A leather-bound religious text, thought to date from the fifth century but discovered only 12 years ago, will cause the collapse of Christianity worldwide, Iran has claimed. The book, written on animal hide, was confiscated during an anti-smuggling operation in Turkey’s Mediterranean region in 2000. Turkish authorities believe it could be an authentic version of […]
A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is just next door as large galaxies go. So close, and spanning some 260,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. While its spiral arms […]
It was a typical Texas sunset except that most of the Sun was missing. The location of the missing piece of the Sun was not a mystery — it was behind the Moon. Sunday night’s partial eclipse of the Sun by the Moon turned into one of the best photographed astronomical events in history. Gallery […]
When making its closest pass yet of Saturn’s moon Dione late last year, the robotic Cassini spacecraft snapped this far-ranging picture featuring Dione, Saturn’s rings, and the two small moons Epimetheus and Prometheus. The above image captures part of the heavily cratered snow-white surface of the 1,100 kilometer wide Dione, the thinness of Saturn’s rings, […]
Scientists say the magnetic north pole is moving toward Russia and the fallout has reached — of all places — Tampa International Airport. The airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to repaint the numeric designators at each end and change taxiway signage to account for the shift in location of the Earth’s […]
JACKSON LAKE, WYOMING—The world may not end on 21 December 2012, as predicted by some doomsayers, but one thing is certain: Earth won’t be around forever. Astronomers at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference here, who study the birth and evolution of planetary systems, are also coming to grips with the ultimate fate of planets like […]
By Dan Nosowitz Masayoshi Son, entrepreneurial founder of Softbank, Japan’s third-largest mobile network, and according to Forbes, the nation’s richest man, unveiled a vague but undeniably ambitious plan to completely change Japan’s energy infrastructure. His plan, which relies heavily on wind and geothermal power and abandons nuclear, would, he says, shift the majority of Japan’s energy […]
By Jennifer Abbasi: New missions and discoveries on Earth, within our solar system and beyond are bringing us closer than ever to finding alien life on other planets “The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms,” is how Andrei Finkelstein, the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’s Applied Astronomy Institute, explained his […]
By Dan Nosowitz The Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, carrying three astronauts (Commander Andrei Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyayev, both Russian, and American Ron Garan) safely landed this morning in Kazakhstan, bringing them home after five months on the International Space Station. The landing, about 94 miles southeast of the smallish Kazakh city Zhezkazgan, wasn’t entirely flawless–mission control […]
A mournful French horn blows. An angsty Luke Skywalker stomps out of his aunt and uncle’s sand hut and peers up at Tatooine’s double sunset, his hair blowing in the breeze. It’s a memorable scene from Star Wars—but now, a precedent for such a sky with two suns has been found in our universe. Using […]
