Phoenix
esiegel | August 17, 2012"We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenk
The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which contains anywhere from a few billion to many trillions of stars.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA) - ESA / Hubble Collaboration
The galaxy shown above, NGC 2841, is very similar to our own Milky Way. Approximately the…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2010tags: Great Argus Pheasant, Great Argus, Phoenix, Argusianus argus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Great Argus Pheasant, also known as the Great Argus or the Phoenix, Argusianus argus, endemic to Malaya, Sumatra, and Borneo. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: John del Rio, 2009 [larger view].
More images by this photographer can be seen on the front page and in the gallery.
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/800s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
The scientific…
cevans | November 10, 2008
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the…
esiegel | April 23, 2008Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns
There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang.
The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and…