Nov 12, 2014 Picture of the Day articles are meant to highlight scientific achievements and to offer alternative viewpoints. A major scientific achievement is happening now. The Thunderbolts Project urges readers to follow the Rosetta Mission’s climactic landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko today, November 12. It is expected that this event will…
Nov 11, 2014 Some star clusters appear to be inside out. Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever. — Leon Trotsky The Flame Nebula is located in the constellation of Orion, just below the three visible stars that make up its belt. Of…
Nov 10, 2014 Measurements indicate that this nebula is one degree above absolute zero. Temperature has little to do with electricity, though. “Bipolar outflow” is a term used to describe the nebular structure seen above, although the cause of the effect remains baffling to scientists who study such phenomena….
Nov 7, 2014 Could Mercury and the Moon be more closely related than previously thought? On March 18, 2011 the MESSENGER spacecraft (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) entered orbit around the planet Mercury. The last time a spacecraft explored Mercury was Mariner 10 during its tour of…
Nov 5, 2014 Plasma phenomena are scaleable. It is commonly known among electrical engineers that transverse electric currents accompany a main discharge channel. That “main discharge channel” is often seen by most people as a terrestrial lighting bolt. Slow-motion videos show that each flash is a complex episode. Multiple…
Nov 04, 2014 Assembling the Universe requires dusty plasma. Dust in space is said to be formed because stars condense out of dusty protoplanetary nebulae. The current theory of star formation was originally proposed by Immanuel Kant and Pierre Simon Laplace in the Eighteenth Century. A nebula is said to…
Nov 3, 2014 Solar plasma phenomena are governed by electricity flowing through space. The conventional view of the Sun is illustrated by a popular science website: “Our Sun is made up of elements left over from the Big Bang, elements formed from dying stars, and elements created in supernovae.”…
Nov 1, 2014 INTEGRAL has observed intense gamma-ray emissions from the Cygnus X-1 star system. Cygnus X-1 is thought to be a stellar binary with one companion object a black hole and the other a blue supergiant known as HDE 226868: one of the strongest X-ray sources ever detected. The…
Oct 30, 2014 So far, no dark matter candidates have been detected. Dark matter, as previous Picture of the Day articles report, is undetectable, except through its supposed gravitational interactions with luminous, or baryonic matter. Large, expensive experiments are currently investigating many aspects of its hidden qualities, including a search…
Oct 29, 2014 Recent solar observations support the electrical model. NASA launched the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) on June 28, 2013 in order to study the solar corona and help determine why it is far hotter than the Sun’s surface, or photosphere. New information from IRIS has identified…
