Free Republic

Skywatchers will have many opportunities in 2016 to see just how small we are in the universe. Four days into the new year, hundreds of meteors will dance across the night skies.... Come September, an outer ring of the sun's annular eclipse will be visible across Africa. In between, there will be spectacular shooting stars, super moons, and lunar eclipses to take in. ... From about Jan. 20 to Feb. 20, all five planets that are visible to the naked eye — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will occupy the morning sky. This hasn't happened since 2005, according...

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.

In 1993, French astronomer Jacques Laskar ran a series of calculations indicating that the gravity of the Moon is vital to stabilizing the tilt of our planet. Earth's obliquity, as this tilt is technically known as, has huge repercussions for climate. Laskar argued that should Earth's obliquity wander over hundreds of thousands of years, it would cause environmental chaos by creating a climate too variable for complex life to develop in relative peace. So his argument goes, we should feel remarkably lucky to have such a large moon on our doorstep, as no other terrestrial planet in our solar system...

Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not so bright. Genes which make people intelligent have been discovered and scientists believe they could be manipulated to boost brain power. Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups. But until now, nobody has been able to pin-point exactly which genes are responsible for better memory, attention, processing speed or reasoning skills. Now Imperial College...

In a finding that suggests "considerable water activity" on Mars, NASA says its Curiosity rover has found very high concentrations of silica on the red planet. The agency says it also found "a mineral named tridymite, rare on Earth and never seen before on Mars." The discoveries took place on Mount Sharp, where Curiosity drilled into a rock called "Buckskin" to find the tridymite, and where it used its "ChemCam" laser to measure high silica levels. The odd findings led researchers to take the rare step of ordering Curiosity to retrace its path to learn more. Explanations for the high...

It’s a big, dark presence at the farthest reaches of our solar system, a mysterious force powerful enough to skew the paths of planets in orbit and yet so subtle that it slips undetected past even the most powerful telescopes on Earth. For centuries, it has eluded some of the most brilliant minds in astronomy — some say it even destroyed one. It’s the subject of endless calculations and rampant speculation, crackpot theories and countless hours spent gazing, fruitlessly, at the night sky. It’s known as Planet X. And on Tuesday, a group of astronomers said they’d found not just...

A planet discovered last year sitting at an unusually large distance from its star - 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun - may have been kicked out of its birthplace close to the star in a process similar to what may have happened early in our own solar system's history. Images from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) in the Chilean Andes and the Hubble Space Telescope show that the star has a lopsided comet belt indicative of a very disturbed solar system, and hinting that the planet interactions that roiled the comets closer to the star might...

Explanation: The glare of Alpha Centauri, one of the brightest stars in planet Earth's night sky, floods the left side of this southern skyscape. A mere 4.3 light-years distant, Alpha Centauri actually consists of two component stars similar in size to the Sun, locked in a mutual orbit. Much smaller and cooler, a third member of the same star system, Proxima Centauri, lies outside this field of view. Still, the telescopic scene does reveal often overlooked denizens of the Milky Way's crowded galactic plane that lie beyond the glare of Alpha Centauri, including a planetary nebula cataloged as Hen 2-111,...

Explanation: The closest star system to the Sun is the Alpha Centauri system. Of the three stars in the system, the dimmest -- called Proxima Centauri -- is actually the nearest star. The bright stars Alpha Centauri A and B form a close binary as they are separated by only 23 times the Earth- Sun distance - slightly greater than the distance between Uranus and the Sun. In the above picture, the brightness of the stars overwhelm the photograph causing an illusion of great size, even though the stars are really just small points of light. The Alpha Centauri system...

A team of astronomers have used the LCOGT network to detect light scattered by tiny particles (called Rayleigh scattering), through the atmosphere of a Neptune-size transiting exoplanet. This suggests a blue sky on this world which is only 100 light years away from us. The result was published in the Astrophysical Journal on November 20 (and is available on ArXiV). Transits occur when an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, reducing the amount of light we receive from the star by a small fraction. When the orbit of an exoplanet is aligned just right for transits to occur,...

Explanation: This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of the Solar System. The larger moon, Phobos, is indeed seen to be a cratered, asteroid-like object in this stunning color image from the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, recorded at a resolution of about seven meters per pixel. But Phobos orbits...

