NASA researchers who monitor the Moon for meteoroid impacts have detected the brightest explosion in the history of their program.
The lunar burst was caused by a 40-kilogram boulder-sized rock slamming into the surface at about 90,000 kph. It generated a flash 10 times brighter than anything seen before, which came from the thermal glow of molten rock at the point of impact.
If we somehow get lucky and don’t kill ourselves first, we may all die when a gigantic meteorite slams the into our blue marble. Meteorites hit Earth more than you think! Since 2300BC, you can see all the meteorites that have pockmarked Earth …
The map shows the location of the 34,513 recorded points of impact in the past 4000 years. Who knows what kind of space balls are hitting places where people dont’ live, or even the ocean! You don’t realise how often of an occurrence (relatively, of course) a meteorite hit on Earth is until you see this map.
See the full map here and find out if where you live has been struck.
Using a potent NASA space telescope to scan the skies for planets like ours where life might exist, astronomers say they have found the most Earth-like candidates yet.
Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone – not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water.
The two planets are slightly larger than ours, and at least a couple of billion years older. The first, 62e, is about 40 per cent larger than Earth. It might be warm, maybe even a waterworld, and may experience flashes of lightning.
The second, 62f, is about 60 per cent larger than our planet, and orbits its star every 267 days, relatively close to Earth’s annual trajectory of 365 days. The planet may have polar caps, significant land masses and liquid water. Both are orbiting a 7-billion-year-old star 1200 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Learn more here, here or here.
A closely tracked asteroid, about 45 metres wide, whizzed safely past Earth on Friday, the same day a much smaller, previously undetected meteor hit Russia, injuring nearly 1,000 people.
The 45 metre asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA 14, passed around 27,000 kilometres above the Earth at the time of closest approach, about 6.25am on Saturday (AEDT), NASA said.
The US space agency had said in a statement on its website that this was ‘‘the closest-ever predicted approach to Earth for an object this large.’’
The asteroid isn’t nearly as large as the 10-kilometre wide object that took out the dinosaurs, but astronomers said it was large enough that, had it struck the Earth’s surface, it could wipe out a large urban area.
However, the asteroid’s path kept it well away from Earth and from the ring of communications satellites in Earth’s orbit, and NASA said the object’s orbit would keep it further from the planet in the foreseeable future.
NASA said the flyby provided a ‘‘unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.’’ See more here.
Russia wasn’t so lucky … A meteor ripped across the sky in central Russia on Friday, injuring hundreds. In the city of Chelyabinsk, the impact caused explosions and sent broken glass out from windows like confetti.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J1206. Galaxy clusters like these have enormous mass, and their gravity is powerful enough to visibly bend the path of light, somewhat like a magnifying glass.
These so-called lensing clusters are useful tools for studying very distant objects, because this lens-like behaviour amplifies the light from faraway galaxies in the background.
What is also interesting is that this image is of a very small section of our sky and it is ABSOLUTELY FULL of galaxies. We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way which has 300 billion stars – imagine how many stars there would be in the image above where each dot is an entire galaxy !!!
The deadly asteroid Apophis is safely passing by Earth today, more than 14.5 million kilometres from our home planet. Next time, we won’t be so lucky. On April 13, 2029, Apophis will come so close that it may destroy satellites in orbit.
Although it is flying past safely, if it were to impact its power would be about 880 megatons — about 17 Tsars, the biggest nuclear bomb ever created. The good news is that Apophis is still small enough not to kill us all, but it could disrupt life on the planet for a few decades. For comparison, the Chicxulub asteroid released about 100,000,000 megatons when it triggered the mass extinction event that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs.
In 2029 we’ll be safe from Apophis mayhem too. The asteroid will not hit Earth then, say astronomers, but it will pass within 36,000 kilometres of Earth’s surface, closer even than the orbits of geostationary satellites.
This means that, while our pale blue dot would be spared, our highly populated constellation of satellites may suffer some casualties.
Nobody knows exactly if a satellite collision may occur. Space is awfully big, but there are plenty of satellites out there. Enough that it’s not crazy to think that some of them may be wiped out as we watch Apophis marching through the night sky. Learn more here or here.
The search for worlds outside our solar system has come a long way since the first exoplanets were confirmed in the early 1990s. Since then, the average rate of alien-world discoveries has shot from about three per year to between fifty and a hundred per year in the last five years. As of the end of 2012, with the tally standing at 854 newfound worlds and reports of new detections being announced nearly every week, thanks in large measure to NASA’s Kepler space telescope, astronomers are calling this the golden age of exoplanet discovery.
Now the race is on to find Earth’s twin, the elusive Earth-size planet in the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone around a star where liquid water can exist—and experts believe we may hit the cosmic jackpot soon.
In 2012 astronomers came closer than ever to zeroing in on an earthly doppelganger, or at the very least a planet considered potentially habitable.
However, we are far from confirming the habitability of any of these planets until we have the capability to observe their atmosphere, but that will take many years. The big goal now is to find an Earth-size planet in its star’s habitable zone—something more similar to Earth.
To learn about five of the most interesting exoplanetary discoveries of this past year like Gliese 667Cc, Alpha Centauri Bb and Tau Ceti e and f - go here.
A new site lets you play with galaxies, writing out any word or phrase using astronomical phenomena that happen to look like letters.
The fun webpage — My Galaxies — is part of the Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science project that enlists ordinary people to sift through data from Hubble and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to identify celestial objects. Launched in 2007, Galaxy Zoo has identified more than 250,000 new galaxies, most of which have remained undiscovered until now. Along with finding a plethora of objects in the night sky, Galaxy Zoo volunteers have spotted many oddly shaped galaxies, and a good deal resembling English letters and numbers.
Have fun here.
The story tells about a group of pioneer astronauts, working on the ISS to open a Gateway to space for all humankind. Their voices, crackling with the static, tell us their story of exploration while a day passes on Earth, from dawn to sunset. They are aware that what they are building can’t be of any use for mankind until people on Earth understand that they must think without borders, promoting cooperation between nations, as the astronauts learnt by working together and by watching our Planet from above.
The astronauts send their wishes to the people down on Earth, their last thoughts fading out as they are flying above an aurora borealis and the lights of European cities.
Then, suddenly, a burst of light: the Gateway to Space is opened.
The ISS gains speed, flying faster and faster to the stars, the astronauts ready to leave our planet, which they see getting smaller and spinning faster and faster, melting borders, oceans and people together, ready to follow them, Further Up Yonder.
In a surprise find, astronomers have discovered a planet possibly covered with oceans of magma “right around the corner.”
Even more exciting to scientists is its size: about the same as Mars’s, which would make the new world the closest known planet smaller than Earth.
Astronomers discovered the newfound alien planet, known as UCF-1.01, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The diminutive world is just 33 light-years away, making it a near neighbor of Earth in the cosmic scheme of things.
Large planets are easier to find, but they’re generally gas giants that don’t have a rocky surface or an atmosphere like Earth’s. So scientists are scanning the skies for smaller worlds, which should be more likely to support life as we know it. Learn more here or here.
