Space

YORP Effect, Peanuts And Itokawa: The Anatomy Of An Asteroid

In 2005,the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa  revealed that the near-Earth asteroid (25143) Itokawa  has a strange peanut shape, leading to questions about why. Now, using ground-based observations, a group has measured the speed at which Itokawa spins and ho ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2014 - 10:30am

Conundrum Solved: Ionized Gas In High Mass Star Formation

Stars like Sol are relatively easy to understand, because they are numerous, and live for billions of years, but high mass stars are rare and live for only a few million years. As a result, understanding their early evolution has been a challenge.   Simple ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2014 - 4:04pm

Can Spinning Habitats Solve Zero g Problem? And Answer Low g Questions?

You've probably seen movies of orbital space habs spinning for artificial gravity. But did you know, that nobody has ever tested this to see how it works out in practise? We know that weightlessnes is bad for health, especially long term, with many p ...

Blog Post - Robert Walker - Oct 27 2015 - 8:33am

Lunar Ranging Provides A Science Explanation Of Full Moons And Curses

Though the evidence shows that people are not really different during a full moon, like homeopathy or organic food benefits happen just often enough that people are convinced by the placebo/nocebo effect to believe there must be something to it. And scien ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 11 2014 - 1:33pm

Hypothesis: How Stellar Death Can Lead To Bipolar Jets

Large stars go supernova but smaller stars sometimes end up as planetary nebulae – colorful, glowing clouds of dust and gas. These nebulae have been observed to often emit powerful, bipolar jets of gas and dust. But how do spherical stars evolve to produc ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2014 - 10:29am

Where Should we Send our Rovers to Mars to Unravel Mystery of Origin of First Living Cells?

The origin of life remains a great mystery in biology. Continental drift has erased most of the record, until all that's left of the first half billion years of evolution are some millimeter sized zircons embedded in later rocks. These can tell us th ...

Blog Post - Robert Walker - Dec 24 2016 - 10:39am

The Death Of The Cosmological Constant: Why Did Einstein Accept An Expanding Universe?

How smart do you have to be to convince Albert Einstein to change his mind? Pretty smart. He never invoked 'the science is settled' or ridiculed the political party of physicists who insisted the universe was expanding. It was static until someo ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 18 2014 - 4:37pm

When A Black Hole Shreds A Star, A Bright Flare Tells The Tale

How accurately can you simulate the universe's most violent events? Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz wanted to find out, so when the first detailed observations of a star being ripped apart by a black hole were reported in 2012 (Gezari et al., Nature), he was eag ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 27 2014 - 11:33pm

Rocks Around The Clock: Star PSR J0738-4042 Is Constantly Pummelled By Asteroids

Calling Bill Haley and the Comets, because PSR J0738-4042, which lies 37,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Puppis, is being rocked around the clock. As in being constantly hit by asteroids. It's not a great place. The environment aro ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2014 - 10:18am

Bell's Inequality And The Speed Of Light: Quasar Findings Might Close The 'Free Will' Loophole

In 1964, the physicist John Bell tackled locality and the disparity between classical physics and quantum mechanics, stating that if the universe is based on classical physics, the measurement of one entangled particle should not affect the measurement of ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2014 - 10:54am