Cartoon – Illegal Aliens
Tag: space
Our sun’s hotter sister
Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]
Read moreIce in a planetary cauldron
With temperatures in excess of 800 F, Mercury is one of the last places in the solar system you’d expect to find ice. But when NASA’s Messenger spacecraft transmitted its first optical images of the closest planets to the sun, that’s exactly what scientists discovered. Mercury sits about 36 million miles from the sun, which is roughly 57 million miles […]
Read moreLife-friendly lake on mars
NASA scientists have discovered evidence that a large freshwater lake existed on Mars billion of years ago, further strengthening the case that Earth’s neighbor once harbored life.The lake was part of a network of waterways that could have lasted thousands or even millions of years—possibly long enough for simple organisms to take hold there.Those conclusions come from an analysis of […]
Read moreThe stuff of life on Mercury
Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has blistering 800-degree temperatures at its equator—but its poles are full of ice. New data from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, which began orbiting Mercury last year, has revealed that as much as a trillion tons of ice exists in shadowy polar craters, where temperatures can drop to minus 370 degrees. Much of the ice […]
Read moreThe mystery of dark matter is solved
THE UNIVERSE IS A LOT OF THINGS, BUT EASY TO understand isn’t one of them. Take the fact that more than 80% of its mass is missing. Galaxies spin so fast, they would fly apart if the gravity of some unseen mass weren’t keeping them intact, sur rounding them like a glass paperweight encasing a butterfly. Cosmologists have been trying […]
Read moreThe secrets of supermassive black holes
Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma tells the Associated Press. “They are monstrous,” she says. The smaller of the […]
Read moreCartoon – The future of potholes
ARE STARS REALLY EATING PLANETS?
Astronomers have found that Tabby’s Star has been at it again – going through a dimming phase. Tabby’s star is located in the constellation Cygnus which is about 1600 light years away. Researchers have come up with the explanation that this star at one time ate a planet which is causing it to flicker. Some also think that its possibly […]
Read moreThe biggest thing in the universe
British astronomers have identified a celestial object so large that it challenges scientists’ basic assumptions about the nature of the universe. Huge-LQG is a cluster of 73 quasars, each of which lies at the center of its own galaxy.The structure measures 4 billion light-years across at its greatest dimension; our own Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, is […]
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