NASA’s Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun. The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, […]
An asteroid half the size of a U.S. football field will pass between Earth and orbiting satellites next week, sparing the human race from the fate suffered by dinosaurs, NASA said. The 150-foot diameter asteroid, named 2012 DA14, will pass about 17,000 miles above Earth on Feb. 15 — lower than the orbits of some […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE / Credit: R. Evans & K. Stapelfeldt (JPL), WFPC2, HST, NASA] Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and […]
The demise of the dinosaurs is the world’s ultimate whodunit. Was it a comet or asteroid impact? Volcanic eruptions? Climate change? In an attempt to resolve the issue, scientists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have now determined the most precise […]
Beyond a fertile field of satellite communication antennas at Kennedy Space Center, an Atlas V rocket streaks into orbit in this long exposure photograph. In the thoughtfully composed image recorded on the evening of Jan. 30, the antennas in the foreground bring to mind the rocket’s payload, a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. This TDRS-K […]
Like many people, sometimes when I’m bored, I like to download some pics from the Curiosity mission and look them over. First thing I want to say is that I’m not one of those people that finds something in every picture I look at. I’ve looked over hundreds of pictures from Mars and in 98 […]
Deep Space Industries, Inc, announced plans to send a fleet of asteroid-prospecting to target asteroids in 2015 The first step in mining asteroids is to learn more about them. DSI aims to launch a fleet of FireFlies in 2015 to prospect promising near-Earth asteroids, determining properties such as their composition and spin rate. When Planetary […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE / Hubble Legacy Archive A gorgeous spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish clusters of young […]
It’s 27 October 1954. A reserve game between Fiorentina and nearby rivals Pistoiese is under way at the Stadio Artemio Franchi. A crowd of around 10,000 has gathered to watch. Among them is Gigi Boni (second left in the aboave picture) a lifelong Fiorentina fan who in later years would become the co-ordinator of the […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Marco Lorenzi] How do clusters of galaxies form and evolve? To help find out, astronomers continue to study the second closest cluster of galaxies to Earth: the Fornax cluster, named for the southern constellation toward which most of its galaxies can be found. Although almost 20 times more […]
