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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Astronauts Working to Fold Arrays
Mission Specialists Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang have gone back outside the International Space Station to try and get its troublesome solar arrays to retract properly. Imagine a big fold out map, that’s supposed to go back on exactly the same folds. It’s not folding back up again, and nothing they tried from inside fixed it. Time to do this hands on.
Curbeam and Fuglesang stepped out around 2pm EST, and they should get back in around 8:25 pm EST, after more than six hours in space.
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Book Review: In Search of Dark Matter
I’m continually amazed at the abilities of our species. Foremost amongst our talents is deduction. Using logic and reasoning, a truth can be determined without direct evidence. Ken Freeman and Geoff McNamara in their book ‘In Search of Dark Matter‘ showcase this talent. In this book, they outline the basis and ongoing search for something we can never see and only indirectly measure. Elementary or not, Holmes would be jealous.
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What’s Up this Week: December 18 – December 24, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! For most of us, the longest night of the year is fast approaching… Why not enjoy solstice with an in-depth look at an amazing galaxy? For those of you who enjoyed the great display the Geminids produced last week, there will also be two more meteor showers to add to the celestial show! So grab your binoculars, set up your scopes and let’s head out into the night because…
Here’s what’s up!
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How Multiple Star Systems Come Together
Multiple star systems are a staple of science fiction. The heroes stumble across a parched desert searching for some escape from the three suns burning in the sky. As they struggle for their lives, perhaps our protagonists might take a moment to consider the chain of astronomical events that brought them to this moment.
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