One of my favorite
blogs happens to be local to me. Eric Berger, the Houston Chronicle's "SciGuy" usually reports on the
weather. But he also posts entertaining and serious stuff as well.
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posted by PapaLobo
on Nov 22, 2011 -
3 comments
Carl Sagan famously said that
we are all made of star stuff. In his vision the basic building blocks of life were jettisoned into interstellar space by the massive explosions of stars going supernova. Now scientists from Hong Kong University
have claimed that the results of their
latest study(paywall), published in Nature, indicate that stars can create complex organic compounds on the very short timescale of weeks.
[more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Oct 27, 2011 -
48 comments
A team of astronomers monitoring data from the
Kepler, a craft designed to identify potenially habitable stars, have just announced today that they have located one orbiting
a double star system (NYT Link). Early data suggests it's a gaseous planet, but it is also within the range considered "sustainable for life". Still, if there's no life there, Kepler's got
over a thousand other exoplanets to check out.
Officially, the newly-discovered planet is named "Kepler 16b," but astronomers have already nicknamed it
"Tatooine".
posted by EmpressCallipygos
on Sep 15, 2011 -
59 comments
Sunspots, first observed by Galileo, normally follow an 11-year cycle. We are into a few years into (recorded) cycle number 24 but according to NASA it's looking rather
underpowered. Nobody is certain exactly what the consequences will be, but one distinct possibility is a
cold period; a previous low in solar activity, the
Maunder minimum, is correlated with a brief
Little Ice Age. Nobody really knows how this unusual solar weather pattern might interact with human-caused climate change.
Previously, albeit somewhat controversially.
posted by anigbrowl
on Jun 14, 2011 -
28 comments
French scientists have just published a paper entitled "Gliese 581d is the 1st discovered terrestrial-mass exoplanet in the habitable zone", claiming that their computer model suggests the
exoplanet "will have a stable atmosphere and surface liquid water for a wide range of plausible cases."
We've discovered a
lot of exoplanets. And there are a
lot of
sites to help you keep track.
Previously.
posted by Ipsifendus
on May 26, 2011 -
47 comments
El Tiede: The Mountain. A timelapse of shots taken from the El Tiede mountain, known for being an excellent site for astrological observations. Includes a timelapse of the Milky Way, as seen through a sandstorm coming off from the Sahara Desert. (SLYT)
posted by flibbertigibbet
on Apr 16, 2011 -
15 comments
Galileo Lectures In 2009, to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo first turning a telescope skywards, Radio New Zealand National, in partnership with the Royal Society of New Zealand, released this kickin' series of five lectures spanning the evolution of cosmology, extra-solar planets, near-earth objects, the nascent field of neutrino astronomy and prospects for the future as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope comes online early in the next decade. It's a great listen and best of all, it's free to download as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis!
posted by treyka
on Apr 14, 2011 -
4 comments
Where's Tyche, the 10th 9th planet? Getting the full story. John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette recently made the news when they announced the possible discovery of a gas giant planet they named
Tyche in the Oort Cloud, at the extreme edge of the Solar System (
previously). Now ars electronica breaks down the evidence behind the announcement, what can be done to confirm or disprove its existence & how long it could take.
posted by scalefree
on Mar 3, 2011 -
17 comments
