Don’t miss the debut of Comet PanSTARRS this week
2013 has been unofficially dubbed “The year of the comets” (and asteroids too, apparently).
The first of those comets has been putting on a show in the Southern Hemisphere recently, and is not making it’s debut in the Northern Hemisphere.
Asteroid passed between Earth and moon earlier today
Remember that asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Russia two and a half weeks ago?
An asteroid around that same size passed just inside the moon’s orbit of Earth earlier this morning — and astronomers only discovered it two days ago.
Yikes.
Readers’ Photos of the Lunar Eclipse
On Saturday, the moon put on a celestial show for vast swathes of the world.
Although Asia and Australia has the best view of the total lunar eclipse, observers in the U.S. and Europe managed to catch a glimpse of at least a partial eclipse.Here are a selection of photos from California, New Mexico, Scotland, England and Japan.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS (by Michael König)
Don’t fuck with nature….it’ll go all Death Star on you.
NASA Finds “Death Star” Blasting Planet With X-rays
by Victoria Jaggard
For now the planet—dubbed CoRoT-2b—has a mass about three times that of Jupiter. That’s 3 x (1.8981 x 10 to the 27) kilograms, for those of you keeping score. The planet and its sunlike host star were discovered in 2008 using the European Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) satellite.
Now, according to new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers can tell that the planet is being hit with x-rays about a hundred thousand times more intense that what Earth receives from the sun.
“This planet is being absolutely fried by its star,” study co-author Sebastian Schröter, of the University of Hamburg in Germany, said in a press statement. All that high-energy radiation is evaporating about five million tons of matter from the planet *each second.*…
(read more: National Geo) (illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
50 new alien planets discovered, including one that might support life
The potentially habitable ‘super-Earth’ is about 3.6 times more massive than Earth and is 35 light-years from its sun.
