[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIS RESOLUTION, Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI /NASA)] Why does the Sombrero Galaxy look like a hat? Reasons include the Sombrero’s unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow […]
If you type “is Pope Francis antichrist” into Google, you’ll get about 425,000 results in .37 seconds. … So why do so many people think—or at least ponder—that the Latin American pontiff is the Antichrist (or at least the end-time False Prophet mentioned in Revelation 19:20)? It could be for some of the same reasons […]
In its final farewell to Pluto, New Horizons … [sent] an image of exotic ice across the dwarf planet’s surface, revealing signs of recent geologic activity — something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. ‘We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,’ said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ. / APL, Southwest Research Inst. A 50 mile (80 kilometer) trip across Pluto would cover the distance indicated by the scale bar/ The close-up of the icy world’s rugged equatorial terrain was captured when the New Horizons spacecraft was about 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION], Ben Cooper Destination: Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft [atop a powerful Atlas V rocket] roared off its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA in 2006 toward adventures in the distant Solar System. The craft is the fastest spaceships ever launched by humans, having passed the Moon only […]
More than $210,000 has been raised in support of the Oregon Christian bakers who are being forced by the state to pay $135,000 in “emotional damages” to a lesbian couple for declining to bake them a wedding cake in 2013, an act that would have violated their deeply-held religious convictions. Although an online fundraiser established […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute] [This is] Dione, and it’s a moon of Saturn. The robotic Cassini spacecraft took the featured image during a flyby of Saturn’s cratered Moon last month. Perhaps what makes this image so interesting, though, is the background. First, the large orb looming behind Dione […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Composite Image Credit & Copyright: Wang, Letian] On June 30, Venus and Jupiter were close in western skies at dusk. Near the culmination of this year’s gorgeous conjunction, the two bright evening planets are captured in the same telescopic field of view in this image taken after sunset from […]
Kelly Beatty, Sky and Telescope The two brightest planets are gliding closer together in the early evening sky, and their celestial dance culminates with an ultra-close pairing on June 30th. Anyone who pays even cursory attention to the evening sky has surely noticed that the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, have been drawing closer […]
. . . The Daily Mail has checked it out and it’s nothing to worry about. The rumor did force NASA to respond with a non-denial denial. And a professor did say there’s a asteroid out there with our name on it. And a former astronaut did say we’ve just been lucky so far in […]
