Science Fiction Ratatouille

Whaddya get when you cross a planet with a comet? Well, HD 209458b looks like a candidate. It’s a gas giant planet also called Osiris, and it’s orbiting so close to its star that some of its atmosphere gets blown away by the stellar wind. Astronomers think that it may then have a tail like a comet’s.

The researchers studied the odd object using the Hubble Space Telescope and reported their finding in the July 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal . [Jeffrey Linsky et al, http://bit.ly/b77vzS ] [More]

Hubble Space Telescope – HD 209458b – Comet – Gas giant – Astrophysical Journal

Whaddya get when you cross a planet with a comet? Well, HD 209458 b looks like a candidate. It’s a gas giant planet also called Osiris, and it’s orbiting so close to its star that some of its atmosphere gets blown away by the stellar wind. Astronomers think that it may then have a tail like a comet’s.

The researchers studied the odd object using the Hubble Space Telescope and reported their finding in the July 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal . [Jeffrey Linsky et al., http://bit.ly/b77vzS ] [More]

Hubble Space Telescope – HD 209458b – Comet – Gas giant – Astrophysical Journal

Astronomers are uncovering newfound planets in orbit around other stars at a meteoric rate these days. The tally of known planets outside the solar system now stands at more than 450, of which about 50 have been discovered just this year. That pace promises to increase as NASA’s Kepler mission carries out its multiyear survey of a large patch of stars; the campaign has already located several hundred planetary candidates for follow-up study and confirmation. [More]

Solar System – NASA – Extrasolar planet – Kepler Mission – Astronomy

One star dies, another is born. The remains of the old are gathered up, at least in some small measure, to become part of the new. That is the astronomical circle of life, the reason that stars have evolved through the eons, each generation incorporating new elements synthesized in the stars that came before. Unlike the earliest stars of hydrogen and helium, stars nowadays contain heavier elements passed down to them by their predecessors, such as carbon, iron and oxygen. [More]

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, does not harbor alien life as far as anyone knows, but the prospects for extraterrestrial biology there are about as good there as anywhere else in the solar system. [More]

Saturn – Titan – Solar System – Extraterrestrial life – Astronomy

Humans have not set foot on the moon since December 14, 1972, when astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission departed the lunar surface to return home. Thankfully, Cernan and Schmitt, a trained geologist , collected 110 kilograms of lunar material–the largest-ever haul of moon rocks and soil–before heading for Earth. [More]

Earth – Moon – Apollo 17 – Eugene Cernan – Space

Private access to space took a giant leap forward on June 4 with a successful test launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, developed and built by SpaceX, a venture headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

The two-stage Falcon 9, which stands 48 meters tall, lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a dummy capsule that could soon deliver supplies to the International Space Station–and, one day, even astronauts to orbit.

[More]

Falcon 9 – International Space Station – NASA – Cape Canaveral – SpaceX

Miami–In rough terms, the sun’s activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections, and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface, provide a visual proxy for the cycle’s evolution; they appear in droves at maximum and all but disappear at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that–the most recent solar minimum of late 2008 was surprisingly quiet and prolonged.

Solar physicists have offered a number of mechanisms to shed light on the solar cycle. Beyond improving fundamental scientific understanding, better predictions of solar behavior would help safeguard against electrical grid disruptions, damage to Earth-orbiting satellites and radiation threats to astronauts. In a press conference at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in May, researchers laid out different approaches to tracking and predicting the sun’s activity, but the final explanation–or, more likely, explanations–for the sun’s curious recent lull remained opaque. “I think we’re almost in violent agreement that this is an interesting minimum,” said David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

[More]

NASA – Sun – Marshall Space Flight Center – Sunspot – American Astronomical Society

Anyone who’s ever seen a dog move around on three limbs knows that canines are remarkably resilient creatures. Scientists are now wondering whether such adaptability could likewise be programmed into robots, in the event they experience damage or malfunction far from a repair shop (look no further than NASA’s Mars Spirit rover to see why this is important). [More]

NASA – Mars – Spirit rover – Space – Dog

It’s a plotline worthy of an action film–galaxies, violently torn apart, smashing into one another, leaving remnants of themselves behind billions of years later. That’s the scene that accounts for some of the oldest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, according to work published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. [Andrew Cooper et al., http://bit.ly/9hMtBZ ]

Researchers ran a huge computer simulation of the evolution of the universe starting shortly after the big bang, more than 13 billion years ago. It’s the most detailed model ever produced, and allowed a close examination of the make-up of the Milky Way’s stellar halo. The stellar halo is debris that surrounds our familiar white swirl of stars. The halo is much larger and much older than the Milky Way itself.

[More]

Milky Way – Astronomy – Galaxies – Star – Big Bang