Or more accurately the milky way is twice as thick as we previously supposed, 12,000 light years thick, rather than 6,000 light years. A light year is the distance it takes like to travel in a year. By comparison light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second. The galaxy is 100,000 light [...]
The ExoMars project is set to be renamed. The concept has changed so much since the project was first envisioned and its costs first set that the new ExoMars is really an entirely different creature from the 2005 version. Jean Jacques Dordain will ask ministers in November for a near doubling of the 650 million [...]
As I write this posting in my blog (On Monday, the 14th of January although I’m already in the 15th here) a pioneering NASA spacecraft is drifting through the gulf of space towards Mercury - 1st rock from the sun. This probe will be the first to visit Mercury in almost 33 years! According to [...]
Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits — in less than 40 million years — it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
“The leading edge of this cloud is already interacting with gas [...]
This gorgeous image to the left is of the Boomerang Nebula (also called the bow tie nebula). It is a protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth in the Centaurus constellation. It was formed by high-speed winds of gas and dust blowing from the aged star at the center of the image. The winds [...]
Within the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is this star - some forty times more massive than out sun - which is blowing that giant bubble of matter into space. It is so hot that material is very quickly cast out into space, forming this lumpy bubble, rippled by encounters with other gases of different density. [...]
NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows that the star Mira is leaving an enormous 13 light year long trail of material that will eventually end up part of new solar systems. The star is named Mira (my-rah) after the latin for “wonderful” and is moving at 291,000 miles per hour in relation to the other objects [...]
The Rho Ophiuchi clouds, shining in a billion splendid shades. We humans are able to see only a tiny fraction of all the wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks to science, we have tools that allow us to see that which is invisible to our own eyes, and we are able to look out at [...]
It’s a gorgeous image, of creation itself - the formation of a new solar system. I didn’t just decide to talk about this because it goes with my colour scheme, or my theme, but rather because it’s a fascinating subject. By gazing into the heavens and watching creation unfold in new systems, we can learn [...]
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