October 14, 2020 Bennu is among 7000 Near Earth Objects (NEO) that orbit the Sun. The Osiris-Rex mission was launched on September 8, 2016 and is now orbiting 101955 Bennu. Its goal is to collect a sample from the asteroid and return it to Earth. The biggest surprise, so far,…
October 13, 2020 Stars are born where regions of space accumulate dense electric charge. Stars are concentrations of electricity that result from Birkeland currents and electric charge separation in space. Therefore, conventional models of stellar evolution reveal almost nothing about how stars are born and behave. Red giant stars, as…
October 12, 2020 Sunspots are mysterious. According to a recent press release, heliophysicists are studying sunspots fields in order to understand how similar phenomena might occur on other stars. Beginning with data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Hinode mission, scientists “smeared” the datapoints into broad images. This gave…
October 9, 2020 One of the most important questions about other planets is whether water is present. NASA launched Mars 2020, otherwise known as “Perseverance”, on July 30, 2020. Its mission is to search for evidence of water and ice on the Red Planet. Since water sustains Earth’s ecology, it…
October 8, 2020 Stars respond to incoming electric charge flow. According to consensus theory, when a star uses up its hydrogen it contracts because radiation pressure no longer overcomes the gravity pulling its outer layers into its core. As that compression increases, internal pressure rises and heats up the star,…
October 7, 2020 Galactic filaments are not kinetic phenomena. Astronomers ponder the enigmatic structure of Galaxy NGC 1275. Multiple strands of material extend outward in light-years-long tendrils, enclosing it in a loose cocoon. The filaments are examples of ionized hydrogen atoms. Since hydrogen is composed of one electron and one…
October 6, 2020 Are red giant stars old or young? “Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars…”—…
October 5, 2020 Solving a particular puzzle can be clouded by a layer of presumptions. The Milky Way hosts at least two smaller satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. However, some astronomers suspect that there are as many as 80 or more, such as the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte dwarf galaxy….
October 2, 2020 The Solar System was chaotic a few thousand years ago. The features on all the moons and rocky planets support that idea. How many thousands of years ago that chaos occurred isn’t important, since it is not millions of years, or even hundreds of thousands of years…
October 1, 2020 What brought methane to the Red Planet? According to a recent press release, measurements taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover show a “higher than expected” amount of methane in the Martian regolith. Planetary scientists believe that methane is important, since one way it forms is through biological processes….
