NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is about to cross another milestone on its long journey leaving the Solar System. According to researchers at the University of California, Riverside, the plucky spacecraft is about to pass through the "termination shock"; the point at which the Sun's solar wind slows down to subsonic speed.
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During many holidays, the folks working on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope try and find an image that captures the essence of the celebration. We've seen Christmas Tree clusters and spooky nebulae. To show their holiday spirit, the Hubble folks have released this beautiful image of the spiral galaxy M74. It's a stretch, I guess, but wow, what a picture.
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It's always exciting to see an idea in theory verified with real observations. For the first time, astronomers have observed a theoretical stage in stellar evolution, when a star's envelope is beginning to flatten and collapse, and streams of gas are escaping out. New observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted a young star right at this stage, blasting out material in powerful jets.
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Like a baseball struck by a bat, there's a neutron star out there that's going, going, gone. Discovered using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the neutron star appears to be the result of a lopsided supernova explosion. It's now hurtling away from the Milky Way faster than 4.8 million km/h (3 million mph). And it's never coming back.
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Just in case you needed more evidence that yes, there are robots from Earth roving around on Mars, check out this photograph. Okay, so it's a little blurry, and you wouldn't actually know what you were looking at unless I told you. That's NASA's Spirit rover, photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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Venus is a hostile world, with high temperatures, intense pressures, and an atmosphere with sulphuric acid. The Russian spacecraft sent to explore it succumbed in mere hours. Well, now it appears that Venus is even more dangerous than previously imagined, with lightning flashing in the atmosphere.
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With the Moon quickly departing early evening skies, now is the time to find a hero. Thanks to attention Comet 17/P Holmes has generated, many SkyWatchers have now become familiar with the constellation of Perseus, but there's a lot more there than just a comet! Only a few days ago, Holmes passed a wonderful bright star named Mirfak - a part of the Alpha Persei Association. Viewable with the unaided eye, but best in binoculars, this young, moving cluster is also known as Melotte 20 or Collinder 39 and is around 601 light years away. What a treat to catch a comet overlaying a star cluster!
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For your space photo, here's a cool image captured by Gob332. It's some star trails behind the branch of a tree.
The New York Times has a fascinating look at the space game Eve: Online. When I get tired of World of Warcraft, I'm sure I'll give this a look.
Why explore space? The Bad Astronomer tells you why. Oh, and he's also giving away a book.
When there's private space travel, there'll be space travel agents.
Remember that cool exoskeleton in Aliens? Reality is catching up fast.
Solar? Bio-fuel? Old technology ideas. Check out these cutting edge alternative energy concepts.
Pamela continues to debunk the speculative stories coming out of New Scientist. This time, that there's an alternative universe poking through a void in space.
Chair Force Engineer shares his list of technologies that need to be developed for a spacefaring society.
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There will never be a better time to ask Santa for a telescope than this Christmas! Over the last few weeks the planet Mars has doubled in brightness… and for every minute that passes… Earth and Mars get about 590 kilometers closer! Closer, that is, until December 18 when our separation will be about 88.5 million kilometers apart.
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With a fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars, and rovers crawling across its surface, there's a flood of images of the Red Planet. It's nice to know the scientists working on those missions can take the time to look elsewhere every now and then. So today, let me present to you some images of the Martian moons: Phobos and Deimos.
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Satellites have revolutionized climate science and geology. The better your instruments, the better you can track what's actually going on around the world. This week US and British science agencies unveiled the output of some of these instruments: a detailed map of Antarctica.
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For a little while there, Comet 17P/Holmes was the largest object in the Solar System, flaring up by a factor of over a million. Its cloud of gas and dust expanded outward to cover a diameter of 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) - bigger than the Sun. Well, the party's over. Comet Holmes is fading away again. But will it follow history and flare up again?
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With all of the press going to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it's about time that Neptune got a turn. Triton – one of the moons of Neptune – is curious, with large swaths of the planet resembling the skin of a cantaloupe and a retrograde orbit (opposite that of Neptune's rotation). Its surface is thought to be rather young, and a new method of counting the craters that pock the moon may push the age of Triton's surface back even younger than previously thought.
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First, let me direct your attention to the 30th Carnival of Space, hosted by Bad Astronomy. I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but the Carnival is a great way to increase exposure to your website or blog. If you want more readers, join the carnival.
My absolute favourite television show, Futurama, has a new DVD coming out called Bender's Big Score. If you like the show, give it some support and buy a DVD. You can find out more here from the official website.
Centauri Dreams talks about the past and future of solar sail technology.
Astronomy Picture of the Day has this image of the International Space Station over the Ionian Sea. Just think what it took to capture that image.
Colony Worlds reports on a new technology that could give solar energy the ability to keep on providing power, right through the night.
Astroprof offers you an easy way to find Mars; just look for the Moon. The two objects are close together right now, and easy to find.
