Aug 6, 2014 Rosetta is orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko A little more than half way between Mars and Jupiter, at around 400 million kilometers from Earth, the Rosetta cometary probe completed its maneuvers and settled into orbit around 67P/C-G. Mission team members are analyzing images, in order to determine an appropriate…
Aug 05, 2014 The Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres in August of 2015 Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Solar System. The most recent measurement from the Hubble Space Telescope puts it at approximately 975 kilometers in mean diameter. It is so large that it is roughly spherical,…
Aug 4, 2014 Plumes of water vapor from Enceladus are not caused by friction. Saturn’s moons are difficult explain when conventional ideas about the composition and age of the Solar System are considered. They vary in composition, orbital inclination, size, and mass. With 62 moons now identified, and 53 of…
Aug 1, 2014 The comet is currently 544 million kilometers from the Sun. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) is about one year away from perihelion, or its closest approach to the Sun. As seen in the image above, there is also a “waist” between the two halves of the comet that appears…
This talk was given by David Talbott on the opening night of EU2014 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was an introduction to his two Sunday presentations that previewed Episodes 4 and 5 of the Symbols of an Alien Sky series. Looking for a fast track to comprehensive education on…
Jul 31, 2014 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg “un-fry”…
Jul 30, 2014 Thomas Short, writing in the 18th century, chronicled the many calamities that decimated mankind over four thousand years. Plagues, earthquakes, drought, pestilence and incredible floods. As you read through Short’s curious book, you are struck by the appearance of bright comets in numbers unmatched by modern…
In the previous Space News, we discussed astronomer’s recent admission that they now need a whole new theory to explain how planets form. Today yet another discovery has shattered conventional ideas about planet formation and the so-called early solar system. Scientists studying data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft have learned some…
Jul 29, 2014 Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting. Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when he…
Jul 28, 2014 Two years ago, I predicted that extinct giant marsupials would be found on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula. Recently, an elephant-sized wombat (the marsupial, Diprotodon) was discovered off Sorrento, Victoria concretized in a limestone beach deposit. But why was I so certain? Along the entire Victorian coastline, from…
