Space and astronomy news
Unlike all of the other planets in the Solar System, Mercury is just bare rock. It does have a tenuous atmosphere, but ground and space-based observations see just the gray rocky color of Mercury. This gray color comes from Mercury’s molten surface that cooled and hardened billions of years ago after the formation of the …
No longer a planet, Pluto is just a member of the Kuiper Belt; a collection of icy objects that extend out past the orbit of Neptune. If you brought Pluto into the inner Solar System, it would start to act like a comet – blasting out gas and particles from the solar wind. It’s a …
We’re getting closer to finding an Earth-like planet out there in the universe. Spanish astronomers announced the discovery of the smallest exo-planet found to date, located 30 light years from earth. “I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth,” team leader Ignasi Ribas said at a …
Earth, four billion years ago, was a lifeless, hot and violent place. Not exactly a world where you’d expect life to form. But this was the scene where the first life-forming amino acids appeared. And how did this happen? According to new research, a lump of rock floating though space may have been irradiated by …
Continue reading “Did a Cooked Meteorite Seed Life on Earth?”
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has measured huge quantities of water and organic compounds surrounding the star AA Tauri, 450 light years from Earth. AA Tauri is a young star, only a million years old, not too dissimilar to our Sun when it was a baby. What makes AA Tauri even more special is that it …
Continue reading “Could AA Tauri Hold the Biochemical Key to Extra-Terrestrial Life?”
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are getting mischievous again. These artefacts from the Big Bang could be responsible for hiding inside planets or stars, they may even punch a neat, radioactive hole through the Earth. Now, they might start playing interplanetary billiards with asteroids in our solar system. Knocking around lumps of rock may not sound …
Continue reading “Could Primordial Black Holes Deflect Asteriods on a Collision Course with Earth?”
We can all guess what would happen should a massive black hole drift into our solar system… there wouldn’t be much left once the intense gravitational pull consumes the planets and starts sucking away at our Sun. But what if the black hole is small, perhaps a left over remnant from the Big Bang, passing unnoticed through our …
Continue reading “What Would Happen if a Small Black Hole Hit the Earth?”
One of the most spectacular sights in the night sky is a fireball; a rock from space impacts the atmosphere and blazes a trail that can last seconds or even minutes. These burn up harmlessly, but when do they turn dangerous? When do asteroids get large enough that they can actually get through the atmosphere …
This week, we’re on to the next planet in the solar system. Having only visited it up close once with Voyager 1, we don’t know much about this sideways-spinning ice giant. But today we’ll cover what we do know, including its faint rings, sideways axis of rotation and rocky core – a first in the …
Monday, October 22 – Something very special happened today in 2136 B.C. There was a solar eclipse, and for the very first time it was seen and recorded by Chinese astronomers. And probably a very good thing because in those days the royal astronomers were executed for failure to predict!Today is also the birthday of …
Continue reading “What’s Up this Week: October 22 – October 28, 2007”