Category: Stars in their eyes
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A habitable planet in Libra?
Where are all them habitable planets that we gonna move to when Earth becomes too hot ‘n’ nasty for us? (By “habitable”, astrobiobods mean host to liquid water.) Turns out that a coupla good candidates are orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light years from here in the constellation of Libra (Gliese…
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Could X-ray afterglows be standard candles?
Astrobods love standard candles. Love ’em. And it ain’t hard to understand why. When ya look out into the darkness, it’s easy to see where everything fits into the celestial sphere. It ain’t quite so simple to see in which layer it sits in the celestial onion. So astronomers look for standard candles, objects whose…
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A wishlist of experiments to do in space
What should we do in space? NASA has bet the farm on the International Space Station, a giant orbiting Lego set where astronauts can play Mommies and Daddies, practice sharing and become zero-g toilet trained. Almost everyone else wants to do something useful. So a bunch of chief eggheads from the world of physics have…
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The galactic foxtrot revisited
A coupla months back, Michael “Bongo” Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he’d been a-starin’ and a-studyin’ some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about ’em: they is all pointing in the same direction. The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story but it now turns…
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Recipes for other Earths
It ain’t gonna be long now before we find another Earth orbiting a nearby star and the question is: what are we gonna do when we find one? (By some accounts we already found at least one but in reality these bodies are too big to be like Earth.) Eric “Nose” Gaidos at the University…
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More on Moon measurements
Ya’ll heard about lunar laser ranging last week: them laser legends can now bounce enough photons off the moon to calculate its distance to within a few millimetres (we’re still waitin’ to hear how many millimetres it is) This week, Victor “Brum” Brumberg at the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg, Russia, and chums…
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Watching other Earths
One of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of science was carried out in 1993 when the NASA spacecraft Galileo flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. Carl Sagan and pals analysed the data and concluded after much head scratchin that life on Earth was a distinct possibility. That was a dry run…
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The mystery of the missing photons
A few hundred thousand years after the big bang, the Universe was a-hummin’ and a-jigglin’ with a plasma of hydrogen and helium nuclei as well as electrons. As the universe cooled, the electrons combined with the nuclei to form neutral atoms, giving off photons in the process. These photons are what we see as the…
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The dim light of dark energy
Dark energy is another one of them mysteries that astronomers love. Turns out there are a whole loada observations suggesting that the universe ain’t just expanding, but acceleratin’ away from us. Something has gotta be providing the oomph for this cosmological acceleration and for want of a better term, theorists have nick-named it dark energy…
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The ball at the end of the solar system
I know ya’ll think of Pluto as a barren, godforsaken excuse of a planet that ought to be reclassified as a lump of sawdust n’ spit. But that could change when the New Horizons spacecraft arrives at the solar system’s most distant minor second class could-do-better planet (or whatever Pluto is these days) sometime in…