Will our Milky Way Galaxy collide one day with its larger neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy? Most likely, yes. Careful plotting of slight displacements of M31’s stars relative to background galaxies on recent Hubble Space Telescope images indicate that the center of M31 could be on a direct collision course with the center of our home […]
Life outside the cubicle . . .Simply amazing! Click here. Then click on ‘Start’. Move the toggle button to the left or right…
Emerging from the original “Men in Black” movie, in 1997, I thought that perhaps half the people in Times Square were aliens. And the Upper West Side was obviously full of aliens, too. Those people on Broadway, concentrating so hard that they seemed to be far, far away somewhere? Aliens. The central joke in “Men […]
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The privately bankrolled Dragon capsule arrived at the International Space Station for a historic docking Friday, captured by astronauts wielding a giant robot arm. … U.S. astronaut Donald Pettit used the space station’s 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon after a few hours of extra checks and maneuvers. […]
When “Men in Black 3” opens everywhere over Memorial Day weekend, most moviegoers will just be hoping this sequel matches the original for popcorn-munching fun. But there are many people who say they’ve been victimized by and live in fear of real MIBs. And those stories, told for decades, are just as terrifying as they […]
Right now, the roughly 20,000 man-made objects orbiting the Earth are less regulated than the cars on a morning commute. Satellites are usually on a fixed path, so the traffic control comes prelaunch. … The International Telecom Union, a United Nations agency, assigns satellites slots in a geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. Operators must […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
