Category Astronomy/Space

Supermoon plus Eclipse Equals Rare Sky show Sunday night

Supermoon plus eclipse equals rare sky show Sunday night

This Sept. 13, 2015 image provided by NASA shows the moon, left, and the Earth, top, transiting the sun together, seen from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The edge of Earth appears fuzzy because the atmosphere blocks different amounts of light at different altitudes. This image was taken in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, invisible to human eyes, but here colorized in gold. A total lunar eclipse will share the stage with a so-called supermoon Sunday evening, Sept. 27, 2015 as seen from the United States. That combination hasn’t been seen since 1982 and won’t happen again until 2033. (NASA/SDO via AP) 

Get ready for a rare double feature, starring our very own moon...

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Most detailed Color Map of Pluto ever made from NASANewHorizons PlutoFlyby :‘Snakeskin’ and more

Snakeskin terrain

In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This view, roughly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14, 2015, and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

The new “extended color” view of Pluto – taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) shows the extraordinarily rich color palette of Pluto...

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Shrapnel from an Exploded Star: Veil Nebula

Veil Nebula, NGC 6960, Cygnus Loop. Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Veil Nebula, NGC 6960, Cygnus Loop. Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of Veil Nebula, a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. The debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering 6 full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

This view is a mosaic of 6 Hubble pictures of a small area roughly 2 light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula’s vast structure.
This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of w...

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New Theory may explain why Dark Matter has Evaded Direct Detection in Earth-based experiments

This 3D map illustrates the large-scale distribution of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing by using the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

This 3D map illustrates the large-scale distribution of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing by using the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence Livermore National Lab team, has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. It identifies it as naturally “stealthy” today, but would have been easy to see via interactions with ordinary matter in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe.

Dark matter makes up 83% of all matter in the universe and does not interact directly with elect...

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