May 27, 2020 Mars is a mysterious world. NASA launched the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) on November 18, 2014 on a year-long investigation of Mars’ upper atmosphere, its ionosphere, and how it interacts with the solar wind. The spacecraft is fitted with instruments that measure various phenomena,…
May 26, 2020 The Seven Sisters, or M45, is a misty cluster of stars. Commonly known as the Pleiades, modern astronomers believe that constellation’s stars were born in the same nebular cloud about 100 million years ago. The cluster contains more than 1000 stars, although only 14 are visible to…
A team of scientists has observed an object which is again blurring the line between asteroids and comets. Scientists using the University of Hawaii’s ATLAS telescope have observed a cometary display from a type of asteroid known as a Jupiter Trojan asteroid. Dubbed 2019 LD2, it is the first such…
May 22, 2020 Comets are often called “dirty snowballs” by astronomers. Various space missions, such as Giotto and Deep Impact, revealed that comets are blackened, cratered, and fractured. No ice fields, reflective crust, or watery clouds. The Giotto spacecraft’s close approach to Halley’s comet, for example, discovered the blackest object…
May 21, 2020 Earth is affected by solar emissions. Electrical connection between charged bodies in space is a basic tenet of Electric Universe theory. The ionosphere is connected to the Sun by streamers of electric charge. Earth is connected to circuits in the Sun that drive electric forces between the…
May 20, 2020 Astronomers measure the Universe using ideas that are based on its expansion out of a primordial explosion. “They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn’t anything…
May 19, 2020 Mineral compounds form in electric fires. “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”— Jack London Meteorites are thought to be “relics” of the Solar System’s earliest epochs,…
May 18, 2020 Three space coordinates and one time coordinate in a five dimensional manifold? According to Einstein, and most astrophysicists who follow after him, time and space are dynamic regions under constant change. Rather than convenient conventions, or useful tools, that help to identify the locations of objects—a.k.a. their…
New scientific reports throw into disarray the standard theory of the origins of our planet’s moon. A decade ago, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s spacecraft Kaguya spent a year and a half orbiting the moon and collecting data. The spacecraft was equipped with an ion mass spectrometer, and it detected…
May 15, 2020 Dione is a devastated world. Saturn’s moons hold a strong fascination; not only for their exotic beauty and weird morphology, but for the idea that they are vast lockers of frozen water. According to NASA, Saturn’s moon Dione shares a “decoupled” crust with the tiny moon, Enceladus,…
