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Summer Astronomy, Minimoon & Saturn Opposition 2017 Saturn on June 1st, nearing opposition. Image credit and copyright: Peter on the Universe Today Flickr forum Summertime astronomy leaves observers with the perennial question: when to observe? Here in Florida, for example, true astronomical darkness does not occur until 10 PM; folks further north face an even more dire situation. In Alaska, the game in late July became “on what date can you first spot a bright planet/star? around midnight. And evening summer thunder showers don’t help. Our solution is to get up early (4 AM or so) when the roiling atmosphere has settled down a bit. ButRead More →

How Do We Know the Universe is Flat? Discovering the Topology of the Universe Whenever we talk about the expanding Universe, everyone wants to know how this is going to end. Sure, they say, the fact that most of the galaxies we can see are speeding away from us in all directions is really interesting. Sure, they say, the Big Bang makes sense, in that everything was closer together billions of years ago. But how does it end? Does this go on forever? Do galaxies eventually slow down, come to a stop, and then hurtle back together in a Big Crunch? Will we get aRead More →

Reused SpaceX Dragon Supply Ship Arrives Space Station, Cygnus Departs, Falcon 9 Launch & Landing: Photos/Videos The newly arrived SpaceX Dragon CRS-11 resupply ship is installed to the Harmony module on June 5, 2017. The Progress 66 cargo craft is docked to the Pirs docking compartment and the Soyuz MS-04 crew vehicle is docked to the Poisk module. Credit: NASA KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – The first ever reused Dragon supply ship successfully arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) two days after a thunderous liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday, June 3. The first stage boosterRead More →

We Finally Know why the Boomerang Nebula is Colder than Space Itself The Boomerang Nebula, a proto-planetary nebula that was created by a dying red giant star (located about 5000 light years from Earth), has been a compelling mystery for astronomers since 1995. It was at this time, thanks to a team using the now-decommissioned 15-meter Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SESTI) in Chile, that this nebula came to be known as the coldest object in the known Universe. And now, over 20 years later, we may know why. According to a team of astronomers who used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) – located in theRead More →

Maybe the Aliens Aren’t Hiding, they’re Sleeping, Waiting for the Universe to Get Better When you consider that age of the Universe – 13.8 billion years by our most recent counts –  and that which is “observable” to us measures about 27.6 billion light years in diameter, you begin to wonder why we haven’t found signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) beyond our Solar System. To paraphrase Enrico Fermi, the 20th century physicists who advanced the famous Fermi Paradox – “where the heck are all the aliens?” Naturally, Fermi’s Paradox has attracted a lot of theoretical explanations over the years – which include ETI being veryRead More →

How Big is Saturn? Beyond the Solar System’s Main Asteroid Belt lies the realm of the giants. It is here, staring with Jupiter and extending to Neptune, that the largest planets in the Solar System are located. Appropriately named “gas giants” because of their composition, these planets dwarf the rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner Solar System many times over. Just take a look at Saturn, the gas giant that takes its name from the Roman god of agriculture, and the second largest planet in the Solar System (behind Jupiter). In addition to its beautiful ring system and its large system of moons, this planetRead More →

Messier 45 – The Pleiades Cluster Welcome back to Messier Monday! In our ongoing tribute to the great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at the universally-renowned cluster known for its seven major points of light – The Pleiades Cluster! 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 theRead More →

Carnival of Space #512 This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Gadi Eidelheit at his The Venus Transit blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #512. 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 →

NASA is Planning to Test Pulsars as Cosmic Navigation Beacons When a large star undergoes gravitational collapse near the end of its lifespan, a neutron star is often the result. This is what remains after the outer layers of the star have been blown off in a massive explosion (i.e. a supernova) and the core has compressed to extreme density. Afterwards, the star’s rotation rate increases considerably, and where they emit beams of electromagnetic radiation, they become “pulsars”. And now, 50 years after they were first discovered by British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, the first mission devoted to the study of these objects is about toRead More →

1st Recycled SpaceX Dragon Blasts Off for Space Station on 100th Flight from Pad 39A with Science Rich Cargo and Bonus Booster Landing Blastoff of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center) at 5:07 p.m. EDT on June 3, 2017, on Dragon CRS-11 resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – After threatening stormy skies over the Florida Space Coast miraculously parted just in the nick of time, the first ever recycled SpaceX Dragon cargo freighter blasted off on the 100th flight from historic pad 39A on the KennedyRead More →

Weekly Space Hangout – June 2, 2017: Mike Simmons of Astronomers Without Borders Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest: Mike Simmons is the President of Astronomer Without Borders. Mike is joining us today to discuss how AWB will be engaging the public and our schools both during and following the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. You can find the AWB Eclipse education program website here. Guests: Sarah Marquart (Futurism.com / @SagaofSarah) Their stories this week: Tomorrow, SpaceX Will Transform Spaceflight Forever NASA Just Unveiled Their Next Mission “We Will Finally Touch the Sun” We use a tool called Trello to submit and voteRead More →

Monster Stratolaunch Aircraft Rolled Out, Getting Closer to First Flights In 2011, Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen and Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan announced the launch of their private space venture. Known as Stratolaunch Systems, this Seattle-based company was founded with the intention of developing air-launch-to-orbit systems. Similar to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, this concept involves a large air carrier flying rockets to launch altitude as cost-effective means of delivering small payloads to orbit. On Thursday, May 31st, the company unveiled their launch vehicle, the Scaled Composites Model 351 (aka. the “Roc”). Consisting of two 747 hulls mated together, this aircraft is the the largest inRead More →

Can We Own Space? Buying Your Own Piece of the High Frontier Compared to a regular human, the Earth is enormous. And compared to the Earth, the Universe is really enormous. Like, maybe infinitely enormous. And yet, Earth is the only place humans are allowed to own. You can buy a plot of land in the city or the country, but you can’t buy land on the Moon, on Mars or on Alpha Centauri. It’s not that someone wouldn’t be willing to sell it to you. I could point you at a few locations on the internet where someone would be glad to exchange yourRead More →

Third Gravitational Wave Event Detected A third gravitational wave has been detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). An international team announced the detection today, while the event itself was detected on January 4th, 2017. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago. LIGO consists of two facilities: one in Hanford, Washington and one in Livingston, Louisiana. When LIGO announced its first gravitational wave back in February 2016 (detected in September 2015), it opened up a new window into astronomy. With this gravitational wave, the third one detected, that new window is getting larger. So far, all threeRead More →

Are Aliens Communicating with Neutrino Beams? It is no easy thing to search for signs of intelligent life beyond our Solar System. In addition to the incredible distances involved and the fact that we really only have indirect methods at our disposal, there is also the small problem of not knowing exactly what to look for. If intelligent life does exist beyond our Solar System, would they even communicate as we do, using radio transmitters and similar forms of technology? Such has been the preoccupation of groups like the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and, more recently, organizations like Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI)Read More →

What Exactly Should We See When a Star Splashes into a Black Hole Event Horizon? At the center of our Milky Way galaxy dwells a behemoth. An object so massive that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light. In fact, we think most galaxies have one of them. They are, of course, supermassive black holes. Supermassive black holes are stars that have collapsed into a singularity. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted their existence. And these black holes are surrounded by what’s known as an event horizon, which is kind of like the point of no return for anything getting too close toRead More →