Discovered in late March, Comet NEOWISE has shown itself in the skies all over the world. Dr. David Schleicher, Senior Astronomer at Lowell Observatory gives us some details about this cool comet gracing the night skies.
The Milky Way is a giant, magnificent, truly transcendently beautiful spiral arm galaxy. It’s too bad we can’t get a decent picture of it. The problem is that we live inside it, and so astronomers have to work extra-hard to construct an accurate map.
It was announced this week that Astronaut Jeanette Epps will be added to NASA's Boeing Starliner-1 mission to the international Space Station. She will be the first Black astronaut to live on the ISS.
In times of darkness and incertainty, opt for exploration of wonder in the skies.
The Crab Nebula sits 6,500 light-years away, and is currently about 11 light-years across. But while it looks pretty from afar, don’t give in to the temptation to visit it up close.
It's time to say goodbye to the mini-moon that's no bigger than your car.
Pluto isn't alone after all. Besides being the home of Pluto, the Kuiper belt hosts dwarf planets, and smaller bits of rock and ice.
The eyes of much of the world have been looking up this week, gazing at Jupiter and Saturn as they dance tantalizingly close to each other.Many in the media and elsewhere have dubbed this planetary pair “the Christmas Star”, in reference to an oft-cited possible connection between the Bible’s Star of Bethlehem and such planetary “conjunctions” as Jupiter and Saturn are now displaying.
The internet and news media alike are abuzz with news about a radio buzz coming from Proxima Centauri, the nearest neighbor star to our sun a mere four and a quarter light-years away. That star happens to host a planet, called Proxima b (because we don’t have a cooler name for it yet), that sits in the habitable zone of its parent star. That means that the planet can potentially host liquid water, and where there’s liquid water there’s a chance for life.
Through the use of cutting-edge instruments, scientists finally have the opportunity to probe deep beneath the surface and ascertain exactly how the terrestrial planet formed.
When we think of an ocean, we don't necessarily think of Pluto. If we can’t see the liquid water, why do astronomers think it’s there?
Listen folks, I love a good sci-fi movie as much as anyone. Cruising around the galaxy, finding weird stuff, and blowing up aliens--it’s all good. But just because a writer can come up with something, it doesn’t make it possible. I’m sorry to say that we’re going to be bound to our solar system for a really, really long time. As in, probably forever.
Just how lucky are we on Earth? What were the chances that life would arise, let alone lead to intelligence?
Just before the close of the seventh month each year, the Earth makes a trip through some comet debris to create the meteor showers. Look up and this year, you may be able to catch two very special meteor showers happening on the same night!!
Headline after headline is sharing the exciting news: a pair of theoretical physicists have realized that our sci-fi dreams may be real: it may be possible to build an actual, operational warp drive. One problem: it doesn’t go all that fast.