Martian Ice Spirals

Caused by wind? Maybe so. Pretty impressive if you ask me, especially given how thin Mars's atmosphere is.

Yet another pretty galaxy

As seen here. Enjoy!

Moving Exoplanets

This is just very cool, and very informative as well. Enjoy!

Pretty pictures of Mars

Available here. The title says it all.

The Future of Astronomy in the US

At least according to the National Science Foundation, who funds most of it (and this podcast / blog). Go here to see what is next, at least for now....

Free Mercury Public Lecture TONIGHT!

Sorry for the late notice, but I just found about this: at 7 PM tonight Dr. Sean Solomon, principal investigator of NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury, will be talking about initial results from this mission at the LeFrak Theater located in the American Museum of Natural History in NYC (77th St. and Central Park West). For more information, go here and enjoy!

The Awakening Sun

Bad for satellites, as described here.

Titan's Case of Missing Hydrogen

NASA is on it. Read more here to learn about it. Answering questions like this is the key to trying to prove the existence of life elsewhere in the Universe, as I hope to discuss soon.

You can teach an old rover new tricks

Or at least get an old Soviet rover on the Mars to reflect lasers pulses back to Earth, as described here. To learn more on why you want to bounce lasers off the moon, listen to this interview with Dr. James Battat on Lunar Laser Ranging.

Spirit may have passed on...

... but the scientific results from its measurements keep on coming. Go here to read more.

Pelting Jupiter

With asteroids. It's big, it can take it.

Stars ejecting stars

Gravity works in very funny ways when you have thousands of stars in a very tiny volume... Go here to read the details.

Spinning Black Holes

One of the many mysteries surrounding astrophysical black holes is why some are powering powerful jets - narrow beams of relativistic particles, and others don't. An intriguing possibility is that is related to the spin of the black hole and the surrounding disk of material falling into the black hole - if the two are aligned, you don't get jets, and if they are misaligned, you do. Read here for details. This would be very hard to test, and it isn't clear how you might get such a misalignment, but it is in an intriguing possibility.

A Cosmic Zoo

Supernova remnants and globular clusters are not as cuddly as panda bears and penguins, but I think they are just as pretty as you can see here.

The "Quiet" Black Hole

at the center of M31, has its own bursts, as revealed by Chandra. Go here to read more.

Rock Catalog

Available here, courtesy of the WISE satellite.

Poor Phoenix Mars Lander

While NASA's Opportunity rover is still going strong, it appears the Phoenix Mars Lander is down for the count. Go here to read more.

Heart and Soul...

... one will burn. Sorry for the obscure musical reference, but that is what came to mind when I saw this image of the "Heart and Soul" nebula taken by the WISE satellite. Enjoy!

The Birth of Binary Stars

A majority of stars in the Milky Way are not isolated like our Sun but are actually orbiting other stars. How did these binary stars form? There are lots of theories out there, but new images from Spitzer might have determine which is correct. Go here to read more. Enjoy!

Jupiter loses a Stripe

Just as clouds and storms on the Earth come and go, so do the ones on Jupiter. Though no storm on the Earth as big as this has ever disappeared so fast... Go here to read more.

Long Live Opportunity

The NASA rover on Mars, of course, which has made it the longest running human machine on Mars. Go here and here to read more. Congratulations Opportunity!

Pretty picture

Not necessarily that much new science content, but this sure is a pretty picture of nearby spiral galaxy M83. Enjoy!

Ancient Galaxy Cluster

One of the most interesting questions in astronomy today is how have galaxies changed since the beginning of the universe? The current thinking - based on lots of observational evidence - is that at early times galaxies were forming many more stars then they are now, and that the large clusters of galaxies we see in the nearby universe formed rather recently. However, recent analysis of a Spitzer observation of a galaxy cluster when the universe was much younger than it is today found that the properties of its galaxies are very similar to those of nearby galaxt clusters. Very, very, interesting. Go here to read more.

Rosetta’s blind date with asteroid Lutetia

Read about it here. Hopefully it works...

A Hole in Space

Not really a "hole", but Herschel has recently detected a large region of almost no gas or dust created by the expanding outflow from a young star as it forms. Go here for more details. Interesting.

Archaeology from Space

Read this New York Times article how airplane and space imaging revealed massive Mayan cities long lost to the jungles. Enjoy!

What happens when you lock strangers together in a room for 500 days?

ESA is about to find out, since any manned mission to Mars will involve something very similar to this. Go here to read more about this test.

First results from Herschel

The European Space Agency launched the Herschel space telescope, designed to detect mid-infrared light from the universe (dominated by emission from hot dust, e.g. from intensely star-forming galaxies at early times or around hot, young stars in the Milky Way) has released its first science results. Go here to read them. Exciting!

Congratulations Dr. Neil Gehrels!

Dr. Neil Gehrels, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and one of leaders of the Swift mission which has revolutionized the study of Gamma-Ray Bursts (among other fields of Astronomy) has just been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (go here for details) - a very high honor. To learn more about his research, listen to this interview he gave on this program describing his research. Hope you enjoy and, again, congratulations!

Happy 4th of July!

Regardless if you are American or not...

Free NASA DVD for Educators

Sorry for the late notice, but go here for details. Hope they are still available.

They might be called "dwarf planets"

but they are still interesting. NASA is developing a mission called Dawn to travel to and orbit two of the largest bodies in the Asteroid belt, Ceres and Vesta. Go here to read more. Enjoy!