Amazing. Hubble has taken images of a galaxy 70 million light years away. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015...-image-barred-spiral-galaxy.html?intcmp=hpbt1
Unsubstantiated, but certainly interesting; Scientist May Have Discovered Alternate Universes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...-universesyes-really_563a1212e4b0307f2cab4d14
I love the final paragraph. 70 million light years is quite close. Earlier this year astronomers used three telescopes, including the Hubble to spota baby blue galaxy that is farther away in space than any other galaxy ever seen. The galaxy, named EGS-zs8-1, is 13.1 billion light-years away.
This is a photo taken from Voyager 1. Of earth. From BILLIONS of miles away, this fucking spacecraft was launched before I was born and is in interstellar overdrive. Crazy.
Was the successful Blue Origin landing already discussed elsewhere on TiB? A couple questions: - they're pitching in that video the idea that anybody (well, anybody with money) can take a ride, showing through animation how awesome and fun it would be to look out the big window at space. But, shouldn't they edit out the incredibly hard smash landing the capsule makes? Ow. - Will the fact that the rocket + capsule looks like a vibrator help or hurt their marketing? I mean, I know all rockets are going to look phallic, but seriously, that looks like a personal massage wand. I guess they can flip it the other way, and sell vibrators painted to look like Blue Origin. "Space Probe: pleasure that is out of this world."
Jesus Christ. Look at how fast and smooth that thing landed, it fell from SPACE, and it touched down like a Bugs Bunny rocket. I thought after the Space Shuttle space travel would be boring for a while, but ther is more awesome shit going on than ever. Public space travel. Landing on comets. Missions to Mars. Exciting stuff.
The way it automatically vectored its thrust to straighten itself out is impressive to say the least. That's some Skynet shit right there.
9th planet, anyone? This is going to send the Planet X fruitcakes into a tizzy. Caltech astronomers find evidence of a 9th planet. "Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun... "Batygin and Brown describe their work in the current issue of the Astronomical Journal and show how Planet Nine helps explain a number of mysterious features of the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt." Emphasis mine. Nothing has been confirmed. It'll be something if they observe it. If anyone wants to really nerd out, here is the actual paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22
Anyone else been paying attention to this? http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-gravitywaves-idUSKCN0VJ2Q9
Actually this is the first I am reading about it, and I just found this, yes it is confirmed http://www.economist.com/news/scien...-century-after-Albert-Einstein-predicted-them
ArsTechnica has had a number of articles on LIGO and gravitational waves recently: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/upgraded-ligo-detectors-spot-gravitational-waves/
Virgin Galactic unveils new spaceship http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/us/virgin-galactic-new-space-plane/index.html
It's nice that unlike most billionaires there are still guys like Branson, Cuban and Musk who not only have fun with their money, but they want others to have fun too.
Fascinating. Mars in three days? NASA touts new propulsion system http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016...touts-new-propulsion-system.html?intcmp=hpbt4
Live web cast of launch of the Falcon 9. The approximately 90-minute launch window is scheduled to open at 6:46 p.m. ET. http://www.spacex.com/webcast EDIT: SpaceX has scrubbed this evening's launch attempt from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station of a Falcon 9 rocket. It was scheduled to deliver an SES communications satellite to orbit at 6:47 p.m. Eastern time. A next attempt date has not yet been announced.
Great way to compare the size of our solar system to the size of our galaxy: Take one piece of paper and set it on the ground. The thickness of that paper represent the distance from the earth to the sun, around 93,000,000 miles. To represent the size of the Galaxy, build a stack of paper nearly one thousand miles tall. There are 150 billion galaxies out there many that are tens of thousands of times bigger than ours. Now THAT my friends is the definition of "massive".