Cosmos
gregladen | December 1, 2008A sugar molecule linked to the origin of life was discovered in a potentially habitable region of our galaxy.
The molecule, called glycolaldehyde, was spotted in a large star-forming area of space around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the less-chaotic outer regions of the Milky Way. This suggests the sugar could be common across the universe, which is good news for extraterrestrial-life seekers.
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gregladen | November 24, 2008... ah, no, actually, it's just a meteor. But caught on video!
And a more detailed report:
So, so many science fiction stories start exactly like this....
gregladen | November 23, 2008Here is the film of the space tool bag floating away.
Apparently, a veteran sattelite watcher ... this is a guy with a telescope who watches satellites from earth ... has filmed the bag from a different angle. From his back yard!
... Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario ... "It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces," he says. Spaceweather's satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag;
Here's the video
Click here for…
gregladen | November 21, 2008
NASA's Dawn spacecraft shut down its ion propulsion system today as scheduled. The spacecraft is now gliding toward a Mars flyby in February of next year.
"Dawn has completed the thrusting it needs to use Mars for a gravity assist to help get us to Vesta," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Dawn will now coast in its orbit around the sun for the next half a year before we again fire up the ion propulsion system to continue our journey to the asteroid belt."
Dawn's ion engines may get a short workout next January to provide any…
gregladen | November 21, 2008Computer reconstruction of Copernicus from skull discovered in the cathedral in Frombork, Poland.
Researchers in Poland say they have solved a centuries-old mystery and identified the remains of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
A comparison of DNA from a skeleton in Poland and strands of the astronomer's hair found in a book in Sweden almost certainly confirm it is his skeleton.
Archaeologists found the skeleton in north-eastern Poland three years ago in a cathedral where Copernicus lived.
bbc
gregladen | November 18, 2008I did that once, and got totally screwed. I went in for an oil change. The guys at the Jiffy Lube convinced me that I should also get my tires rotated (though they did not succeed in convincing me to have the transmission oil reconditioned). When I drove off, it turned out that they had forgotten to bolt the wheels back on. Whoa.
Always make sure they bolt the wheels back on.
Anyway, our own Twin Cities Astronaut, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper (that's a very common name in Saint Paul, by the way) was up in space walking around the space shuttle, and she was supposed to give it a lube job…
gregladen | November 17, 2008Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, by Jennifer Ouellette, is an exploration of popular culture, including literature, movies, TV shows, and so on. Ouellette demonstrates a well studied knowledge of these areas of human endeavor, and she is an excellent writer. This means that when you have explored these aspects of day to day life, you will at the end have a reasonably good understanding...
... of quantum physics.
Well, not really, though this is how Black Bodies is often described. In reality, Jennifer, in these re-worked and updated entries from her regular…
cevans | November 16, 2008
Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to…
gregladen | November 13, 2008Not just ANY planets, but planets outside of our solar system. Planets in another solar system! Observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, the other using other methods.
Visible and infrared images have been snapped of a planet orbiting a star 25 light-years away.
The planet is believed to be the coolest, lowest-mass object ever seen outside our own solar neighbourhood.
In a separate study, an exoplanetary system, comprising three planets, has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellation Pegasus.
source
And they said it could never be done...
gregladen | November 12, 2008
This image of the northern polar region of Saturn shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different wavelengths of infrared light as captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the wavelength visible to the human eye). The image shows both a bright ring, as seen from Earth, as well as an example of bright auroral emission within the polar cap that had been undetected until the advent of Cassini. This aurora, which defies past predictions of what…
gregladen | November 10, 2008Like Jerry the Goldfish, whom I found doing the old back paddle this morning, the Mars Phoenix Lander has ceased communications after five months of operation. This is the seasonally dark time in arctic Mars, and there is a lot of dust in the air for some reason, so there is no longer enough power for Phoenix to keep alive. Engineers received the last signal from the lander on November 2nd.
It is possible, but unlikely, that Phoenix will 'phone home' again over the next couple of weeks, and NASA will be listening just in case.
Farewell sweet robot.
Details here
gregladen | November 9, 2008Anyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image is the deepest ground-based U-band image of the Universe ever obtained. It contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument.
Read it here
gregladen | November 1, 2008A piece of space station trash the size of a refrigerator is poised to plunge through the Earth's atmosphere late Sunday, more than a year after an astronaut tossed it overboard.
Details
gregladen | October 28, 2008This is one of the nicest explanations for one of the deepest mysteries of our modern (as in post Bronze Age) technological era: Why is it that when you look in a mirror, left and right are reversed, but not up and down?
The answer is simple: Neither is reversed. What is switched around is not one side vs. the other or top vs. bottom, but rather, which side of your face your nose is on. When you look in a mirror, you do not see the back of your head. The image in the mirror is the image of yourself with front and back reversed. All else follows from that.
Anyway, enjoy the show. Hat…
gregladen | October 17, 2008This sucker is about 70 kilometers long:
Get the details here, from NASA
gregladen | October 4, 2008Via lifehacker:
Don't believe that part about where Jupiter is. As far as I know, the planets move .... (which is why they are called planets, yes?)
gregladen | September 25, 2008The fact that this is an astrobiology rap is a good thing. Like the recently memed-out Large Hadron Collider Rap, the Astrobiology Rap places important and difficult to understand science on the pop cultural smorgasbord, and that is good.
But this isn't the Large Hadron Rap. It is simply, IMHO, not as good.
Which reminds me of a story, see below. Anyway, here is the rap for your review, I'd love your opinion:
[hatip: amee]
The music is dull, the rapper is mediocre, the words are totally cliff note. Or maybe I'm just having a bad morning, having just eaten the last cookie.
The story:…
gregladen | September 20, 2008According to a widely disseminated story (see this) the Large Hadron Collider broke only hours after it started operations last week. This is an atrocity and an example of something seriously, endemically wrong with science more generally.
Why is the fact that the LHC broke right away an atrocity? Well, actually, that it broke is not the atrocity. The atrocity is that you are only hearing about it now, a week after the fanfare linked to the startup. There are only three possible explanations for this:
1) They forgot to mention it . Slipped their minds. Oops, sorry, I guess I didn't think…