astronomy

The site is ZOOGEMS, and what it is is explained in this extensive blog post: Gems of the Galaxy Zoos – help pick Hubble observations! tl;dr version: volunteers (citizen scientists) get to vote on which objects the Hubble Space Telescope will observe; the candidates were proposed by zooites...

Before I start, let me state that I'm not pushing any explanation of my own, because I don't even have one. Which is unsurprising, I guess, since I'm not a physicist. I genuinely get a brainfart just trying to think about how it swallows matter, and I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable can help...

Holy crap! http://spaceweather.com/ We are already waiting for a class G-3 solar storm to hit. All this does is guarantee clouds here in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of NYS.

So I am writing a story about a future human colony and after searching through a lot of systems to try and find one that would potentially work and wasn't already used in about 50 prominent Sci Fi Books, I settled on the idea that 61 Virginis does in fact have a near Earth mass planet in the...

Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes http://www.phys.unm.edu/~gbtaylor/astr422/ARP/e_0402.pdf Really cool.

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-06-unseen-planetary-mass-warped-kuiper.html

The reason I so like science. No matter how good our imagination is, reality always seems to be both more complex and way more interesting. Is there any planet we ever even got close to the truth in our imaginations? https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html

Seems I am something of a mystery to Astronomers :D. Wonder what I will turn out to be? http://www.space.com/36583-new-aurora-feature-named-steve-investigated.html

For those down under http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/planet-9-search-goes-on/news-story/37811e566e0bd685ae427dbd36bf9ead Lots of cool hands on science with an interactive aspect that drew a million fresh crowd sourced analysis Join in the hunt...

Quote: Astronomers have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the center of a distant galaxy by what could be the awesome power of gravitational waves. Though there have been several other suspected, similarly booted black holes elsewhere, none has been confirmed...

Gearheads: I want to write an SF story where a private company leasing time on a radio telescope receives a large file from space which is, essentially, a pdf (or other book format). It would be about 800,000 pages of text and diagrams. My question is how this could happen. Forgetting the...

The nearly Half Moon will occult (cover) the magnitude +0.9 star Aldebaran for North American observers during the evening of Saturday 2017 MAR 04. As with solar eclipses, occultations are limited to specific zones on Earth. Aldebaran is one of four first magnitude stars that can be occulted...

Hey. See this article: http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=70143 If a similar supernova went off close to the earth, what would the sky look like at nighttime and how long would it last? Would appreciate a lot of detail so I can visualise it. Thanks. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Today BGR published and AT&T Yahoo further distributed an article called How to watch tonight's incredibly rare lunar eclipse. There will be no lunar eclipse tonight. They only occur during Full Moons, and currently it is a waning Half Moon. The next lunar eclipse will be a penumbral event on...

I recently watched ep 2 of the National Geographic miniseries 'Mars', and one of the major plot points was the danger posed to the astronauts by the cold temperatures of the planet, especially at night. It's common in popular media to portray Mars being a dangerously cold place, and the numbers...

Venus and Jupiter were at their closest (to each other, as they appeared in our sky) last night for the first time in 2000 years. I read some speculation that this may have been the event considered the "Star of Bethlehem", since it occurred right around the time that legend began. I'm rather...

This thread has been split from the thread discussing the apparent discovery of an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri. As the mechanism for splitting a thread is more akin to a chainsaw than a scalpel, there may be some posts that been moved but should not have been, or not moved where they...

EARTH-LIKE PLANET AROUND PROXIMA CENTAURI DISCOVERED If this pans out, it is extremely exciting. Not only might there be the potential for exobiology, but even if there isn't life it may be suitable for human colonisation - and be close enough that colonists could actually get there within a...

Hey there - looks like my account works again. :) While not strictly a skeptical event, a lot of the JREF forum folks and TAM folks will be attending this, and Hal Bidlack is the EmCee. I know it's late notice, but if you're in the area, it's going to be a lot of fun. The official pitch...

Dwarf planet spotted at solar system’s outer fringe http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/new-dwarf-planet-spotted-at-solar-systems-outer-fringe/article30854098/ Has an interesting diagram as to how much "stuff" there is in orbit around the Sun.

There's a Scientific American article about that star that periodically dims. One of the claims struck me as strange: "So what is blocking out the light from Tabby's Star? Well, an astronomer's kneejerk reaction is to try to concoct some model that might explain the observations. We've all been...

Over in Zooniverse Talk*, there's a ~3 weeks' old thread "I was wondering if the Santilli telescope can be used in the zooniverse or to classify antimatter stuff and antimatter galaxies?" (link). Yesterday, a quite new someone with the handle sferwnhafs6tggs posted a bit of material on this...

As I peruse the night sky from the indulgent comfort of my newly-installed Jacuzzi, I notice that the stars, particularly the brightest, appear to have an apparent diameter. Hard to say, but the brightest observed seems to have an apparent diameter of, say, 1/100 of the Moon, there or...

Since the Rosetta/Philae and Dawn missions have their own threads, I thought it was time for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto to get its own thread too. :) Only five days to go before the event. The glitch encountered a few days ago has been resolved and the spacecraft is back on track to resume...

From the BBC News App today: One should expect that somebody speaking on behalf of the Seti Institute would at least understand that the concept of north and south poles derives from a body rotating about an axis, surely!

The very first Jack Horkheimer Star Hustler episode (1976) mentioned planting crops with respect to Moon phases. I got to thinking, and most googling turned up sites like this, which make claims like ...which sounds like a lot of woo to me. Even Wikipedia says, under Agricultural astrology...

Hi there! I'm currently keeping my brain working with putting together a Sci-Fi story based on Mars in 1913 - that's not Mars as it really is, but with more gravity, atmosphere and heat - and population! :) A bit more like the Mars of John Carter, in fact. What I'm looking for is some help in...

I read two science articles. One said that astronomers have discovered what could be 11 billion planets in the goldilocks zone hinting that there could be life on these planets. Then another article soon after said that astronomers after careful study of the universe they could find no sign of...

Who is going to take a peak at tomorrow's solar eclipse? Best viewing north of the British isles, but northern Germany is going to get 80% coverage of the sun. I built me a camera obscura from a slender cardboard box (2m long, perhaps 18x18 cm wide). Also got my SLR on a tripod with an 80%...

When I went to my work this morning I saw that the moon was almost full and alread waxing a bit. That meant that we had survived another werewolf time. :) But that got me thinking (hey, it happens). What is the maximum time we would be at risk from werewolves, supposing they can only come out...