Shortly after dawn on 15 February 2013, a large meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk (Russia), generating a shockwave that injured some 1,200 people. According to the popular media, no other bolide on record is known to have caused so many casualties. Have any more violent impacts occurred within human memory?…
Feb 21, 2013 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Recently, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its…
Feb 20, 2013 It has the body of a snake and the head of a lion. It has legs that end in clawed feet. It often has wings: it flies, or at least it comes from the sky. It breathes fire. It’s an absurd creature, and the stories can be…
Feb 19, 2013 It twists like a Birkeland Current; it’s stringy like a Birkeland Current; it’s dense like a Birkeland Current; but Everyone Knows (if they want to pursue a career in astronomy) that There is No Such Thing as Electricity in Space. The press release for this new image of…
Feb 18, 2013 Is this an image of a supernova remnant around a black hole? An exploding double layer in a galactic circuit? A mythical creation event in another planetary system? An unnamed formation in an unimagined process? Theories and facts interdependently provide names for things; without a name,…
Feb 15, 2013 Even the lonely monuments left behind have a story to tell. Chavín de Huantar, in the Peruvian Andes, is one of many civilisations to have preceded the mighty Inca empire. The occupants of the ruins have no name; lacking a script, their cultural identity is forever…
Feb 14, 2012 Is it gravity and heat that cause landslides on Iapetus? Recently, the science journal Nature Geoscience described giant, icy landslides that are supposedly taking place on the Saturnian moon Iapetus. According to the report, it is frictional heating that overcomes resistance, causing the moon’s crust to give way…
Feb 13, 2013 Most researchers address ‘known’ questions, such as ‘what causes ice ages?’, ‘how far is the moon?’ or ‘where did the ancestors of the human species live?’. Comparative mythologists face the double challenge of seeking answers to problems which most people are unfamiliar with in the first…
Feb 12, 2013 What causes the rapid changes observed in Orion Nebula “protostars”? Using a combination of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers found that so-called “young stars” are changing in brightness much faster than they thought possible. Instead of taking several years for…
Feb 11, 2013 Astronomers continue to cling to outmoded theories of star formation The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Planck telescope platform on May 19, 2009 into an orbit around Lagrange point L2. Planck is designed to analyze the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) with greater precision than its predecessors. Foreground…
