Astro Blog

Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Excerpt: Some 3.8 billion years ago... A 930-kilometer-wide impact basin perched on the moon’s visible edge, [Mare] Orientale resembles a bull’s-eye, with a smooth interior encircled by three rough rings. ...Do any of the rings match the original crater rim left by the striking asteroid or comet? Now, a new subsurface moon map from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, published today in Science, suggests that the answer is no. ...GRAIL’s two spacecraft...measured Orientale from a scant altitude of 2 kilometers. At such close range, the spacecraft were exceptionally sensitive to tiny changes in the moon’s gravity caused by buried rocks of different density–giving the GRAIL team a picture of the subsurface, and a better idea of how the impact actually went down. They found that the Orientale strike hollowed out a crater some 320 to 460 kilometers wide—smaller than any of the rings. Within an hour, the crater’s steep wa...

Source:    By   Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley Media relations Excerpt: Tabby’s star has provoked so much excitement over the past year, with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilization capable of building orbiting megastructures to capture the star’s energy, that UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any signals from intelligent extraterrestrials. ...“The Breakthrough Listen program has the most powerful SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] equipment on the planet, and access to the largest telescopes on the planet,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and co-director of Breakthrough Listen. “We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world. ” ...“Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telesco...