Hauntingly Beautiful Aurora Video

by Jason Major on February 6, 2012


Time-lapse photographer Christian Mülhauser braved sub-zero temperatures and frozen camera equipment to capture this stunning aurora footage from Norway during the last week of January 2012.

Powerful solar storms in January made for some impressive auroral displays… thanks to Christian for capturing them on camera!

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600 Million Year Drought Makes Life on Surface of Mars Unlikely

by Paul Scott Anderson on February 6, 2012

View of Mars' surface near the north pole from the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona

Mars is often referred to as a desert world, and for good reason – its surface is barren, dry and cold. While water was abundant in the distant past, it has long since disappeared from the surface, although ice, snow, frost and fog are still common. Other than liquid brines possibly trickling at times, all of Mars’ remaining water is now frozen in permafrost and in the polar ice caps. It has long been thought that the harsh conditions would make current life unlikely at best, and now a new study reaffirms that view.

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Asteroid Vesta Floats in Space in High Resolution 3-D

February 6, 2012

The giant Asteroid Vesta literally floats in space in a new high resolution 3-D image of the battered bodies Eastern Hemisphere taken by NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter. Haul out your red-cyan 3-D anaglyph glasses and lets go whirling around Vesta and sledding down mountains to greet the alien Snowman! The sights are fabulous ! The [...]

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Super Bowl Cities Seen From Space

February 5, 2012

If you live in or are from the US, you probably know that today is Super Bowl Sunday. Whatever you happen to be doing, be it tailgating in Indianapolis, getting together with friends and family (and plenty of hot wings and nachos) in your living room or just waiting for all the fuss to be [...]

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The Milky Way’s Magnetic Personality

February 5, 2012

Recently we took a look at a very unusual type of map – the Faraday Sky. Now an international team of scientists, including those at the Naval Research Laboratory, have pooled their information and created one of the most high precision maps to date of the Milky Way’s magnetic fields. Like all galaxies, ours has [...]

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Journal Club – Neutrino Vision

February 5, 2012

According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the scientific literature. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, without further ado – today’s journal article is about the latest findings in neutrino astronomy. Today’s [...]

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Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…

February 4, 2012

It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting [...]

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New Study Shows How Trace Elements Affect Stars’ Habitable Zones

February 4, 2012

Habitable zones are the regions around stars, including our own Sun, where conditions are the most favourable for the development of life on any rocky planets that happen to orbit within them. Generally, they are regions where temperatures allow for liquid water to exist on the surface of these planets and are ideal for “life [...]

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Beautiful Conjunction: Comet Garradd Meets M92

February 4, 2012

This lovely image of Comet Garradd (C/2009 PI) as it passes by the globular cluster M92 in the constellation Hercules, was taken remotely from the Tzek Maun Observatory in New Mexico by our friends Giovanni Sostero, Ernest Guido and Nick Howes. While the two objects look like they are right next to each other, M92 [...]

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Cities at Night Panorama of Millions of US East Coast Earthlings

February 4, 2012

Do you live here? Tens of millions of Earthlings live and work in the bustling and seemingly intertwined American mega-metropolis of the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center splotch) captured in this stunning “Cities at Night” panorama of the East Coast of the United States along the Atlantic seaboard (image above). Look northward and you’ll see [...]

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Incredible 3-D View Inside a Martian Crater

February 3, 2012

This is why I always keep a pair of 3-D glasses by my computer. This well-preserved crater on Mars may look like just your average, run-of-the-mill impact crater in 2-D, but in 3-D, the sharply raised rim, the deep, cavernous crater body, and especially the steep crater walls will have you grabbing your armchairs so [...]

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Can We Land On a Comet?

February 3, 2012

The Rosetta mission will do something never before attempted: land on a comet. The spacecraft is now on its way to intercept comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in January 2014 and land a probe on it for what promises to be an amazing view. But what we know of comets so far comes from a few flyby missions. [...]

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Are You Listening to Astronomy.FM?

February 3, 2012

Are you listening to Astronomy.FM? If not, you should join the audience of over 25,000 listeners in 85 countries who are enjoying this amazing free service. Astronomy.FM is billed as “The only all-Astronomy radio station in the Known Universe.” You can listen to this one-of-a-kind radio station on-line anytime, as it is streaming 24 hours [...]

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How Plants May Have Helped Create Earth’s Unique Landscapes

February 3, 2012

According to conventional thinking, plant life first took hold on Earth after oceans and rivers formed; the soil produced by liquid water breaking down bare rock provided an ideal medium for plants to grow in. It certainly sounds logical, but a new study is challenging that view – the theory is that vascular plants, those [...]

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Hubble Captures a Classic Barred Spiral Galaxy

February 3, 2012

Is this what we look like? Astronomers don’t know for sure exactly what the Milky Way looks like, but searching out other barred spiral galaxies like this one is helping scientists to learn more about our home. Galaxy NGC 1073 is located in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).Most of the known spiral galaxies [...]

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Weekly Space Hangout – Feb 2nd, 2012

February 3, 2012
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SpaceX Test Fires SuperDraco Abort Engines Critical To Astronaut Launch Safety

February 3, 2012

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has test fired a prototype of its new SuperDraco engine that will be critical to saving the lives of astronauts flying aboard a manned Dragon spacecraft soaring to orbit in the event of an in-flight emergency. The successful full-duration, full-thrust firing of the new SuperDraco engine prototype was completed at the [...]

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Hubble Captures Giant Lensed Galaxy Arc

February 3, 2012

Less than a year ago, the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured an amazing image – a giant lensed galaxy arc. Gravitational lensing produces a natural “zoom” to observations and this is a look at one of the brightest distant galaxies so far known. Located some 10 billion light years away, the galaxy [...]

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Getting to the Core of Earth’s Falling Snow

February 2, 2012

An international plan is unfolding that will launch satellites into orbit to study global snowfall precipitation with unprecedented detail. With the upcoming Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellites, for the first time we will know when, where and how much snow falls on Earth, allowing greater understanding of energy cycles and how best to predict extreme [...]

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Armadillo Launches a STIG-A Rocket; Captures Awesome Image of ‘Ballute’

February 2, 2012

Over the weekend, Armadillo Aerospace launched one of their STIG-A rockets and captured a unique image of their recovery system. A ballute is a cross between a balloon and a parachute, and are braking devices that are usually used at high altitudes and high supersonic velocities. The one used by Armadillo looks very reminiscent of [...]

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