For roughly a month now, the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has been holding an online poll – appropriately named Pluto Rocks! – to help them name Pluto’s smallest moons, officially designated P4 and P5. Discovered in 2011 and 2012 respectively, an online poll ran up until the end of February, at which point […]
Origins of Russian Meteor Found!
Just over a week after a meteor exploded across the sky above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, a group of astronomers published a paper that reconstructs where the rock came from. The men in question were Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. And the method they used was […]
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Happy Birthday Copernicus!
As I learned not long ago, today is the 540th birthday of the late great man who definitely proved that the Earth revolved around the sun. And so I thought I’d take some time out of my busy (not so much today!) schedule to honor this great man and the massive contribution he made to […]
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The Mercury/Mars Conjunction
This weekend, amateur astronomers and stargazers will be treated to a rare sight: the conjunction of Mercury and Mars in the sky. This has proven to be quite the confusing spectacle in the past, as people have often misinterpreted the conjunction of the two planets as the appearance of Mercury’s moon. Much like the appearance […]
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New Super-Earth Discovered
It has been an exciting year for the discovery exoplanets! First, there was the news from Gliese 581 g, then the discovery of an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri. And now, scientists working in the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS apparatus have announced the discovery of the latest Super-Earth, which they believe to be the greatest […]
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A Diamond Bigger Than Earth
Some interesting news from space these days, and for once didn’t have to do with Mars. For many years, scientists at NASA and other space agencies have known about 55 Cancri e, an extrasolar planet that orbits the Sun-like star 55 Cancri A that is approximately 41 years from our system. Up until recently, it […]
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3D GIF of Rotating Nebula
Pretty freakishly cool isn’t it? Personally, I never really got onto this GIF thing. It’s like, if it fits on the page and looks cool, it’s all good. However, this one was too cool to ignore. The brain-child of Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsävainio, this GIF depicts IC 1396, a nebula where stars are born. This […]
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Evidence of Ancient Streambed Found on Mars
More news from the Red Planet! At a press conference held just yesterday, members of the Mars Science Laboratory announced that Curiosity discovered some interesting gravel patterns in the Gale Crater which would seem to indicate that water once flowed there. What more, according to William Dietrich (Curiosity’s co-investigator from the University of California, Berkeley) the […]
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The Blue Martian Sunset
Ever since the Curiosity rover landed, NASA had been awash with new photos of the Martian landscape. Naturally, most have been black and white picks of the oxidized soil immediately around the rover’s landing area. But more have been arriving lately that show a feature unique to Mars. That feature is the Blue Sunset. Scientists […]
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