Mar 17, 2014 Astronomers have found a lot of misbehaving gas around an elliptical galaxy in a galaxy cluster: It’s too hot to form stars. The elliptical galaxy must be big because it’s far away—because: high redshift! The gas around it must be comparably voluminous, too. Theorists expect that…
Mar 14, 2014 Protoplanetary disks are said to be accreted around infant stars. A recent press release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory reports the possibility that collisions between comets and a large planet might be occurring around the star, beta Pictoris. A cloud of carbon monoxide (CO) and…
Mar 13, 2014 Galactic magnetic fields were discovered more than 50 years ago. Astronomers continue to ask basic questions about galaxies: what generates their magnetic fields? What gives those fields their shape and their strength? Researchers using the latest computer simulations think they have found the answers. Cool gas…
Mar 12, 2014 More information provides more support for the Electric Universe theory. The MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission has been ongoing since August 2004. The satellite is orbiting Mercury, where it is conducting observations of the torrid planet’s domain. A recent color mosaic of…
Mar 11, 2014 Many cultures recalled a period of unbearable cold, which they associated with a distant mythical age of ‘creation’, when the sun did not yet shine or fire had not yet been obtained. Such tales are hardly surprising for higher latitudes, such as the Viking sagas of…
Mar 10, 2014 Are stars born in cold clouds of gas and dust? The Herschel Space Observatory entered orbit around LaGrange point L2 in July 2009, so that its sensitive instrumentation would not repeatedly heat up and cool down, as it would have passing through Earth’s shadow. Since L2 is “gravitationally…
Mar 07, 2014 Shockwaves from exploding stars are in the news again. According to a recent press release, the Tycho supernova remnant, SN1572, is affected by a “reverse shockwave” rebounding from the leading edge of its “impact” with interstellar gas and dust. The combination of a pulse traveling outward…
Astrophysicists using the Submillimeter Array Telepscope have made an astonishing discovery on the formation of stars. The scientists obtained the most detailed images yet of a stellar nursery within the Snake Nebula. What they have discovered is not what they had expected. For background on the electric universe theory of…
Mar 06, 2014 Things may be carved in stone and still be nebulous. Petroglyphs come without captions; clues of their intended meanings are more often missing than not. Yet though certainty is rarely to be had, the quest for the meaning of rock art is as legitimate as any…
Mar 05, 2014 Ammonites look like a squid with a shell, and are now extinct. Paleontologists claim they lived between 400 million and 66 million years ago. Fossil ages are usually determined by the ages of the rock layers in which they’re embedded. What caused their mass extinction, and…
