GriffinScience

Beyond awesome for so many reasons… Frothy Magnetic-Bubble Sea Found at Solar System’s Edge: “The edge of the solar system may be a frothy sea of giant magnetic “bubbles,” a new NASA study says. The new findings may mean that our system’s magnetic barrier—once thought to be a smooth shield—may be letting in more harmful [...]

Go read (covered this so many times in class but this post does a great job to sum things up with where we stand)… Striving for the Speed of Light : Starts With A Bang: “It’s always easy to point out the difficulties with a dream. The stars, after all, are so incredibly far away, [...]

CfA Press Room: “Cambridge, MA – Today, astronomers unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created. Taking more than 10 years to complete, the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) also is notable for extending closer to the Galactic plane than previous surveys – a [...]

Supernova Sonata from Alex Parker on Vimeo. Observations: The Real Explosions in the Sky: Supernovae Translated into Music [Video]: “What does a supernova sound like? Hopefully we will never find out directly—getting within earshot of an exploding star is probably a bad idea. “ Incredible! Head over to the link above and see how they [...]

Wow! Bye Bye Comet! [HD Video] | Flickr – Photo Sharing!: “SOHO watched as a fairly bright comet dove towards the Sun in a white streak and was not seen again after its close encounter (May 10-11, 2011). The comet, probably part of the Kreutz family of comets, was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov. [...]

You’ll be 23 (and I’ll be a chipper 45) in 2023 when we could launch the first boat in space. Head over to NewScientist to read this great post on a possible future probe that will also be the first “space-boat”… NASA floats Titan boat concept – space – 09 May 2011 – New Scientist: [...]

Fascinating and a must read… Stephen Hawking Speaks – NYTimes.com: “On a screen attached to his wheelchair, commonly used words flash past him. With a cheek muscle, he signals an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses to transmit instructions to the computer. In this way he slowly builds sentences; the computer transforms them into the metallic, [...]

Perhaps! Going to read the quoted paper tonight and I’ll let you know how it goes. The universe’s very first black holes might be even older than the Big Bang itself: “But that hasn’t stopped physicists Bernard Carr and Alan Coley from taking these two ideas and knitting them together into one spectacular proposal: that [...]

Beautiful… These Little Lights of Mine: “Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) have created the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe by using the light of the brightest objects in the cosmos to illuminate ghostly clouds of intergalactic hydrogen. The map provides an unprecedented view of what the universe looked like [...]

Here’s the video we watched in class on a gamma ray burst… Gamma-ray bursts: Introduction to a Mystery: “Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons, the most energetic form of light. At least some of them are associated with a special type of supernovae, the explosions marking the deaths of especially massive stars. Video: [...]