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Weekly Space Hangout – January 13, 2017: News Roundup! Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Guests: Carolyn Collins Petersen (thespacewriter.com / space.about.com / @spacewriter ) Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Kimberly Cartier ( KimberlyCartier.org / @AstroKimCartier ) Their stories this week:New studies of Boyajian’s Star Breakthrough Starshot hunting for planets Probing the Nearby Space Between Stars Looking for the stuff of life A new star in 2022 We use a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would like to see covered each week, and then Fraser will be selecting the stories from there. Here is the link to the Trello WSH pageRead More →

What Will the Voyager Spacecraft Encounter Next? Hubble Helps Provide a Roadmap The twin Voyager spacecraft are now making their way through the interstellar medium. Even though they are going where none have gone before, the path ahead it is not completely unknown. Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the ‘road’ ahead for these pioneering spacecraft, to ascertain what various materials may lay along the Voyagers’ paths through space. Combining Hubble data with the information the Voyagers are able to gather and send back to Earth, astronomers said a preliminary analysis reveals “a rich, complex interstellar ecology, containing multiple clouds of hydrogenRead More →

Stars at the Edge of our Galaxy May Have Been Stolen Our Milky Way is a pretty vast and highly-populated space. All told, its stars number between 100 and 400 billion, with some estimates saying that it may have as many as 1 trillion. But just where did all these stars come from? Well, as it turns out, in addition to forming many of its own and merging with other galaxies, the Milky Way may have stolen some of its stars from other galaxies. Such is the argument made by two astronomers from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. According to their study, which has been acceptedRead More →

Land On Titan With Huygens in Beautiful New Video On December 25, 2004, the piggybacking Huygens probe was released from the ‘mothership’ Cassini spacecraft and it arrived at Titan on January 14, 2005. The probe began transmitting data to Cassini four minutes into its descent through Titan’s murky atmosphere, snapping photos and taking data all the while. Then it touched down, the first time a probe had landed on an extraterrestrial world in the outer Solar System. JPL has released a re-mix of the data and images gathered by Huygens 12 years ago in a beautiful new video. This is the last opportunity to celebrateRead More →

A “Breakthrough” to Search for Planets in Closest Star System to Earth Ever since the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had discovered an exoplanet in the nearby system of Proxima Centauri, there have been a lot of questions about this exoplanet. In addition to whether or not this planet could actually support life, astronomers have also been eager to see of its companion stars – Alpha Centauri A and B – have exoplanets too. Prior to the discovery of Proxima b, Alpha Centauri was thought to host the closest exoplanets to Earth (Alpha Bb and Bc). However, time has cast doubt on theRead More →

Finally, An Explanation for the Alien Megastructure? Back in October of 2015, astronomers shook the world when they reported how the Kepler mission had noticed a strange and sudden drop in brightness coming from KIC 8462852 (aka. Tabby’s Star). This was followed by additional studies that showed how the star appeared to be consistently dimming over time. All of this led to a flurry of speculation, with possibilities ranging from large asteroids and a debris disc to an alien megastructure. But in what may be the greatest explanation yet, a team of researchers from Columbia University have suggested that the star’s strange flickering could beRead More →

What is the International Space Station? After the historic Apollo Missions, where human astronauts set foot on another celestial body for the first time in history, NASA and the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) began to shift their priorities away from pioneering space exploration, and began to focus on developing long-term capabilities in space. In the ensuing decades (the 1970s to 1990s), both agencies began to build and deploy space stations, each one bigger and more complex than the last. The latest and greatest of these is the International Space Station (ISS), a scientific facility that resides in Low-Earth Orbit around our planet. This space stationRead More →

Venus Rules the Dusk Skies at Greatest Elongation Venus, Mars, and the waxing crescent Moon at dusk from the evening of January 3rd, 2017. Image credit and copyright: Alan Dyer. “What’s that bright light in the sky?” The planet Venus never fails to impress, and indeed makes even seasoned observers look twice at its unexpected brilliance. The third brightest natural object in the sky, Venus now rules the dusk, a fine sight for wintertime evening commuters. Venus reaches greatest elongation tomorrow, a excellent time to admire this dazzling but shrouded world of mystery. Venus at greatest elongation Only the two planets interior to Earth’s orbitRead More →

