Jul 4, 2016 Juno enters Jupiter space. The latest mission to Jupiter began on August 5, 2011 when NASA launched the Juno spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After flying past the orbit of Mars, the spacecraft returned for a gravity assist from Earth on October 9, 2013 and then…
Jul 1, 2016 Colorful planets are the result of plasma cosmogony. Immanuel Kant’s theorized that the Solar System was born from a dusty cloud of gas, or nebula, floating in space. His idea is now known as the “Nebular Hypothesis.” Kant suggested that the cloud contracted because gravity drew…
Jun 30, 2016 Electrical interpretations are often a better fit. Two dwarf galaxies, known as the Magellanic Clouds, are orbiting the Milky Way and might have once been part of it. Both reside at the beginning of a filamentary structure known as the Magellanic Stream. The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)…
Jun 29, 2016 There are no “super magnets” in space without powerful electric discharges. The standard model of stellar evolution proposes that pulsars are neutron stars rotating at incredible speed. In 2006, PSR J1748-2446ad was reported to spin at 43,000 RPM—the blades of a kitchen blender do not exceed…
Jun 24, 2016 Space and time do not bend. “Gravitational lensing” theory is used to explain the arcs of glowing material surrounding some galaxies. They also use it in conjunction with other theories to help deal with puzzling observations. One of those puzzles involves the so-called expanding Universe. Combining…
Jun 23, 2016 The dwarf planet Ceres shares many characteristics with other rocky bodies. NASA launched the Dawn spacecraft on September 27, 2007. Its scientific observations of the asteroid Vesta began on July 17, 2011 and ended on September 5, 2012 when Dawn fired-up its ion thruster engine and headed toward…
Jun 22, 2016 The Sun’s activity drives Earth-based phenomena. Picture of the Day articles point out that there are linkages between galactic electric currents, solar electric currents, and terrestrial electric currents. Earth is connected to a circuit that flows through the cosmos, but that circuit is difficult to perceive….
June 20, 2016 How are stars and galaxies born? The Milky Way is thought to harbor nearly a trillion stars in orbit around its central gravity source. According to cosmologists, our galaxy condensed out of a cloud of hydrogen and dust thousands of light-years wide, with a more-or-less homogeneous…
Jun 17, 2016 Earth displays its celestial nature. Intense lightning in thunderstorms can interact with electricity (cosmic rays) coming from space. When the right conditions in Earth’s atmosphere occur, lightning causes giant particle accelerators to form above the clouds. Cosmic rays are high energy sub-atomic particles, mostly protons, that…
Jun 16, 2016 Rocky bodies in the Solar System share a common experience. Recently, a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) announced the discovery of high temperature minerals in meteorites that goes against the standard interpretation of Solar System formation. As the article states, meteorites are…
