Space News for February 4, 2012

Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…

It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting [...]

New Study Shows How Trace Elements Affect Stars’ Habitable Zones

Habitable zones are the regions around stars, including our own Sun, where conditions are the most favourable for the development of life on any rocky planets that happen to orbit within them. Generally, they are regions where temperatures allow for liquid water to exist on the surface of these planets and are ideal for “life [...]

Beautiful Conjunction: Comet Garradd Meets M92

This lovely image of Comet Garradd (C/2009 PI) as it passes by the globular cluster M92 in the constellation Hercules, was taken remotely from the Tzek Maun Observatory in New Mexico by our friends Giovanni Sostero, Ernest Guido and Nick Howes. While the two objects look like they are right next to each other, M92 [...]

Cities at Night Panorama of Millions of US East Coast Earthlings

Do you live here? Tens of millions of Earthlings live and work in the bustling and seemingly intertwined American mega-metropolis of the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center splotch) captured in this stunning “Cities at Night” panorama of the East Coast of the United States along the Atlantic seaboard (image above). Look northward and you’ll see [...]

Incredible 3-D View Inside a Martian Crater

This is why I always keep a pair of 3-D glasses by my computer. This well-preserved crater on Mars may look like just your average, run-of-the-mill impact crater in 2-D, but in 3-D, the sharply raised rim, the deep, cavernous crater body, and especially the steep crater walls will have you grabbing your armchairs so [...]

Can We Land On a Comet?

The Rosetta mission will do something never before attempted: land on a comet. The spacecraft is now on its way to intercept comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in January 2014 and land a probe on it for what promises to be an amazing view. But what we know of comets so far comes from a few flyby missions. [...]

Are You Listening to Astronomy.FM?

Are you listening to Astronomy.FM? If not, you should join the audience of over 25,000 listeners in 85 countries who are enjoying this amazing free service. Astronomy.FM is billed as “The only all-Astronomy radio station in the Known Universe.” You can listen to this one-of-a-kind radio station on-line anytime, as it is streaming 24 hours [...]

How Plants May Have Helped Create Earth’s Unique Landscapes

According to conventional thinking, plant life first took hold on Earth after oceans and rivers formed; the soil produced by liquid water breaking down bare rock provided an ideal medium for plants to grow in. It certainly sounds logical, but a new study is challenging that view – the theory is that vascular plants, those [...]

Hubble Captures a Classic Barred Spiral Galaxy

Is this what we look like? Astronomers don’t know for sure exactly what the Milky Way looks like, but searching out other barred spiral galaxies like this one is helping scientists to learn more about our home. Galaxy NGC 1073 is located in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).Most of the known spiral galaxies [...]

Weekly Space Hangout – Feb 2nd, 2012

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