Subterms
Space has some strange places and the Milky Way is no exception. These 5 barely begin to scratch the surface. Read on to learn more about some of the weirdest strange places in our galactic back yard. Strange Place: Blackhole Graveyard Palomar 5 is a globular cluster 65,000 light years away from Earth that orbits […] More
The Sunburst Arc shows a fuzzy or blurry image to the untrained eye. In fact, the image shows 12 copies of a galaxy 11 billion light-years away, distorted and copies by gravity in the foreground. Meet the Sunburst Arc At least 12 copies of the galaxy – called PSZ1 G311.65-18.48 and nicknamed the Sunburst Arc […] More
The closest black hole may be the closest black hole to Earth. It’s so close you can identify it in the night sky without a telescope. The black hole is lurking only 1,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Telescopium. It belongs to a system with two companion stars that are bright enough […] More
A radio telescope detected a fast radio burst from another galaxy. The signal pulsates in a regular 16 day cycle, according to a new paper posted on arXiv. The phenomenon, known as FRB 181112, was identified by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope. Follow-up observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) showed […] More
Satellites in space can spot changes to Earth’s climate, and they are providing frightening bird’s-eye views of the wildfires in Australia. The wildfires burning in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria began in November 2019, and they continue to pose severe safety and environmental problems. NBC News reported that thousands of Australians fled […] More
Can we destroy Jupiter with a little fire? On Earth, we know that hydrogen gas is extremely explosive. And we know that Jupiter is made mostly of hydrogen. So could we just set it on fire and turn Jupiter into a giant fireball? Classic riddle Q: A man (wearing a respirator) finds himself in a […] More
Quora: How old are the Atoms on Earth? How old are the Earth’s atoms? Ahh, time. Humans have grappled with time for… a long time. This is actually a really hard question—for very philosophical reasons. Age of Earth’s Atoms is Really Old When you think about it, for most of human history, the very concept […] More
Is Time Running Out on Dark Matter? Dark matter fails to materialize yet again. The fundamental problem is this: if a theory is confirmable but not falsifiable, it’s not a scientific theory. More
Science says the EmDrive is a fake. Its creator designed the EmDrive as an engine for space travel. The EmDrive uses a RF resonant cavity thruster. This should create thrust without any propellant. Traveling around and carrying all your fuel with you gets very expensive, and a propellant-less thruster would change space travel forever. Unfortunately, […] More
Finally, scientists have solved a 60-year-old mystery about Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, thanks to a tiny orbiting satellite and students at the University of Colorado Boulder. Published in Nature, the study looked at the source of high-energy electrons in Earth’s inner radiation belt. The Van Allen belts are two large belts of radiation that surround […] More
This is such a lovely story of an engineer who knew his stuff and saved the day! The W. M. Keck Observatory is a two-telescope astronomical observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in the U.S. state of Hawaii. The total funding to the Keck telescopes is in the billions of dollars, and it’s responsible […] More
The New Horizons craft visited Pluto and its moon, Charon, last year. The photos transmitted back were jaw-dropping. They even strung together a few photos taken a short time apart, which showed New Horizons’ Pluto approach. But a few photos don’t make video. Unfortunately. Video, of course, takes longer to transmit. And now, after almost […] More
Send this to a friend