Feb 26, 2013 Heliophysicists acknowledge the role of plasma in solar eruptions but miss important aspects of its behavior. In Bengal to move at all Is seldom, if ever, done, But mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. — Noël Coward According to a recent press release,…
Feb 21, 2013 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Recently, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its…
Feb 14, 2012 Is it gravity and heat that cause landslides on Iapetus? Recently, the science journal Nature Geoscience described giant, icy landslides that are supposedly taking place on the Saturnian moon Iapetus. According to the report, it is frictional heating that overcomes resistance, causing the moon’s crust to give way…
Feb 12, 2013 What causes the rapid changes observed in Orion Nebula “protostars”? Using a combination of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers found that so-called “young stars” are changing in brightness much faster than they thought possible. Instead of taking several years for…
Feb 11, 2013 Astronomers continue to cling to outmoded theories of star formation The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Planck telescope platform on May 19, 2009 into an orbit around Lagrange point L2. Planck is designed to analyze the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) with greater precision than its predecessors. Foreground…
Feb 05, 2013 According to astronomers and their theories about the Solar System, the space beyond Neptune is getting stranger all the time. Near the end of the eighteenth century the nebular hypothesis was born. It grew in popularity for more than 100 years and then appeared to die…
Feb 04, 2013 The Cassini space probe’s flyby of Iapetus confirms its electrical attributes. The closest images of Iapetus ever taken came from the Cassini spacecraft as it flew to within 5000 kilometers of its target, resolving features as small as ten meters. In a previous Picture of the…
Feb 01, 2013 Galactic tails, bright comas, and central nuclei are reminiscent of comets. What is a comet? Most astronomers think comets are small, fragile, irregularly shaped objects composed mostly of water ice and dust, along with carbon and silicon-based compounds. “Dirty snowballs,” as Fred Whipple described them in 1950….
Jan 31, 2013 Strands of magnetically confined plasma can be seen throughout the cosmos. A rotating vortex of solar plasma was the topic of a recent press release. Does that phenomenon relate to other energetic vortices? Previous Picture of the Day articles describe many cases of ionized clouds in space that are…
Jan 30, 2013 What takes place in thunderstorms on Earth is most likely a smaller version of large scale phenomena. “I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present Universe and work our way backward to progressively more…