Pamela Gay debunks the recent news that observing the Universe will hasten its demise.
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It's been a long journey, 64 episodes, but now we're back where we began: Pluto. Last time we talked about how Pluto lost its planethood status, so we won't go over all that again. This time we're going to talk about Pluto, its moons, the Kuiper belt, and the other icy objects that inhabit the outer Solar System.
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Pluto and the Icy Outer Solar System - Show notes and transcript
Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.
Go here if you'd like some Pluto pictures.
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Monday, November 26 - Today in 1965 marked the launch of the first French satellite - Asterix 1. Today is also the seventh anniversary of the discovery of the meteorites SAU 005 & 008: the "Mars Meteorites." These meteorites are known to be of Martian origin because of gases preserved in the glassy material of their interior. They were hurled into space some 600,000 years ago when a probable asteroid impact on Mars tossed them high enough to escape the planet's gravity, and they were captured by our gravity these many thousands of years later. They are just two of the 32 meteorites found on Earth which have been positively determined from their chemical compositions to be of Martian origin.
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Explosions are almost always cool, and supernovae are some of the most spectacular and violent explosions in the Universe. In 2006, the supernova SN 2006gy wowed scientists with a light show that was 10 times as luminous as the average supernova, challenging the traditional model of exactly how an exploding star creates a supernova. Astronomers suspect that the cause is the repeated production of antimatter in the core of the star.
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When stars like our Sun run out of fuel, they die a long slow death as a white dwarf, slowing cooling down over billions of years. But now an international team of astronomers has found an unusual form of white dwarf with a bare carbon core; one that might suggest a new sequence of stellar evolution. A fate for stars right on the edge of detonating as supernovae.
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As humans prepare to return to the Moon, this time to stay, there are so many different technologies that need to be developed and tested. NASA and the NSF are testing out a new prototype for an inflatable habitat that might eventually protect humans on the Moon. And they're testing it in the most extreme place on Earth: Antarctica.
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If Mars ever had water flowing on its surface, as the many canyons and riverbed-like features on the Red Planet seem to indicate, it also would have needed a thicker atmosphere than what encircles that planet today. New research has revealed that Mars did indeed have a thick atmosphere for about 100 million years after the planet was formed. But the only thing flowing on Mars’ surface at that time was an ocean of molten rock.
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You know what it's like to get an X-ray done: you go to the doctor, get in a large machine, she puts on a lead vest, and X-rays shoot through your body, forming a picture of your skeletal structure. Well, using the IceCube neutrino detector – as well as other neutrino detectors to come – it might be possible to do something very similar to this, but to the Earth.
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We’ve reached Neptune, the final planet in our tour through the solar system – but don’t worry! The tour’s not over, but after this week we’ll be all out of planets. Neptune has a controversial story about its discovery, some of the strongest winds in the solar system and some weird moons.
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Neptune - Show notes and transcript
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A child wakes with boundless energy, runs and jumps through a day of fun and excitement. Then they fall, exhausted, to sleep, dreaming of another day. Authors Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe – Beyond the Big Bang see our universe as having similar cycles. And, just as with the child, energy plays a staring role for their universe as it goes through its motions.
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Monday, November 19 - Even if you only use binoculars tonight, you can't miss the beautiful C-shape of Sinus Iridium as it comes into view on the lunar surface. As we have learned, the mountains that ring it are called the Juras, and the crater punctuating them is named Bianchini. Do you remember what the bright tips of the opening into the "Bay of Rainbows" are called? That's right: Promontorium LaPlace to the northeast and Promontorium Heraclides to the southwest. Now take a good look at Heraclides… Just south of here is where Luna 17 landed, leaving the Lunokhod rover to explore!
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Today's photo is the Moon. Sure, I've shown lots of pictures of the Moon, but this one's lunertic's first astrophoto, and I thought I could help encourage this wonderful hobby. Take more, let's see them.
Space Prizes has some interesting links to the recent 2009 Space Settlement Calendar Art Contest. How come nobody told me about this?
Nancy Houser at A Mars Odyssey has a great two part article about the first African American astronaut: Guion Bluford. Here's part 1 and part 2.
Astronomy Picture of the Day has an image of the Orion Nebula, with a streak through the middle that turned out to be fuel dumped out of a recent rocket launch.
Jeff Foust at Space Politics gives a run down of NASA's Administrator's time in front of a Senate committee. It sounds like an uncomfortable place to be. Keith Cowing from NASA Watch has an opinion on the matter too.
Director of the Planetary Society, Louis Friedman, puts the most recent shuttle mission into perspective. The astronauts had a dangerous job of fixing the station's solar wings, so why wasn't there more press about it?
Pamela Gay translates some astro-gibberish into a really interesting scientific result.
The Angry Astronomer got a great post about the power of Big Sky Surveys.
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