August 08, 2012 The significance of life on other planets leaves many unanswered questions. Note: 32 years ago the managing editor’s father speculated about the possibility and significance of extraterrestrial life. The universal feeling that man is unique has been challenged by the final photographs sent by Mariner IV…
August 07, 2012 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 radiation…
August 06, 2012 The Mars rover Curiosity is on schedule for touchdown at 12:31 AM CDT on August 6, 2012. Curiosity is five times heavier than the Mars Exploration Rovers “Opportunity” and “Spirit,” with upgraded instrumentation, including a high definition stereo video camera. Additionally, a tunable laser spectrometer can identify…
August 03, 2012 A new theory states that dark matter might prevent stars from aging normally and preserve them for billions of years. According to astronomers, the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. It started out with a bang – an explosion occurred and all of existence came into…
August 02, 2012 Did tectonic and volcanic forces create the wide, parallel trenches on the Moon? The Moon has seen cataclysmic devastation at some time in its past. There are giant craters, wide and deep valleys, and multi-kilometer long rilles crisscrossing its surface. Conventional theories postulate that the Moon has…
August 1, 2012 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 in…
July 31, 2012 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 inexplicable…
July 30, 2012 Images from Cassini seem to indicate deltas and river channels. Could electricity have formed these features on Titan? Recent data from the Cassini-Solstice mission is said to reveal oceans of liquid ethane, in one case occupying an area as large as 26,000 square kilometers, in Titan’s north…
Jul 27, 2012 Dark matter is in the news. “Plasma phenomena are scalable. Their electrical and physical properties remain the same, independent of the size of the plasma.” — Donald Scott, author of The Electric Sky Plasma in space usually appears as a cloud of partially charged gas and…
Jul 19, 2012 An X-2 class solar flare recently missed a direct impact with Earth. Heliophysicists classify solar flares according to their brightness in X-ray wavelengths. C-class flares are the smallest on the scale, with X-ray measurements in the 10^-6 watts per square meter range (W/m^2), while X-class flares…
