News from UniverseToday
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| Viking Experiment May Have Found Life’s Building Blocks on Mars After All |
| A new look at data from the Mars Viking landers concludes that the two landers may have found the building blocks of life on the Red Planet after all way back in 1976. The surprise discovery of perchlorates by the Phoenix mission on Mars 32 years later could means the way the Viking experiment was [...] |
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| NASA Satellites and Spacecraft Look Into the Eye of Hurricane Earl |
| NASA scientists, instruments and spacecraft are busy studying Hurricane Earl from both the air and space, and an unmanned aircraft actually flew inside the giant storm. Above is a satellite image from NASA’s Terra satellite, and below is an image taken by one of the astronauts on board the International Space Station, Doug Wheelock. Three [...] |
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| New Horizons Mission Practices Telescopic Imager on Pluto’s Twin |
| This summer, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken for its annual systems checkout, and took the opportunity to exercise the long range camera by snapping pictures of Neptune, which at the time, was 3.5 billion km (2.15 billion miles) away. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped several photos of the gas giant, but Neptune [...] |
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| How to Crash Stars Together |
| The math is simple: Star + Other star = Bigger star. While conceptually this works well, it fails to take into account the extremely vast distances between stars. Even in clusters, where the density of stars is significantly higher than in the main disk, the number of stars per unit volume is so low that [...] |
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| Ultraluminous Gamma Ray Burst 080607 – A "Monster in the Dark" |
| Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are among the most energetic phenomena astronomers regularly observe. These events are triggered by massive explosions and a large amount of the energy if focused into narrow beams that sweep across the universe. These beams are so tightly concentrated that they can be seen across the visible universe and allow astronomers [...] |
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| Near Earth Asteroids Vary Widely in Composition, Origin |
| From the Spitzer website: New research from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals that asteroids somewhat near Earth, termed near-Earth objects, are a mixed bunch, with a surprisingly wide array of compositions. Like a piñata filled with everything from chocolates to fruity candies, these asteroids come in assorted colors and compositions. Some are dark and dull; [...] |
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| Supernova Spews Its Guts Across Space |
| The recently refurbished Hubble Space Telescope has taken a new look at Supernova 1987A and its famous "String of Pearls," a glowing ring 6 trillion miles in diameter encircling the supernova remnant. The sharper and clearer images are allowing astronomers to see the “innards” of the star being ejected into space following the explosion, and [...] |
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| Downloadable Shuttle Tribute Posters |
| NASA has put out a collection of tribute posters to the Space Shuttle fleet that celebrates the contributions to human space flight of Columbia, Atlantis, Discovery, Challenger and Endeavour. Large versions of these posters now hang in Firing Room 4 of the Launch Control Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Click on each [...] |
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| Oh Canada! Hadfield Named First Canadian Commander of ISS |
| Congratulations to one of our favorite astronauts, Chris Hadfield from Canada. Today NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced Hadfield will be heading to the International Space Station in 2012, serving as Flight Engineer for Expedition 34, and then transitioning to Commander midway through his 6-month stay when Expedition 35 begins. Hadfield will be the [...] |
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| Hawking: God Not Needed for Universe to be Created |
| Physicist Stephen Hawking has written a new book called "The Grand Design." While the title might seem like Hawking could be delving more into the “mind of God” that he alluded to in his earlier book, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking actually says that the universe’s beginnings – or the "Big Bang" was an [...] |
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