Astro Blog

Source:  The New York Times Excerpt:  Set foot on [Pluto] an alien world, three billion miles from the warmth of the sun. Download the NYT VR [virtual reality] app for Android or iPhone. [Different views are seen by moving the smart phone to different viewing angles. Or use cardboard viewer for effect]... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/science/space/seeking-plutos-frigid-heart-nytvr.html

Source:   By Shannon Hall, EoS-Earth & Space Science News (AGU) Excerpt: Massive meteorites likely slammed into a Martian ocean billions of years ago, unleashing tsunami waves up to 120 meters tall, a close study of a region of the Red Planet's terrain has found.... https://eos.org/articles/tsunamis-splashed-ancient-mars

Source:   By JoAnna Wendel, EoS-Earth & Space Science News (AGU) Excerpt: Scientists searching for life in the universe now have a new target: the once-icy worlds orbiting red giants. There’s some good news and bad news for Europa colonization enthusiasts. As our Sun gets older, brighter, and bigger over the next several billion years, it will expand into a red giant so large that its heat could melt ice on the surface of Europa and other moons of Jupiter, as well as those around Saturn. Liquid water flowing freely would not only be a boon for would-be space explorers, but it could provide a stable environment ripe for fostering life. The bad news is Earth will be burnt to a crisp. It may even get engulfed by the fiery wall of the expanding star, along with Mercury and Venus, so anyone that remains on Earth probably won’t live to see that day. For right now, however, humans who study planets orbiting other stars stand to benefit from the grim future prospects of our solar s...

Source:   NASA Excerpt: 550 of the 1,284 new Kepler planets are small possibly rocky; 9 of those reside in habitable zone.... http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=415

Source:  By Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy 2016-03-29. Jupiter Got Whacked by Yet Another Asteroid/Comet! By Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 1. Excerpt: On March 17, Gerrit Kernbauer, an amateur astronomer in Mödling, Austria, was taking video of Jupiter using a 20 cm telescope. ...he got more than he expected. At 00:18:33 UTC he captured what looks very much like the impact of a small comet or asteroid into Jupiter! [see video] ...On average ...an object will hit Jupiter with roughly five times the velocity it hits Earth, so the impact energy is 25 times as high. The asteroid that burned up over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was 19 meters across, and it exploded with the energy of 500,000 tons of TNT. Now multiply that by 25, and you can see how it doesn’t take all that big a rock to hit Jupiter for us to be able to see it from Earth. Incidentally, at these huge speeds, hitting the atmosphere is like slamming into a wall. A lot of people get understanda...

Source:   By Glen Roberts Jr., Berkeley Lab News Center. Excerpt: WFIRST will explore mysteries of dark energy, hunt for distant planets, retrace universe's history during 6-year mission. ...The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will launch into its six-year mission from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the mid-2020s. ...The telescope will be NASA’s next major astrophysics observatory following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. ...WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies. WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies.... http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/0...

Source:   By Adrian Cho, Science Excerpt: ...two massive black holes—the ultrastrong gravitational fields left behind by gigantic stars that collapsed to infinitesimal points—slowly drew together... spiraled ever closer, until, about 1.3 billion years ago, they whirled about each other at half the speed of light and finally merged. The collision sent a shudder through the universe: ripples in the fabric of space and time called gravitational waves. Five months ago, they washed past Earth. And, for the first time, physicists detected the waves, fulfilling a 4-decade quest and opening new eyes on the heavens. The discovery marks a triumph for the 1000 physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gigantic instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. ...Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but directly detecting them required mind-boggling technological prowess ...[sensing] a wav...