Titan Mons

  Nov 29, 2016 The tallest mountain on Titan. The Cassini spacecraft was launched October 15, 1997 on a mission to explore Saturn and Titan, the gas giant’s largest moon. With the Huygens lander included, Cassini was the largest interplanetary space probe ever launched. It is 6.7 meters high, four meters…

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Chicxulub

  Nov 28, 2016 Did a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid strike Earth and excavate a crater? Off the coast of Mexico is what geologists believe to be an impact basin caused by the collision of an asteroid. It is a multi-ringed structure, similar to those mentioned in a previous Picture of the…

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Electric Rings

  Nov 24, 2016 What force created and sustains Saturn’s rings? Saturn’s main rings, including gaps, are approximately 416,000 kilometers wide, but are estimated to be a mere 50 meters thick, possibly as little as 10 meters. This means that even the most powerful Earth-based telescopes can detect only a thin…

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Split the Sky

  Nov 23, 2016 Nova explosions are electrical phenomena. According to a recent press release, two novae were spotted in the constellation Sagittarius. One, temporarily identified as TCP J18102829-2729590 and the other one, called ASASSN-16ma, were found in late October. A nova explosion is thought to occur when a white…

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Say What?

  Nov 22, 2016 The Large Hadron Collider has met with a few unforeseen accidents. Could they be a bizarre case of sabotage? Originally published October 2009 Particle physicists began thinking about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) early in the 1980s. The LHC’s predecessor, the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP)…

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Core Principles

  Nov 21, 2016 The Sun is not a fusion reactor. Heliophysicists believe that the Sun’s core pressure is so dense and the temperature so high that hydrogen atoms crush together until they fuse into helium. It is thought to be approximately 15 million Celsius and more than 340 billion times Earth’s…

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Cold Got To Be

  Nov 17, 2016 Pluto reveals its electrical birth. In an Electric Universe, the Solar System, and by extension, the rest of the galaxy, is governed by electromagnetism. This idea sets consensus ideas about cosmology and cosmogony against an electrical theory for how the planets behave. In most theories about…

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Boiling Mad

  Nov 15, 2016 Back hole physics in the news again. A NASA press release announced that the “most luminous galaxy” ever observed is being consumed by the black hole at its heart. The rapid motion of gas and dust revolving around W2246-0526’s so-called “event horizon” is generating extreme turbulence throughout the galaxy’s…

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Most Atypical

  Nov 14, 2016 Matter in the plasma state exhibits extreme activity. According to a recent press release, galaxy NGC 1222 is a “peculiar example” of lenticular galaxy. It is peculiar because lenticular galaxies are supposed to have used up the material available for new stars to form. NGC 1222,…

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