Space, Science, Sci Fi, Technology and Exploration.
The James Webb Space Telescope will soon be on the move from Maryland to Texas, but how do you transport a giant telescope worth almost 10 billion dollars? Very carefully, obviously. The James Webb Space Telescope is charged with the job of peering into the cosmos and giving humanity an unprecedented look at the universe. …
Continue reading "The James Webb Space Telescope: To Be Handled With Care"
Intensely active volcanoes on the surface of Io have created an 8,300 square mile depression on the surface of the fourth largest Jovian moon. All the excitement around moons has been centered on Enceladus lately, with the announcement of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of its subsurface ocean and the possibility of life outside our …
Continue reading "Io And Behold: Huge Lava Waves Seen On Jupiter’s Moon"
Parallel trenches on the south pole of Enceladus have been labeled ‘tiger stripes’ by enthusiastic scientists, but could life exist beneath the tiger stripes of this leaky moon? For those not particularly interested in astronomy (how could you not be?), Enceladus is a small icy moon that orbits the gas giant, Saturn. It’s not exactly …
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Sirius is a nearby star that is twice as far as our closest neighbor, yet 16 times as bright. Researchers think that we can get there and study the star within 69 years. Astronomy has always felt fleetingly futile for me. Despite longing to know more, and yearning for the answer to the fundamental question …
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Uranus might be the butt of all astronomy jokes, literally, but some think that a mission to Uranus could do wonders for the scientific community and our solar system understanding. Uranus is a pretty lonely place. It hasn’t received a visitor since a 5 hour fly past in 1986, when Voyager 2 stopped by to …
Continue reading "Uranus: What A Mission To The Ice Giant Could Do For Science"
Enceladus is one of 62 moons orbiting the gas giant, Saturn, but it might be unique in the fact that conditions beneath the surface of the icy moon could be perfect for life to have developed. The excitement came after NASA revealed that Cassini, its spacecraft currently exploring Saturn and its environment, flew through plumes of …
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As well as investigating exoplanets and exomoons in the cosmos, astronomers have recently been studying distant members of our own stellar neighborhood. The planetary body, 2014 UZ224, more affectionately known as DeeDee, has been studied by teams interpreting data from Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). It lies about 3 times the distance of Pluto from …
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Detecting and confirming an exoplanet is really difficult; it takes expensive satellite equipment, skilled researchers and lots of time trawling through mountains of data. Detecting a piece of rock orbiting one of these exoplanets is almost impossible, which is why we haven’t done it yet. This year, however, might be the first year that we …
Continue reading "Beta Pictoris B Could Be The First Exoplanet With An Exomoon"
As we learn more about how our solar system came into being, we continue to find anomalies and phenomena in the outer solar system that confound us and force us to rewrite the really old history books. One such anomaly is Sedna; a dwarf planet with an eccentric orbit that some think was stolen from …
KELT-16b is a gas giant that orbits incredibly close to its star. A year on the planet lasts less than a day on Earth day and this is getting shorter as the planet continues its spiral of death. A new study has found that KELT-16b started its death spiral about 2 billion years ago and …
Continue reading "Gas Giant Close To Fiery End As KELT-16b Moves Closer To Its Star"
