Free Republic

If Martians exist, they'll be closer to Earth on Memorial Day than they have been in 11 years. This Monday, around 5:34 p.m. EDT, when many Americans may be enjoying a holiday barbecue, the Red Planet will be the closest it has been to Earth in more than a decade, coming within 46.8 million miles, according to NASA. The relatively close encounter with Earth comes a week after the Martian opposition, when Mars and the sun lined up on exact opposite sides of the Earth.

A pair of newly discovered stars is the third-closest star system to the Sun, according to a paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916. The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are...

A conference like the recent on in Aosta offers plenty of opportunity to listen in on fascinating conversations, one of which had to do with what would happen if we found a brown dwarf closer to the Earth than the Centauri stars. The general consensus was that such a find would be a powerful stimulus to the public imagination and would probably result in renewed interest in getting to and exploring such a place. A boon, in short, for all our interstellar efforts, an awakening to a new set of possibilities.But if there were a brown dwarf that close,...

Mammoth Findings: Asian elephant is closest living kin Sid Perkins A study of a woolly mammoth that died in Siberia several millennia ago has yielded the complete DNA sequence of the creature's mitochondria, the energy factories of the animal's cells. Comparison with the mitochondrial genomes of living elephants indicates that the mammoth is slightly more closely related to the Asian elephant than to the African elephant. COUSIN HAIRY. A new genetic analysis suggests that the woolly mammoth is more closely related to the Asian elephant than to the African elephant. J. Tucciarone Fossil evidence had suggested that woolly mammoths and...

Closest asteroid yet flies past Earth 18:17 02 October 03 NewScientist.com news service An asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by. The first sighting was on Sunday 28 by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search program in Arizona, US. Amateur astronomer Peter Birtwhistle of Great...

Mars closest to Earth in nearly 60,000 years The wandering of the planets is bringing Mars closer to Earth than at any time in nearly 60,000 years. Just 34.6 million miles of space will separate the two planets on August 27. Mars was five times as distant just six months ago, and won't be as close again until August 28, 2287. Already, Mars has begun to loom large in the late evening sky, its rusty twinkle apparent in the south east. Aldo Vitagliano, of the University of Naples in Italy, calculates that Mars has not had as close a brush...