SciFi films can be pretty scary, but it always helps to know that you’re watching fiction. Here are frightening facts from space that are anything but fictional.
Space Corpses in the Sky: Space exploration research has claimed a number of animal lives, and while the idea of sacrificing monkeys and dogs on the altar of science is rather disheartening, the notion that there are dead simian and canine space explorers in orbit RIGHT NOW just adds to the creepiness.
Several early space missions involved re-entry procedures, but not every spacecraft was recovered. This leads many to theorize that perhaps dozens of mummified animals are still making the orbital rounds up there. Think about that the next time you wish upon a star.
In this video WatchMojo.com speaks with Louie Bernstein about Galileo’s first discoveries and how it changed our understanding of the sky.
A common misconception about telescopes is that their main purpose is to magnify objects. This is false: in fact what a telescope does is capture more light than is possible by the naked eye. The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the world’s most important telescopes. Situated in orbit around Earth, but outside of its atmosphere, the Hubble gets a clearer view of the Universe and what lies within than any ground-based instrument. In this video, WatchMojo.com learns how the Hubble works.
Good call Buzz. From The Tech Herald:
Legendary Moon walker and NASA spaceman Buzz Aldrin has said the race to establish a permanent Moon base should be the result of international cooperation with the real focus on a manned mission to Mars.
Speaking in a lengthy interview with Popular Mechanics magazine, Aldrin said the next race to be the first to host a manned presence on the Moon should not be a financially damaging “space race” but an international effort combining the resources of China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia.
“By renouncing our goal of being first on the Moon (again), we would call off Space Race II with the Chinese and encourage them to channel their ambitious lunar efforts into the consortium,” Aldrin said.
He added that the Mark II mission to the Moon is, in fact, a “damaging” detour from what should be NASA’s principal objective — namely, the preparation for a manned mission to Mars.
“The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020 — a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago,” he said. “Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour.”
Approaching his 80th birthday, Aldrin was in no mood to hold back on criticism of the American space administration’s plan. In its place, Aldrin proposed a radical program he named the “Unified Space Vision,” which, controversially, calls for a permanently manned presence on Mars by 2035.
“Here’s my plan, which I call the Unified Space Vision,” he told the magazine. “It’s a blueprint that will maintain U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, avoid a counterproductive space race with China to be second back to the moon, and lead to a permanent American-led presence on Mars by 2035 at the latest.”
“That date happens to be 66 years after Neil Armstrong and I first landed on the moon — just as our landing was 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight,” Aldrin said.
A new color-coded image represents the first visual evidence of the existence of dark energy, a mysterious force that astronomers think is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.”This is the first time when we actually see the effect of dark energy in a picture,” said study leader István Szapudi of the University of Hawaii. “This is the most direct evidence of dark energy.”
The new image reveals the spectral fingerprints created by dark energy as it stretches huge supervoids and superclusters, structures that are roughly half a billion light-years across.
Superclusters are filled with dense clusters of galaxies, while supervoids are made up of mostly empty space.
According to the team, there is only a 1-in-200,000 chance that their detection of dark energy’s fingerprints happened randomly. Read more…
According to Ker Than
An artist’s impression shows the trio of super-Earths discovered by a European team and announced on June 16, 2008.
The three planets are 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times more massive than Earth and orbit the star HD 40307 every 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively.
According to Anne Minard
A brilliant burst of light marking a dying star’s final moments before exploding has been glimpsed by astronomers for the first time.Called a shock breakout, the x-ray flash—detected in January—signals the destruction of a star several times more massive than our sun.
This “first light” is just the opening salvo of a larger supernov blast that tears the star apart from within.
“They come out at the moment the star cracks open,” said study team member Alicia Soderberg, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Shock breakouts have been predicted for decades but are so short-lived that they have never been seen before.
The study authors think that future wide-field x-ray surveys could allow researchers to witness the starts of hundreds of supernovae each year. Read more…
According to Ker Than
The familiar eyeball shape of the Helix Nebula shows only two dimensions of this complex celestial body. But new observations suggest it may actually be composed of two gaseous disks nearly perpendicular to each other.
By listening to the “ringing” of a nearby planet-harboring star, astronomers have for the first time identified the birthplace of one of our galaxy’s many drifting stars.
The yellow-orange star Iota Horologii, located 56 light-years away near the southern-sky constellation Horologium (”The Clock”), was discovered to harbor a planet about two times the size of Jupiter in 1999.
But until now, scientists were unable to identify the exact characteristics of the star, or where in the galaxy it had formed.
The star currently resides in the “Hyades stream,” a large number of stars that move in the same direction, many of which are thought to be so-called “drifting stars” — stars that were displaced from their birthplace. The new method used by the team of astronomers to identify Iota Horologii’s stellar parentage involves studying how sound waves move through a star.
The approach could be used to ID other orphaned stars — estimated to make up about 20 percent of the stars within 1,000 light-years of the sun — and shed more light on how these stars move in the galaxy.
According to Andrea Thompson
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