April 27, 2017 Do crustal blocks slide around? According to planetary scientists, plate tectonic activity on Mars is similar to what happens on Earth. Studies undertaken by the University of California Los Angeles suggest that: “Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse…
April 25, 2017 Saturn generates electricity. Saturn is quite large compared to Earth; its mean equatorial diameter is about 121,000 kilometers. However, Saturn rotates so fast (10 hours, 34 minutes) that its polar diameter is 108,700 kilometers. The difference is caused by “flattening” as angular momentum pushes the low-density…
Apr 24, 2017 Brown dwarf stars could be harbors for life in the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled for launch in October 2018 on a five-year mission. Its goals are to search for the earliest galaxies—meaning that it will look for those with the greatest redshift….
Apr 21, 2017 Spherical shells around stars are signs of electrical activity. More than 70 years ago Dr. Charles Bruce noted that planetary nebulae are similar to electric discharges. He reasoned that their shapes were hourglasses, with central stars obscured by dusty toroids. Since nebular shapes are similar to…
April 20, 2017 “Walk into splintered sunlight…” NASA launched the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) on June 28, 2013. Its primary mission includes a study of the solar corona: why is it far hotter than the Sun’s surface, or photosphere? Heliophysicists see formations that resemble “mini-tornadoes” in the Sun’s…
Apr 19, 2017 More dark matter machinations. In a previous Picture of the Day article about dark matter, it was argued that it is an ad-hoc theory, created so that the current gravitational models of the Universe can be preserved, primarily the Big Bang. here is a problem underlying the…
April 18, 2017 Mysterious Neptune. Sir,—The Planet [Neptune] whose position you marked out actually exists. On the day on which your letter reached me, I found a star of the eighth magnitude, which was not recorded in the excellent map designed by Dr. Bremiker, containing the twenty-first hour of…
Apr 17, 2017 Instead of tectonic activity, Venus shows signs of electric discharges. The planet Venus shows signs of a somewhat recent catastrophe: giant cracks extend for hundreds of kilometers; formations called “coronae” are accompanied by massive fracture zones, branching out like carved lightning bolts; and vast caldera with upraised…
Apr 14, 2017 Stars form at a faster rate in a starburst galaxy. Astronomers using the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) recently announced that a distant galaxy is creating stars at an anomalous rate. So-called “starburst galaxies” contain regions where stars form at “a breakneck rate”, so fast that…
April 13, 2017 Long time passing…. The Dawn mission was launched on September 27, 2007. It first entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta on July 17, 2011, departing on September 5, 2012 toward Ceres. Dawn arrived at Ceres on Friday, March 6, 2015. According to a recent press release,…
