Claire Brewster, I’ll Get There, I Know I Will
Paper art out of old and out-of-date maps and atlases
via lindayay
The Rings of Pluto?
In the distant outer Solar System, rings are nearly ubiquitous. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings, leaving Pluto as the only outer planet without rings.
But PSI Senior Scientist Henry Throop would love to change that. Using both giant telescopes on Earth, and a small spacecraft currently on its way to Pluto, Throop is searching for signs that Pluto may have rings orbiting it, just like its neighbors. Astronomers expect that Pluto could well have rings – they’ve just never been discovered.
Throop presented results from one study at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Nantes, France in October 2011. In the study, Throop and his co-authors used data from the four-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia.
“From the ground, Pluto’s rings would be too faint and too small to see directly. But occasionally, Pluto passes in front of a distant star, and that lets us study it in exquisite detail,” Throop said. “As Pluto passes in front of the star, the star’s light blinks out, like a moth blocking out the beam from a flashlight. We searched through the observations to try to find any hint that the star light was being blocked by rings of Pluto.”
via thenewenlightenmentage
Double-Barreled Solar EventAn active region on the Sun unleashed two blasts in quick succession (Jan. 19, 2012), which have sent particle clouds headed towards Earth.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/SOHO/SDO
via spacetimecontinumm
cwnl:
NASA Telescope Discovers 26 Alien Planets Around 11 Different Stars
Credit: NASA Ames/UC Santa Cruz
Image: This artist’s concept shows an overhead view of the orbital position of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, and announced on Jan. 26, 2012. All the colored planets have been verified. The planet candidates shown in grey have not yet been verified.
NASA’s prolific planet-hunting spacecraft has hit the jackpot again, discovering 11 new planetary systems with 26 confirmed alien planets among them.
The findings nearly double the number of bona fide planets found outside our solar system by the Kepler space observatory.
“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”
The newly detected worlds vary in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter; 15 of the 26 planets fall between Earth and Neptune in size. While all of the planets tightly orbit their parent stars, more research will be required to determine which worlds are rocky like Earth, and which have thick, gaseous atmospheres like Neptune, the scientists said.
via ikenbot
