Space and astronomy news
[/caption]Most of the Earth surface, about 70%, is covered with water. The remaining 30% is made up of the seven continental landmasses. Underneath the water that fills the oceans, and the dirt and plants that cover the continents, the Earth’s surface layer is made of rock. This outer layer formed a hard, rocky crust as …
[/caption] ESA released new images of Mars’ moon Phobos, taken during the Mars Express March 7, 2010 flyby, showing the rocky moon in exquisite detail and also in 3-D. Mars Express orbits the Red Planet in a highly elliptical, polar orbit that brings it close to Phobos every five months, and it is the only …
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Matryoshka dolls are a popular novelty for tourists going to Russia to bring home for their children. These dolls, which are hollow wooden bowling pin-shaped representations of a Russian woman (or babushka), are nested inside of each other, each doll smaller than the one that encases it. In a perfect model of planetary matryoshka dolls, …
Jupiter probably does not have a solid core. Jupiter’s core contains some rock and hydrogen metals. Scientists can not be 100 percent certain if deep within the planet there is a solid core or not, but based on gravitational measurements compared with Earth’s, the best educated guesses possible based on those measurements say there is …
This artist’s conception shows the newly discovered super-Earth GJ 1214b, which orbits a red dwarf star 40 light-years from our Earth. Credit: Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA More exoplanets this week! Today astronomers announced the discovery of so called super-Earth around a nearby, low-mass star, GJ1214. The newly discovered planet has a mass about six …
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[/caption] One of the legacies of the Apollo program is the rare lunar samples it returned. These samples (along with meteorites that originated from the moon and even one from Mars) can be radiometrically dated, and together they paint a picture a cataclysmic time in the history of our solar system. Over a period of …
[/caption] The Earth’s mass is 5.9736 x 1024 kg. That’s a big number, so let’s write it out in full: 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. You could also say the Earth’s mass is 5.9 sextillion tonnes. Phew, that’s a lot of mass. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the Earth has a fraction of the …
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is planning on building a massive – and I do mean massive – telescope in the next decade. The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is a 42-meter telescope in its final planning stages. Weighing in at 5,000 tonnes, and made up of 984 individual mirrors, it will be able to …
[/caption] The basic chemistry for life has been detected the atmosphere of a second hot gas planet, HD 209458b. Data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes provided spectral observations that revealed molecules of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere. The Jupiter-sized planet – which occupies a tight, 3.5-day orbit around …
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[/caption]There are many interesting facts about comets. Some are about the different parts of the comet, others are about the effects that comets have had on humans and their behavior. This article will let you know about the different parts of the comet, the orbital habits of a comet, and the effects that comets have …