During an extremely rare fly-by, comet Siding Spring zoomed by Mars on October 19th in an event that scientists bill as being once-in-a-lifetime. The event could help astronomers better understand what occurred during the earliest days of our solar system. Siding Spring flew as close as 87,000 miles to the Martian surface at 2:27 PM EDT-approximately one third of the distance between Earth and … [Read more...]
Mercury Hosts Water Ice in North Pole Craters
Searching for extraterrestrial water presence has never been so rewarding. Messenger, NASA’s probe orbiting Mercury, has discovered ice sheets on the planet’s North Pole. Finding ice on the Sun’s closest neighbor is astonishing. While Earth lies comfortably at 93 million miles away from the Sun, Mercury and the star are separated by just 36 million miles. Because it has almost no atmospheric layer … [Read more...]
Solar Roadways gets Funding Boost After Star Trek Geroge Takei’s Tweet
American actor George Takei has endorsed a North Idaho couple's idea for transforming roads, sidewalks and parking lots into solar surfaces. The endorsement has brought Scott and Julie Brusaw’s crowdfunding campaign pass the USD 1 million goal. Takei took to the micro-blogging site Twitter to express his views about Solar Roadways of Sagle, Idaho. "I like the sound of that. Worth a look. … [Read more...]
Sun’s sibling ‘HD 162826’ is hotter and bigger
Believe it or not, it seems the astronomers have found the lost sibling of the Sun. The new member of the solar family has been named as HD 162826, which is just 110 light years away from the Sun. Our Sun has emerged from a thick cloud of space dust and gas, like most of the stars. These dust particles and gas has led to the origin of 1,000 to 10,000 stars. Initially these small stars … [Read more...]
Earth fortunately missed violent solar flare in 2012
In a major relief to all living on Earth, the scientists have said that our planet has fortunately missed encounter with a fierce solar magnetic storm in the year 2012, an event that could have wreaked havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS had it come nine days earlier. According to the researchers, if the massive eruptions had came nine days earlier it would have hit the … [Read more...]
Solar system’s smallest planet Mercury getting even smaller, says NASA study
A new study has found that the smallest planet of our solar system is even getting smaller as its radius has witnessed reduction by some 7 kilometers over the past four billion years. The sparkling revelations have been made by the US space agency NASA after analyzing the data beamed back by its Messenger spacecraft. The first spacecraft sent to explore Mercury was Mariner 10. The spacecraft … [Read more...]
NASA’s Kepler discovers 715 new planets outside solar system
NASA's Kepler mission, a space observatory launched by the space agency to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, has announced the discovery of 715 new planets. According to NASA, these newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much similar to the solar system. Nearly 95 per cent of these planets, outside our solar system, are smaller than Neptune, … [Read more...]
NASA’s IBEX Helps Find A Cosmic Roadmap To Galactic Magnetic Field
NASA's spacecraft Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), which was launched the previous year, was the first to help paint a picture of the magnetic system beyond the solar wind which the scientists refer to as a 'roadmap in the sky.' The study reveals a magnetic field that is nearly perpendicular to the path our Solar System is travelling through the galaxy. The result sheds light on … [Read more...]
