May 06, 2014 A Neptune Year has Passed. The planet Neptune is the eighth and farthest planet from the Sun. Neptune’s mean diameter is approximately 49,250 kilometers, with a mean orbital radius of 4,503,443,661 kilometers, and a year of 164.79 Earth years. Neptune is a massive planet, with an escape…
May 05, 2014 The expansion of the Universe is said to be speeding up. In 1997, two teams of astronomers were studying Type 1a supernovae, when they found that there was “something wrong” with their data. By way of background, a supernova is conventionally described as a massive star…
May 2, 2014 Make room for “dim matter”. The Intergalactic Medium (IGM) is where galaxies are born, according to standard theories; it is also where they live. It is thought to be a diffuse gas connecting all galaxies in the Universe. Composed primarily of ionized hydrogen atoms, its density…
May 01, 2014 A University of Michigan press release announces “warped space-time” around a so-called “neutron star”. Could electricity provide a better explanation? The smeared lines of an iron spectrum have given NASA and University of Michigan astronomers another mystery to solve when it comes to explaining the universe. Using the XMM-Newton…
Dr. A.P. David’s talk considered the sources of the modern idea of ‘Laws of Nature,’ or as they are more usually known nowadays, ‘physical laws.’ He began by articulating the difference between descriptive and prescriptive laws: nature as directly observed versus nature idealized into geometric or other mathematical relationships. This…
Apr 30, 2014 Could noctilucent clouds be part of Earth’s auroral phenomena? On April 25, 2007 NASA launched the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) spacecraft on a multi-year mission to study the highest visible clouds, otherwise known as polar mesospheric clouds, or noctilucent clouds. Although AIM’s primary mission…
In his talk, Piers Corbyn described the failure of standard meteorology (SM) in outlook, theory, and practice. He included: signals in real meteorology data unexplained by SM; real role of jet stream, stratosphere, electro-jets, magnetosphere, solar wind, solar corona, and the Moon; the total inability of SM to explain: sudden…
Apr 29, 2014 Where did the extremely rarified atmosphere on Rhea come from? Relative to Saturn, Rhea is most likely negatively charged. Saturn’s powerful opposite charge is probably initiating an electric discharge, causing the water in Rhea’s icy surface to dissociate, so the presence of oxygen around the moon is not…
Apr 28, 2014 Can the Universe be weighed in the balance? What causes the formation of compact galactic clumps and filaments? One proposal is that gravitational “tidal forces” pull stars and gas out of other galaxies as they pass by each other. Another suggestion is based on the movement of…
A team of scientists analyzing the coma and tail of Comet Hale- Bopp have published their observations in a landmark paper. What they discovered cannot be explained by the standard model of comets. The scientists analyzed the comet’s surprising coma and tail at distances up to 27 times the average…
