We finally get organized enough deal with several listener questions: isn’t dark matter just regular stuff we can’t see? how can parts of the Universe be expanding faster than the speed of light? what will Betelgeuse look like when it explodes as a supernova? what’s the speed of gravity? All these and more questions are answered.
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Next Up, the COROT Space Telescope
Step aside Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, there’s a new space telescope ready for launch. On December 27, 2006, the European Space Agency is planning to launch its planet hunting, starquake finding COROT satellite.
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Gallery of the Gemini North Telescope
I know we normally like to see pictures taken by telescopes, but here’s cool set of pictures of telescopes. Okay, it’s actually several pictures of one telescope, the Gemini North telescope, located atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. The timelapse photographs were all taken during a single night of telescope operations.
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Discovery Pulls Away from the Station
After 8 days docked together, and 4 spacewalks, the astronauts on board the International Space Station and the space shuttle Discovery big farewell to one another and closed the hatch. Discovery then detached from the station and drifted slowly away. Astronauts on board captured a series of photographs of the station as they pulled away.
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Carl Sagan’s Influence on My Life
My friend and forum co-admin, Phil Plait, reminded me that today marks 10 years without Carl Sagan. His son, Nick Sagan has been organizing an online memorial to commemorate his life and influence on science.
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Here’s a New Way to Explode: Hybrid Gamma-Ray Burst
Just when you thought you’d figured out all the ways to blow up, nature reveals a new way. This latest class of explosion is called a hybrid gamma-ray burst, and it was discovered by NASA’s Swift satellite. As with most gamma-ray bursts, this explosion probably indicates the birth of a new black hole in the Universe; however, the explosion itself was different from what astronomers have seen before.
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What’s Up 2007 is Now Available
It’s been nearly a year since we released Tammy Plotner’s What’s Up 2006. Over the course of the last year, the 400+ page book was downloaded more than 500,000 times. Well, it’s that time again.
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Happy Hubble Holidays
The fine folks at the Hubble Space Telescope released this photograph today to celebrate the holidays. I’m not sure which holiday specifically, but anytime is a good time to release beautiful new photographs from Hubble.
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Astronauts Fold Up a Solar Panel on the Final Spacewalk
On their fourth and final trip outside the International Space Station, US astronaut Robert Curbeam and Sweden’s Christer Fuglesang convinced a misbehaving solar panel to fold up nicely. The team suited up and began their spacewalk on Monday at 1910 GMT (2:10 pm EST). Working with the panel was hard, slow work, eventually requiring about five hours of poking panels and shaking the storage box to get the stuck sections to fold up properly. With the solar panel safely folded away, the station’s new panels are free to rotate to face the Sun and generate the maximum amount of electricity.
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Last Weekend’s Auroras… From Space
Of course, as usual, we had rain here on Vancouver Island, Canada in December. But large portions of the Northern Hemisphere were treated to quite the sky show over the weekend – beautiful auroras stretched across the skies. All thanks to a powerful flurry of solar flares unleashed from the Sun last week.
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