interplanetary space. Those researchers want to convince astrobiologists to devote more time looking for these curious molecular machines. A virion — the form a virus takes outside of a host — consists of genetic material encapsulated in … Read more
The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that the blast from a meteor caused a 2.0 earthquake over Detroit and southeast Michigan on Tuesday night around 8:10 pm. The earthquake was recorded 8 kilometers west-southwest of New Haven, according to the USGS. The meteor lit up the sky and social media was flooded with videos of its blinding light. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) reported 355 sightings. Sightings were reported in Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Ontario, Canada. By Andy Towle – Full Story at Towleroad.com
SpaceX’s monstrous new rocket has officially arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its debut test launch. Elon Musk — who founded the space exploration firm in 2002, one year before he launched Tesla (TSLA) — tweeted photographs of the Falcon Heavy awaiting its big moment inside a SpaceX hangar. The exact date of the Heavy test launch isn’t clear. The plan was to launch before the new year, but a series of delays pushed it into 2018. A tweet posted to SpaceX’s verified account on December 6 said the company is targeting “early January.” By Jackie Wattles … Read more
Last month, The New York Times published an article describing a secret government program investigating reports by military pilots of unidentified flying objects they encountered in the course of their daily duties. The media was awash with stories of flying saucers and extraterrestrial encounters, with scientists downplaying the likelihood of alien visitation and UFO enthusiasts exclaiming their excitement. While I sit very firmly on the side that believes these reports more likely have an unremarkable and terrestrial explanation, whether alien life exists is a very real and credible scientific question. What is the possibility that life — and even intelligent … Read more