Concept of an asteroid redirect mission. Credit: NASA ==================================================================================================================================== The grizzled asteroid miner is a stock character in science fiction. Now, a couple of recent events - one legal and the other technological - have brought asteroid mining a step closer to reality. The legal step was taken when the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed a bill titled H.R. 2262—SPACE Act of 2015. The bill has a number of measures designed to facilitate commercial space development, including a provision that gives individuals or companies ownership of any material that they mine in outer space. According to one estimate,...

The ideal Red Planet crewed site should be of high scientific value — allowing pioneers to search for signs of Mars life and investigate other intriguing questions — and also possess enough resources to help sustain expeditionary crews, scientists and engineers said. They came to these and other conclusions at the First Landing Site/Exploration Zone Workshop for Human Missions to the Surface of Mars, which was held here Oct. 27 though Oct. 30 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. ... Nearly 50 locations on Mars were proposed as future locales for human landings. Those sites were all within 50 degrees...

Image: J021659-044920. The red and yellow lobes are the galaxy’s radio lobes. The red spot in the center is the visible galaxy. Prathamesh Tamhane/Yogesh Wadadekar. ================================================================================================================== Astronomers in India have discovered a very unusual galaxy, and it’s dying. By now, in fact, it’s probably already dead. The new galaxy, known as J021659-044920, is 9 billion light years away from Earth. That means it’s really old in cosmic terms (but not quite as old as the oldest object astronomers have ever found, a galaxy 13 billion light years away called UDFy-38135539). Viewed in the visible spectrum, J021659-044920spans about 100,000 light years...

University of Arizona scientists have uncovered a curious case of missing asteroids. The main asteroid belt is a zone containing millions of rocky objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientists find that there ought to be more asteroids there than researchers observe. The missing asteroids may be evidence of an event that took place about 4 billion years ago, when the solar system's giant planets migrated to their present locations. UA planetary sciences graduate student David A. Minton and UA planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra say missing asteroids is an important piece of evidence to support an...

A moderately massive early Sun has been proposed to resolve the so-called faint early Sun paradox. We calculate the time-evolution of the solar mass that would be required by this hypothesis, using a simple parametrized energy-balance model for Earth's climate. Our calculations show that the solar mass loss rate would need to have been 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than present for a time on the order of ~2 Gy. Such a mass loss history is significantly at variance (both in timescale and in the magnitude of the mass loss rates) with that inferred from astronomical observations of mass loss...

Could An Asteroid Hit Planet Earth, Again?Asteroid impact on early Earth. Some scientists believe that impacts such as this during the Late Heavy Bombardment period, 4 billion years ago, may have delivered primitive life to Earth. (Credit: Copyright Don Davis) ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) — Earth dodged a bullet today, when asteroid TU24 passed within 540,000 kilometers of our planet, which is just down the street on a galactic scale. Tomorrow, another asteroid – 2007 WD5 – will zip past Mars at a distance of only 26,000 kilometers away. Will we dodge the bullet the next time a near-Earth object...

Source: Stanford University Date: August 10, 2007 What We Can Learn From The Biggest Extinction In The History Of Earth Science Daily — Approximately 250 million years ago, vast numbers of species disappeared from Earth. This mass-extinction event may hold clues to current global carbon cycle changes, according to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences. Payne, a paleobiologist who joined the Stanford faculty in 2005, studies the Permian-Triassic extinction and the following 4 million years of instability in the global carbon cycle. Jiayong Wei, Payne's colleague, examined a block of early Triassic microbial limestone. (Credit: Jonathan Payne)...

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, ninety percent of marine species disappeared and life on land suffered greatly during the world's largest mass extinction. The cause of this great dying has baffled scientists for decades, and recent speculations invoke asteroid impacts as a kill mechanism. Yet a new study published in the December issue of Geology provides strong indications that the extinction cause did not come from the heavens but from Earth itself.An international team of scientists led by Christian Koeberl from the University of Vienna studied rock samples taken from deep in the Carnic Alps of southern Austria...

Washington-AP -- New research casts doubt on the theory that a single asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists have often pointed to a crater in Mexico as the asteroid's impact point. But Princeton University researchers say the impact that caused the crater occurred 300-thousand years before the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 (m) million years ago. A report appears in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At least one scientist doubts the group's findings. Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography says the Princeton researchers were working with incorrect site data.