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Call Mulder and Scully, Hillary has a job opening The United States is facing a lot of problems these days. We’ve got Islamic terrorism, mass shootings, hundreds of thousands of illegals flooding across our southern border, and an out-of-control federal government drowning in debt. We also, apparently, have concerns about aliens. No, we’re not talking about families wandering in from Tijuana, we’re talking about little green men who come to Earth to slaughter our cattle and probe us in our sleep. Don’t worry, though. Hillary Clinton is aware of your concerns and - if elected president - she’s going to...

Planet of the red dwarf star WOLF-1016 Astronomers are excited: a new planet has been discovered, currently termed WOLF-1016c, a planet of the red dwarf star WOLF-1016. It’s said to be the planet most similar yet discovered to Earth, both in size, trajectory and other features but a bit far away, about 15 light years or so. Let’s put that distance into perspective.

Caltech and JPL scientists suggest the fingerprints of early photochemistry provide a solution to the long-standing mystery. Mars is blanketed by a thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere—one that is far too thin to prevent large amounts of water on the surface of the planet from subliming or evaporating. But many researchers have suggested that the planet was once shrouded in an atmosphere many times thicker than Earth's. For decades that left the question, "Where did all the carbon go?" Now a team of scientists from Caltech and JPL thinks they have a possible answer. The researchers suggest that 3.8 billion...

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Although impressive, the number of galaxies found at this early epoch is not the team’s only remarkable breakthrough, as Johan Richard from the Observatoire de Lyon, France, points out. “The faintest galaxies detected in these Hubble observations are fainter than any other yet uncovered in the deepest Hubble observations.” By looking at the light coming from the galaxies the team discovered that the accumulated light emitted by these galaxies could have played a major role in one of the most mysterious periods of the universe’s early history — the epoch of reionization. Reionization started when the thick fog of...

The Universe Never Expands Faster Than the Speed of Light Breaking my radio silence here to get a little nitpick off my chest: the claim that during inflation, the universe “expanded faster than the speed of light.” It’s extraordinarily common, if utterly and hopelessly incorrect. (I just noticed it in this otherwise generally excellent post by Fraser Cain.) A Google search for “inflation superluminal expansion” reveals over 100,000 hits, although happily a few of the first ones are brave attempts to squelch the misconception. I can recommend this nice article by Tamara Davis and Charlie Lineweaver, which tries to address...

The discovery of water on the surface of Mars, which just happened to coincide with the premiere of the hit film The Martian, starring Matt Damon as an astronaut marooned on the Red Planet, has caused some degree of excitement for space enthusiasts. NASA is particularly inspired because its central organizing project is “the journey to Mars” which is scheduled to put astronauts on the Martian surface by the 2030s. The discovery and the movie certainly would not hurt the effort to gin up support for the humans to Mars program.

A shadow falls on the moon as it undergoes a total lunar eclipse, as seen from Mexico City on April 15, 2014. On September 27, a lunar eclipse will occur at the same time as a supermoon for the first time since 1982. EDGARD GARRIDO/REUTERS

NASA officials will announce Monday morning a major scientific discovery related to their continued exploration of Mars. The agency won’t give too many details on what exactly the big reveal is, apart from the fact that the briefing will feature some pretty big names at the space agency (including Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA HQ; Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program; Lujendra Ojha, a grad student at Georgia Tech; Mary Beth Wilhelm at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and a grad student at Georgia Tech as well; and Alfred McEwen at the University of...

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured a near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto's horizon. The smooth expanse of the informally named Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto's tenuous but distended atmosphere. The image...

The New Horizons probe has sent back the latest images from its historic July 14 flyby of Pluto. While the first close-up photos of the dwarf planet, taken from 7800 miles above the surface, had the New Horizons team—and people around the world—giddy with excitement about intriguing features like 11,000-foot-tall ice mountains, the latest, downlinked over Labor Day weekend, have left them scratching their heads. "If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top—but that’s what is actually there," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research...

New Horizons: River of Data Commences by Paul Gilster on September 8, 2015 Hard to believe it’s been 55 days since the New Horizons flyby. When the event occurred, I was in my daughter’s comfortable beach house working at a table in the living room, a laptop in front of me monitoring numerous feeds. My grandson, sitting to my right with his machine, was tracking social media on the event and downloading images. When I was Buzzy’s age that day, Scott Carpenter’s Mercury flight was in the works, and with all of Gemini and Apollo ahead, I remember the raw...

Space agency kills off internet rumour by confirming an asteroid strike will not wipe out humanity in the next few weeks, or years, or decades.Good news for those with plans for October and beyond: the Earth will still be in existence. NASA has confirmed – after rumours swept the internet about an imminent asteroid strike expected between 15 and 28 September – that the two-week period in question will be entirely free of Earth-destroying space attacks. The likelihood of any known potentially hazardous asteroid striking the planet within the next 100 years stands at 0.01%, the space agency said in...

A team of Antarctic scientists has just verified the existence of cosmic neutrinos — tiny, energetic particles that might hail from far reaches of the Milky Way and beyond. And these ghostly little flecks of matter could hold the key to some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. High-energy cosmic neutrinos are thought to be produced by some of the universe’s most violent agents, including black holes, supernovae, and the energetic cores of galaxies. Unchanged as they zip across space and time, these particles may represent something of an intergalactic breadcrumb trail, pointing us in the direction of any...

Device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an “extra special dimension”Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. "This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."...

Once you visit the Space Flight Operations Facility, "I've been to the center of the Universe." On a recent trip to California, I was constantly reminded of what is wrong with California, a state whose economy was so booming decades ago that, had it been a stand-alone state, it would have been the world’s sixth largest economy. Looking at this state now, ravaged by years and years of Marxist policies, open borders, unchecked illegal immigration, anchor babies, multiculturalism, insane diversity rules, sanctuary cities, multi-lingual school system, illegal voting, tax everything and tax again, and environmentalist-driven water use plans including but...

Earth just got a new next-door neighbor.Astronomers have found the closest rocky planet outside our solar system using the Spitzer Space telescope. The planet, known as HD 219134b, orbits a star just 21 light years away, and NASA is calling a "potential gold mine of science data." The planet is probably a bad place for life as we know it: it’s 1.6 times the size of Earth and more than four times the mass. Plus its three-day orbit is too close to its host star for liquid water to form, even though the star is cooler and smaller than our...

It sounds like a scene from a disaster movie – mass power failures, plane crashes, satellite disruptions, and train derailments. These are some of the threats modern society would face in the case of a massive solar storm, according to a new document released by the U.K. Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The “Space Weather Preparedness Strategy” outlines the disturbances that could be caused by unpredictable solar weather. The most striking find from the report is the fact that a country would have only a 12-hour warning period before the storm would hit the planet. The worst possible scenario...

NASA's discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Kepler-452b, nicknamed "Earth 2.0", has social media buzzing about the chances of finding a faraway world, possibly with alien life or key resources such as water. Science or fiction? The experts respond. - Is 'Earth 2.0' like our planet? - Currently we don't know if this planet is terrestrial -- rocky -- or a small gas planet. If Kepler-452b turns out to be a terrestrial world, it will be the most Earth-like known which also orbits a G-class star like the Sun. The other leading competitors have mostly be found to orbit cooler dwarf stars....