Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    Full-Circle Vista from NASA Mars rover Curiosity shows Murray Buttes’

    August 22, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called 'Murray Buttes' on lower Mount Sharp. This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called "Murray Buttes" on lower Mount Sharp. The view combines more than 130 images taken on Aug. 5, 2016, during the afternoon of the mission's 1,421st sol, or Martian day, by Mastcam's left-eye camera. This date also was the fourth anniversary of Curiosity's landing. The dark, flat-topped mesa seen to the left of Curiosity's robotic arm is about 300 feet (about 90 meters) from the rover's position. It stands about 50 feet (about 15 meters) high. The horizontal ledge near the top of the mesa is about 200 feet (about 60 meters) across. An upper portion of Mount Sharp appears on the distant horizon to the left of this mesa. The relatively flat foreground is part of a geological layer called the Murray formation, which formed from lakebed mud deposits. The buttes and mesas rising above this surface are eroded remnants of ancient sandstone that originated when winds deposited sand after lower Mount Sharp had formed. Curiosity closely examined that layer -- the Stimson formation -- during the first half of 2016 while crossing a feature called "Naukluft Plateau" between two exposures of the Murray formation.

    This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called ‘Murray Buttes’ on lower Mount Sharp. This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called “Murray Buttes” on lower Mount Sharp. The view combines more than 130 images taken on Aug. 5, 2016, during the afternoon of the mission’s 1,421st sol, or Martian day, by Mastcam’s left-eye camera. This date also was the fourth anniversary of Curiosity’s landing. The dark, flat-topped mesa seen to the left of Curiosity’s robotic arm is about 300 feet (about 90 meters) from the rover’s position. It stands about 50 feet (about 15 meters) high...

    Read More

    Young Heavyweight Star discovered in the Milky Way

    August 22, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist's impression of the disc and outflow around the massive young star. Credit: A. Smith, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.

    Artist’s impression of the disc and outflow around the massive young star. Credit: A. Smith, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.

    A young star, located almost 11,000 light years away could help us understand how the most massive stars in the Universe are formed. This young star, already >30 times the mass of our Sun, is still in the process of gathering material from its parent molecular cloud, and may be even more massive when it finally reaches adulthood. The researchers, led by a team at the University of Cambridge, have identified a key stage in the birth of a very massive star, and found that these stars form in a similar way to much smaller stars like our Sun – from a rotating disc of gas and dust.

    In our galaxy, massive young stars – those with a mass at least 8X greater than the Sun ...

    Read More

    The Comet that Disappeared: What happened to Ison?

    August 21, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An enhanced image of Comet ISON taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2013. Credit: NASA

    An enhanced image of Comet ISON taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2013. Credit: NASA

    Comet ISON, a bright ball of frozen matter from the earliest days of the universe, was inbound from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system and expected to pierce the Sun’s corona on Nov. 28. Scientists were expecting quite a show. But instead of a brilliant cosmic display, there was … nothing. “The first thing we did was make sure that we had definitely seen nothing,” said Paul Bryans, NCAR, who was looking for the comet using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. “We did image processing just to make sure nothing was there, and it wasn’t. But that’s not necessarily a boring result. That can tell us something.”

    “We think that the most likely thing that happened is that Comet ISON broke up b...

    Read More

    A New Goldilocks for Habitable Planets

    August 20, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A new Goldilocks for habitable planets

    A new study suggests a planet must start with an internal temperature that is “just right” in order to support life. Credit: Michael S. Helfenbein/Yale University

    The search for habitable, alien worlds needs to make room for a second “Goldilocks,” according to a Yale University researcher. For decades, it has been thought that the key factor in determining whether a planet can support life was its distance from its sun. In our solar system, for instance, Venus is too close to the sun and Mars is too far, but Earth is just right. That distance is what scientists refer to as the “habitable zone,” or the “Goldilocks zone.”
    It also was thought that planets were able to self-regulate their internal temperature via mantle convection—the underground shifting of rocks caused by internal heating an...

    Read More