Very very cool…

Astronomers see exoplanet orbiting its parent star! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: “This is extremely cool news: astronomers have, for the first time, directly seen an exoplanet orbiting its star from one side to the other!”

Once we perfect the ability to discern the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system, it is going to get very interesting.

Scary!

Video of a man exposed to total vacuum

Antimatter Supernova -The Biggest Bomb in the Cosmos: “We’ve recently seen the largest explosion ever recorded: a supergiant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production.  The resulting blast was visible for months because it unleashed a  cloud of radioactive material over fifty times the size of our own star, giving off a nuclear fission glow visible from galaxies away.”

Antimatter Supernova is a great name.

Head over to read the whole article… completely fascinating.

Go out and look at the stars tonight (if it’s not too cold/cloudy), and thank Galileo

The Galilean Revolution, 400 years later | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: “Four hundred years ago tonight, a man from Pisa, Italy took a newly-made telescope with a magnifying power of 33X, pointed it at one of the brighter lights in the sky, and changed mankind forever.

The man, of course, was Galileo, and the light he observed on January 7, 1610 was Jupiter. He spotted ‘three fixed stars’ that were invisible to the eye near the planet, and a fourth a few days later.”

Yay Science.

Just Wow:

YouTube
- The Known Universe by AMNH: “The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010. “

Possibly huge news!

Has dark matter finally been detected? The Guardian: “For 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. But tonight it appeared that the hunt may be over for dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of the mass of the universe.

In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century.”

We’ll be studying Dark Matter/Energy a great deal this Spring, so stay in the loop!

If you are in Robotics this semester, we briefly discussed this on Friday…

New Clues Discovered to Detect Alien Worlds (A Weekend Feature): “The key is lithium.  A stellar spectography survey of over five hundred stars reveals that known-planet-bearers, including our own Sun, have less than a hundredth of the lithium of ‘barren’ stars.  Stars don’t produce much lithium in their fusion reactions, so most share the same proportion of the element, which was created at the beginning of the universe.  But some stars seem to destroy their stock, fusing it into other elements, and a European team have found that they all have one thing in common: planets.”

I love lithium.

Had to share…

MH’s First Telescope Viewing.

via MH’s First Telescope Viewing on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

A new panoramic image of the full night sky — with the Milky Way as its centerpiece — has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs.

Beautiful!

via 3,000 images combine for Milky Way portrait – Space.com- msnbc.com.

We’ll be talking about elements this week as we begin our studies of the Periodic Table and the properties of elements.

A part of that study will help us understand how everything we see (including each other) ultimately comes from stars.

Pretty neat to think about when you think how connected you are to the universe…

We Come From Stars from Sam Harrelson on Vimeo.