20th Century Fox Co-ops NASA's Cassini Probe In Brilliant Marketing Strategy For "Prometheus"
If you thought the "Happy Birthday David" short was an ingenious bit of marketing for Ridley Scott's upcoming Prometheus, wait til you see this.
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Something Something Lunar Eclipse
We weren't able to blow it up, but at least the moon—that crap-ass satellite that wastes valuable space in the sky and brings irritability and outright craziness everywhere it goes (THAT'S RIGHT, MOON, I AM CALLING YOU OUT! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? OH, JUST SIT THERE SILENTLY IN THE COSMOS LIKE THE BIG DUMB HUNK OF ROCK THAT YOU ARE? I THOUGHT SO. FUCK YOU, MOON!)—will experience a lunar eclipse tonight, so for a very short period of time (at approximately 2:41 a.m., they say) we can pretend that it doesn't exist. It is absolutely worth setting your alarm so that you can get [...]
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Huge Star Explodes 168,000 Light Years Away, Tiny Brain Does Same Here
Hey, want to see what a star exploding looks like in 3-D? Of course you do, it's totally amazing. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (that's what it's called) in Chile, have sent back zoom-lens images of supernova 1987A, which blew up 168,000 light-years away from earth and was first discovered in 1987. How we're able to see this event, that happened in the past, and was apparently visible to the naked eye 23 years ago, today, is one of those questions that hurts my brain to think about. Moving stuff is frozen in time by the incredible long distances in space? I guess? I don't know. But [...]
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Yes, But What Would Our Galaxy Taste Like To An Alien Astronomer?
"The best description I can give would be that if you looked at new spring snow, which has a fine grain size, about an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset, you'd see the same spectrum of light that an alien astronomer in another galaxy would see looking at the Milky Way." —University of Pittsburgh astronomer Jeffrey Newman, on how, by looking through telescopes at other galaxies, he and his colleagues have determined the exact color our own would have from an outside perspective. But what if, say, the alien astronomer had stayed up all night tripping on mushrooms? Like, if he'd rented a house in Vermont with [...]
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First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet Found! So What's the Big Deal?
Read enough astronomy press releases, and you'll know that "habitable" is better than "earth-like," which means a certain distance from a star, which is better than "earth-sized," which could mean Venus which looks like pizza right out of the oven. So "Potentially Habitable," this is good. The planet's name is Gliese 581g, it's around three earths, it's probably not made of gas, it could conceivably hold on to an atmosphere, and it's at the right distance from its star, Gliese 581, to have liquid water on the surface. Gliese 581g for some physics reason always faces Gliese 581, so half of it may or may not be [...]
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The Story of Hanny, So Far
Hanny van Arkel was 24 years old and teaching primary school in Heerlen, the Netherlands. She also played guitar and during summer vacation back in 2007, she was noodling around on the website of a famous rock guitarist named Brian May. Brian May got famous in the middle of a doctorate in astronomy on interplanetary dust, so his website had links to astronomy websites, and Hanny clicked on a new site called Galaxy Zoo. A week or so before, Galaxy Zoo had posted a million galaxy pictures and asked the internet to please classify each one according to whether it was a spiral or an elliptical or something [...]
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Happy First Anniversary, Neptune!
"It's a frozen lump of frozen gases and I suppose not a terribly friendly place. Let's wish it a happy birthday but perhaps let's keep as far away from it as we can as it won't give you a welcome." —British astronomer Alan Chapman, on the fact that tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of the discovery of of Neptune—in Neptunian years, which are 164.79 times longer than Earth years. It was on September 24, 1896 that Johann Gottfried Galle, using theoretical predictions made earlier by French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (and, of course, a telescope) officially discovered the eighth planet in our solar system, 4.4 billion [...]
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The Extremely Far-Off Green Pea Galaxies
"Round or elliptical galaxies are huge and almost always reddish. Spiral galaxies are less huge but still large and almost always bluish. Galaxies that are small are almost never round and certainly not green. By July, 2008, the Zooites had found enough of these galaxies they were now calling Green Peas-their slogan, Give Peas a Chance!-that astronomers were getting seriously interested. So astronomers did what they always do with a new project, they gave it to a graduate student, this one named Carie."