Confirmed: We Really are ‘Star Stuff’ Scientist Carl Sagan said many times that “we are star stuff,” from the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, and the iron in our blood. It is well known that most of the essential elements of life are truly made in the stars. Called the “CHNOPS elements” – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur – these are the building blocks of all life on Earth. Astronomers have now measured of all of the CHNOPS elements in 150,000 stars across the Milky Way, the first time such a large number of stars have been analyzed forRead More →

Could We Marsiform Ourselves? As soon as people learn how inhospitable Mars, Venus, and really the entire Solar System are, they want to know how we can fix it. There’s a word for fixing a planet to make it more like Earth: terraforming. If you want to fix Mars, all you have to do is thicken and warm up its atmosphere to the point that Earth life could survive. You’d need to do the opposite with Venus, cooling it down and reducing the atmospheric pressure. But it’s hard to wrap your brain around the scale it would take to do such a thing. We’re talkingRead More →

Carnival of Space #491 This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Stefan Lamoureaux at the Links Through Space blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #491. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to helpRead More →

Messier 31 – The Andromeda Galaxy Welcome back to Messier Monday! In our ongoing tribute to the great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31. Enjoy! During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noted the presence of several “nebulous objects” in the night sky. Having originally mistaken them for comets, he began compiling a list of them so that others would not make the same mistake he did. In time, this list (known as the Messier Catalog) would come to include 100 of the most fabulous objects in the night sky. One of these objectsRead More →

Exploding Binary Stars Will Light Up the Sky in 2022 Stellar collisions are an amazingly rare thing. According to our best estimates, such events only occur in our galaxy (within globular clusters) once every 10,000 years. It’s only been recently, thanks to ongoing improvements in instrumentation and technology, that astronomers have been able to observe such mergers taking place. As of yet, no one has ever witnessed this phenomena in action – but that may be about to change! According to study from a team of researchers from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a binary star system that will likely merge and explode inRead More →

Poor Weather Pushes SpaceX Return Debut with Revolutionary Iridium Relay Sats to Jan. 14 Mission patch for Iridium-1 mission showing launch of the first 10 Iridium NEXT voice and data relay satellites on SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, for Iridium Communications, and planned landing of the first stage on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: SpaceX/Iridium In the face of unrelenting days of very poor weather and a range conflict with another very critical rocket launch, SpaceX is pushing back the return debut of their private Falcon 9 rocket carrying a revolutionary fleet of voice and data commercial communications relayRead More →

FAA Accepts Accident Report, Grants SpaceX License for Falcon 9 ‘Return to Flight’ SpaceX Falcon 9 poised for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, in this file photo ahead of Jason-3 launch for NASA on Jan. 17, 2016. Credit: SpaceX The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today “accepted the investigation report” regarding the results of SpaceX’s investigation into the cause of the company’s catastrophic Sept. 1, 2016 launch pad explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida, and simultaneously “granted a license” for the ‘Return to Flight’ blastoff of the private rocket from California as soon as next week – the FAA confirmed todayRead More →

Hubble Spots Possible Exocomets in Nearby Star System The Hubble Space Telescope is a workhorse which, despite its advanced years, keeps on producing valuable scientific data. In addition to determining the rate at which the Universe is expanding, spotting very distant galaxies, and probing the early history of the Universe, it has also observed some truly interesting things happening in nearby star systems. For example, Hubble recently spotted some unusual activity in HD 172555, a star system located about 95 light-years from Earth. Here, Hubble obtained spectral information that indicated the presence of comets that appeared to be falling into the star. This could proveRead More →

Martian Spacecraft Spies Earth and the Moon The incredible HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter turned its eyes away from its usual target – Mars’ surface – and for calibration purposes only, took some amazing images of Earth and our Moon. Combined to create one image, this is a marvelous view of our home from about 127 million miles (205 million kilometers) away. Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for HiRISE said the image is constructed from the best photo of Earth and the best photo of the Moon from four sets of images. Interestingly, this combined view retains the correct positions and sizes ofRead More →

Weekly Space Hangout – January 6, 2017: Abigail “Astronaut Abby” Harrison Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guests: This week’s guest is Abigail “Astronaut Abby” Harrison. Abigail is the founder of The Mars Generation nonprofit. Currently a sophomore at Wellesley College in Massachusetts majoring in Astrobiology and Russian. Harrison is positioned to enter a PhD program upon graduation and continue her pursuit of becoming a scientist, astronaut and member of the first human crew to land on Mars in the 2030’s. Hundreds of thousands of supporters from around the world follow her journey to becoming an astronaut via the blog Harrison authors at AstronautAbby.org. The MarsRead More →