Fair Daughter of the Dawn

  Original Post August 16, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a…

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My Friend Flicker

Orion Nebula

Original Post August 10, 2012 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…

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Footprints on Mars

Original Post August 8, 2012 The significance of life on other planets leaves many unanswered questions. Note: In May 1976 Richard H. Smith, the father of Stephen Smith, TPOD managing editor, speculated about the possibility and significance of extraterrestrial life. The universal feeling that man is unique has been challenged…

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Frozen in the Dark

A detail from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image

Original Post August 3, 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…

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Lunar Graben

A portion of the Rimae Burg graben on the Moon

Original Post August 2, 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…

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The Fall of El Gordo

Colliding galaxy clusters

Original Post July 12, 2012 El Gordo is so called because it is the biggest, brightest, and hottest pair of colliding galaxy clusters known to astronomers. Astronomers “know” that El Gordo is over 7 billion light-years from Earth. This knowledge derives from the amount by which El Gordo’s light is shifted toward…

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