A white arrow points to a faint object detected by chance in 2006 as astronomers scanned the skies for distant supernovae.
The object, which resembles a tailless comet, traces a long, elliptical orbit that takes it as much as 150 billion miles (241 billion kilometers) from Earth, astronomers announced in August 2008.
The object, dubbed 2006 SQ372, is a kind of tailless comet that’s currently some two billion miles (three billion kilometers) from Earth, a bit closer to the sun than Neptune.
But the lump of ice and rock is moving on a long, elliptical orbit that will take it on a round-trip journey lasting about 22,500 years. Read more…
According to Brian Handwerk
Space-industry belt-tightening and ever shrinking technology are combining to give tiny satellites a big future, scientists say.
Sometimes as small as softballs, the little orbiters are cheaper and quicker to build than the megabuck, monster-size satellites that have dominated for decades.
“In the last ten years small satellites have started to take off across different industries and the world,” said Pat Patterson of the Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University. Read more…
According to Graeme Stemp-Morlock
Deep underneath your feet is a hellish stone soup, kept hot by a torrent of radiation from poisonous isotopes of uranium, thorium and potassium in the earth’s superheated mantle. This is the heat that helps cause volcanoes, geysers and hot springs. And it is the heat that powers a modest number of electricity generators around the world, from Iceland to Indonesia.
This energy source remains largely untapped, though, simmering either too far below the surface to reach, or isolated from water that could carry it up. Read more…
According to Jonathan Fahey
As NASA prepares to send humans back to the moon and then on to Mars, psychologists are exploring the challenges astronauts will face on missions that will be much longer and more demanding than previous space flights. Psychologists outlined these mental health challenges recently at the American Psychological Association’s 116th Annual Convention, and introduced a new interactive computer program that will help address psychosocial challenges in space.
Read full story
According to ScienceDaily
NASA has put off the planned launch of its next-generation Orion spacecraft for a year, a setback to efforts to fly a successor to its aging space shuttles, the space agency announced Monday.
“September 2014 is when we are saying we will launch the first crew on the Orion,” program manager Jeff Hanley told reporters in a conference call Monday.
NASA officials plan to wrap up assembly of the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle fleet in 2010, freeing up money to build and fly the new spacecraft. Cost concerns are at the root of the delay, but NASA is also giving itself wiggle room to deal with the unforeseen technical problems that will inevitably crop up, Hanley said. Read more…
According to www.cnn.com
There’s a fungus among us chili fans—and some of the spicy peppers evolve their kick to repel it, a new study says.
Chili peppers develop piquant chemicals to thwart the harmful microbes long enough to give birds and other animals a chance to disperse the pepper seeds, helping the chilies to procreate, scientists found.
Chilis high in chemicals called capsaicinoids occur most in areas where the fungus can enter the peppers through holes bored by insects, and these chilies are hotter, said study author Joshua Tewksbury, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Read more…
According to John Roach
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
Venus, with its boiling-hot surface, doesn’t seem a likely place to find ET. But a new paper argues not only that Venusian clouds could harbor microbial life, but also that the life there could potentially hitch a ride aboard the solar wind to Earth. The possibility for microbial life on Venusian clouds has been suggested before, though it’s still not widely thought to be likely. However, the assertion that this life could potentially float from Venus to Earth is novel, and contentious. Read more…
According to Clara Moskowitz
Tags: Earth, microbes, Venus|
Posted By: ashley | Aug 11th
Unlike short-lived solar eclipses or unpredictable auroras, meteor showers regularly offer skywatchers a dazzling show.Soon the curtain will rise on one of the best of these showers: the Perseids, so called because the meteors appear to originate in the constellation Perseus.
Slated to peak sometime during the night and early morning of August 11 to 12, the shower offers one of the year’s best chances to see a shooting star. Read more…
According to Graeme Stemp-Morlock
Hanny van Arkel, a 25 year old school teacher, was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet last August when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky: a bright, gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle.
Van Arkel posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project, which encourages members of the public to join in astronomy research online.
Galaxy Zoo astronomers are now researching what may be a new class of astronomical object.
Click here to read more about this mysterious vortex and how you can be an astronomer on-line.
