Jul 10, 2015 Does gravity power stellar behavior? Modern astronomical models of cosmic evolution rely on the kinetic effects of cold gas collapsing from gravitational forces. Clouds of gas and dust a thousand times less dense than a puff of smoke are said to be compressed into a region…
Jun 09, 2015 Stellar flares are seen in unexpected places. In a September 30, 2014 press release, NASA officials from the Goddard Space Flight Center announced that their SWIFT satellite detected a stellar flare with X-ray emissions larger than anything they expected to witness from DG Canum Venaticorum, a “normal”…
Half-a-century ago, at the height of the Cold War, the Space Race between two competing superpowers set mankind on an accelerated path toward placing a man on the moon. In addition to its geopolitical significance, the moon was central in the evolution of planetary science. The discoveries of the Apollo…
Jul 8, 2015 Modern astronomy is like a blind man, panicked, without his cane, running. There are collisions. It’s not because astronomy has lost its sight; it’s because it has gained a second sight, another sense beyond the five that evolved. It has gained a sixth extrasensory perception conferred…
Jul 07, 2015 Lights on a Christmas tree depend on electric power. So do the lights in space. The Christmas Tree cluster contains about 40 stars and lies in the constellation Monoceros, along with the Cone Nebula. Both were discovered by William Herschel between 1783 and 1786, although the Cone…
Jul 6, 2015 Auroral substorms on Jupiter are not caused by the solar wind, alone. A previous Picture of the Day published in late 2012 quoted Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester: “The main aurora oval on Jupiter we think should dim when the solar wind blows harder,…
Jul 3, 2015 Titan’s characteristics support Electric Universe ideas about planet formation. Titan is the second largest moon in the Solar System, with a mean diameter of 5150 kilometers. Only Ganymede is larger, at 5262 kilometers. The planet Mercury is smaller than Titan (4879 kilometers), as is the Moon…
Jul 02, 2015 The melting of the glacial ice sheets in North America, Europe and elsewhere was a stochastic process. Long periods of slow melting alternated with bursts of accelerated melting. Between the Late Glacial Maximum and the early Holocene, global sea level rose by 100 to 130 metres,…
Jul 1, 2015 Saturn’s moons sport colorful bands. Mars is a faint yellowish-red color when seen with the naked eye, and its rusty surface hue is visible through the lenses of robotic rovers traveling across its landscape. Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons, has a reddish-black deposit covering one hemisphere….
Jun 30, 2015 On the surface, the idea that the sun could reverse its apparent direction and be seen to move from west to east might seem bizarre in the extreme, but exactly this is what several ancient traditions claim to have happened in the past. In the 5th century…
