Space // Current TV

After Solar Flare, Massive Storm Speeds Earthward

A solar flare Sunday triggered an outburst of solar material that should hit Earth... more

coolplanet
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18 days ago
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HUNGRY BLACK HOLE SNACKING ON ASTEROIDS?

The giant black hole at the center of our galaxy may be snacking on... more

RachaelRichards
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2 days ago
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United Kingdom Talk Wednesday 8th February 2012

Wednesday's talk show. Subscribe to my You Tube channel. Username ChrisReardonUK... more

ChrisReardon
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4 days ago
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Rewritten News: The Dow Jones to Anonymous

News just the way you like it rewritten.

TonyDiGerolamo
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7 days ago
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1 comment

New “Super Earth” Found at Right Distance for Life

Dim star would give any atmosphere red glow, like “evening all the time.”... more

artq8
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8 days ago
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4 comments

Kepler Mission discoveries

26 previously unknown planets orbiting their suns in 11 new planetary systems... more

kbshana
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15 days ago
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3 comments

Lego man sent to space by Canadian teenagers

Two teenagers from Toronto have posted a video of a Lego man they sent into the outer... more

sbacker
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15 days ago
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25 comments

Solar eruption sparks biggest storm in seven years

A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles past Earth on Tuesday, as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a huge eruption on the sun overnight (10:59 p.m. ET Sunday, or 0359 GMT Monday), according to SpaceWeather.com.

The solar flare spewed from sunspot 1402, a region of the sun that has become increasingly active lately. Several NASA satellites, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory and the STEREO spacecraft, observed the massive sun storm.

A barrage of charged particles triggered by the outburst is expected to hit Earth at around 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [Video and photos of the solar flare]

NOAA's forecasters say this is the strongest solar radiation storm since May 2005. As a precaution, polar flights on Earth are expected to be rerouted, the agency's deputy administrator, Kathy Sullivan, said Monday at the 92nd annual American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans.

Scientists call these electromagnetic bursts "coronal mass ejections," and they are closely studied because they can produce potentially harmful geomagnetic storms when electrically charged particles from the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field.

In addition to generating stronger than normal displays of Earth's auroras (also known as the northern and southern lights), geomagnetic storms aimed directly at our planet can also disrupt satellites in orbit, cause widespread communications interference and damage other electronic infrastructures.

"There is little doubt that the cloud is heading in the general direction of Earth," SpaceWeather.com said in an alert. "A preliminary inspection of SOHO/STEREO imagery suggests that the CME will deliver a strong glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on Jan. 24-25 as it sails mostly north of our planet."

unday's solar flare was rated an M9-class eruption, which placed it just on the verge of being an X-class flare, the most powerful type of solar storm. M-class sun storms are powerful but midrange, while C-class flares are weaker.

Last week, a separate sunspot group unleashed several M-class flares. SDO scientists said these types of flares are occurring almost daily as the sun's rotation slowly turns the region toward Earth.

The sun's activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. Currently, our planet's nearest star is in the midst of Solar Cycle 24, and activity is expected to ramp up toward solar maximum in 2013.A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles past... more

Vierotchka
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19 days ago
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Incredible New View of Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pillars of Creation’

The European Space Agency’s Herschel space telescope has captured this gorgeous... more

Vierotchka
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24 days ago
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13 comments

The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats - free Energy hidden from 1914.

The Moray Radiant Energy discovery, using radiations from the cosmos as its power... more

worrg
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24 days ago
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Did US radar down Russian Mars probe?

An electromagnetic pulse from a US radar station in the Pacific is being investigated... more

MotherForTruth
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25 days ago
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Volunteers wanted for planet hunt

Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could... more

aileenalmeda
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26 days ago
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NASA: Probabilty of Alien Life in the Milky Way Increasing Exponentially

Like the Age of Copernicus, the Kepler space telescope's survey of one small... more

pjacobs51
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29 days ago
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51 comments

Puny Krauthammer ambushes a science giant

Then, from bad logic he shifts to chicanery, as my research failed to establish where... more

hoosierdaddy
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1 month ago
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Risky Rescue for Crippled Air Force Satellite

It was an epic space rescue that, in audacity and risk, echoed NASA’s campaign... more

aileenalmeda
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1 month ago
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0 comments

China Sending Men to the Moon to Build a Lunar iPad Factory

Beijing -- China has revealed the purpose of its manned missions to the moon. The... more

mbalton
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1 month ago
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Apocalypse not now: 2012 doomsday debunked

Artist's conception of the rogue planet Nibiru, or Planet X. On Dec. 21, 2012,... more

Vierotchka
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1 month ago
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90 comments

Grails and Probes, Oh My!

NASA's Grail Probes Nearing Moon: The New Year's countdown to the moon has... more

Incredulous
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1 month ago
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13 comments

Hubble Reveals We Are Not Alone: Dec. 30, 1924

1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a galaxy and that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.

Before Copernicus and Galileo, humans thought our world was the center of creation. Then (except for a few notable stragglers) we learned that the sun and planets did not revolve around the Earth, and we discovered that our sun — though the center of our solar system and vitally important to us — was not the center of the universe or even a major star in our galaxy.

But we still grandiosely thought our own dear Milky Way contained all or most of the stars in existence. We were about to be knocked off our egotistical little pedestal once again.

Edwin Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889 and moved to Chicago in 1898. In high school, he broke the state record in the high jump, and went on to play basketball for the University of Chicago. He won a Rhodes scholarship and studied law at Oxford. He earned a Ph.D. in astronomy, but practiced law in Kentucky. After serving in World War I and rising to the rank of major, he got bored with law and returned to astronomy.

He trained the powerful new 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson in Southern California on spiral nebulae. These fuzzy patches of light in the sky were generally thought to be clouds of gas or dust within our galaxy, which was presumed to include everything in the universe except the Magellanic Clouds. Some nebulae seemed to contain a few stars, but nothing like the multitudes of the Milky Way.

Hubble not only found a number of stars in Andromeda, he found Cepheid variable stars. These stars vary from bright to dim, and a very smart Harvard computationist named Henrietta Leavitt had discovered in 1912 that you could measure distance with them. Given the brightness of the star and its period — the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again — you could determine how far away it is.

Hubble used Leavitt’s formula to calculate that Andromeda was approximately 860,000 light years away. That’s more than eight times the distance to the farthest stars in the Milky Way. This conclusively proved that the nebulae are separate star systems and that our galaxy is not the universe.

Cosmic though it was, the news did not make the front page of The New York Times. The paper did notice the following Feb. 25 that Hubble and a public health researcher split a $1,000 prize ($12,500 in today’s money) from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Hubble went on to discover another couple of dozen galaxies. Before the 1920s were over, he added another astronomical achievement to his reputation. By analyzing the Doppler effect on the spectroscopic signals of receding stars, he established that their red shift was proportional to their distance.

When the 200-inch Mount Palomar telescope was completed in January 1949, Hubble was honored to be the first astronomer to use it. He died in 1953. NASA named its space telescope after him.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/1230hubble-first-galaxy-outside-milky-way/1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a... more

pjacobs51
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1 month ago
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25 comments

US Moves EMP Attack To Iran From North America After Russian Report

by TheTotalCollapse.com on December 29, 2011 An urgent follow-up report from... more

circlesquared
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1 month ago
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39 comments

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