Stronger Than Strong

May 4, 2020 Electrical activity is a better explanation for energetic celestial phenomena. More than ten years ago, astronomers discovered an energy signature they called a “Fast Radio Burst”, or FRB. What was so unusual about the observation is that it appeared to release more energy than the Sun puts…

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Moon Quakes?

May 1, 2020 Consensus scientific theories postulate that the Moon experienced extreme selenological activity early in its history. There are reports that the Moon is not a completely dead body; that selenological processes involving tectonic plates might still be happening. It is obvious that cataclysmic devastation occurred at some time…

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Ring in the New

April 30, 2020 Science depends on novel ideas. “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” — Plato It is commonly believed that science “stands on the shoulders of giants”. In other words, new theories are based on those inherited from older generations. If that is the…

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Truth or Fashion

April 29, 2020 If currently fashionable theories are Ultimate Truth (or at least smart ideas) and myth was stupid superstition, where is the dividing line? Was Ptolemy stupid and Newton smart? But General Relativity is not just an improved version of Newton’s theory, it’s different: Einstein’s stretchable space-time is not…

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Cold-Hearted

April 28, 2020 Dust at a temperature near absolute zero shows up as red and orange in this image of the Carina Nebula.  NGC 3372 is a large, bright nebulosity in the constellation Carina, located between 6500 and 10,000 light-years from Earth. Since there are so many nebulae, and all…

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Toil and Trouble

April 24, 2020 A bubble of X-rays generated by an electric discharge through dusty plasma. In images from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a stellar explosion is thought to create a spherical shockwave that is traveling through the surrounding interstellar dust at extremely high velocity. According to astronomers, the shockwave of…

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DAVINCI Visits Venus

April 23, 2020 A new mission to study the second planet. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission is now over. Launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on November 9, 2005 the spacecraft entered orbit around Venus on April 11, 2006. Sometime in November 2021, NASA will launch the DAVINCI…

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How Cold Is It?

April 22, 2020 “So cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death.”— Samuel Clemens The Galileo spacecraft was launched on October 18, 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, entering orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995. After eight years in orbit, Galileo…

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Sun Sparks

April 21, 2020 The Sun is not a ball of (con)fusion. “In a low density plasma, localized space charge regions may build up large potential drops over distances of the order of some tens of the Debye lengths. Such regions have been called electric double layers. An electric double layer…

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