UCR researchers have identified 121 giant planets that may have habitable moons RIVERSIDE, Calif.– We’ve all heard about the search for life on other planets, but what about looking on other moons? In a paper published Wednesday (June 13) in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Southern Queensland…
From Greenbank Observatory Nanoscale gemstones source of mysterious cosmic microwave light For decades, astronomers have puzzled over the exact source of a peculiar type of faint microwave light emanating from a number of regions across the Milky Way. Known as anomalous microwave emission (AME), this light comes from energy released by rapidly spinning nanoparticles –…
NASA Finds Ancient Organic Material, Mysterious Methane on Mars Discovery adds to evidence suggesting that Mars was at one time habitable. NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence preserved in rocks on Mars that suggests the planet could have supported ancient life, as well as new evidence in the Martian atmosphere that relates to the…
Guest commentary by David Middleton Back in March, Eric Worrall authored a nice post about “climate scientists running for congress.” Eric’s subject was a really goofy Clean Technica article about Joseph Kopser, touted as some sort of climate scientist. Clean Technica even spelled his name wrong (Kosper instead of Kopser). Yesterday, Mr. Kopser won the runoff election…
In ancient rocks, scientists see a climate cycle working across deep time. A repeating shift in Earth’s orbit spans hundreds of millions of years From THE EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Scientists drilling deep into ancient rocks in the Arizona desert say they have documented a gradual shift in Earth’s orbit that repeats regularly every…
Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar system, according to a study published Tuesday. Researchers from Switzerland, France and Germany examined diamonds found inside the Almahata Sitta meteorite and concluded they were most likely formed by a proto-planet at…
We dodged a bullet today. It came within one half of the distance to the moon. I got this notice in email from NASA about a surprise asteroid that gave us only one day of warning passing halfway between the Earth and the moon. It was the largest known asteroid to ever pass that close to Earth…
This is truly spectacular. From NASA and ESA. comes this photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which clearly proves [one] of Einstein’s theories – gravitational lensing. Via Wikipedia: The bending of light by a gravitational body was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1912, a few years before the publication of general relativity in 1916 (Renn et al. 1997).…
From Columbia University and the “that’s heavy” department: New Study Suggests Tens of Thousands of Black Holes Exist in Milky Way’s Center A Columbia University-led team of astrophysicists has discovered a dozen black holes gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The finding is…
Huge hole over 400,000 miles long (700,000 kilometers) is 55 times wider than the Earth A wide hole in the sun’s atmosphere is facing Earth and spewing a stream of solar wind toward our planet. Estimated time of arrival: April 9th. In this extreme ultraviolet image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, we see not only the…