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Welcome to Armageddon Online - Disaster News, Future Scenarios, Preparedness and Survival |
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Science + Astronomy  Explore some of the mysteries of the cosmos. These news articles deal with all things science and astronomy. Black holes, gamma ray bursts, supernovas etc.
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Science-Astronomy
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May 06, 2013 |
Earth is bombarded all the time by space rocks, but people rarely notice them--only 1,042 have ever been seen falling. People didn’t start recording these impacts until a couple hundred years ago, and then suddenly, they noticed all the time.
Data designer Carlo Zapponi has a lovely new animation, Bolides, showing all these recorded impacts, along with every known meteorite fall--most of which weren’t seen when they happened. The information comes from The Meteorite Bulletin, which is maintained by the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. The word "bolide" comes from the Greek word for missile, and is used to describe bright fireballs. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 24, 2013 |
- Comet could shine brighter than Venus or even the full moon in November
- Photographed on April 10, when it was 394 million miles from Earth
The Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their clearest view yet of Comet ISON, which experts believe could light up the sky in a breathtaking display later this year. The image of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was photographed on April 10, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter’s orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun, and 394 million miles from Earth. Experts believe it will get dramatically brighter as it swings around the sun in late November, with some claiming the comet could shine brighter than Venus or even the full moon. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 23, 2013 |
- Nasa timelapse shows images from its Solar Dynamics Observatory since it was launched in 2010
- Image and video show the violent space weather that can send radiation and solar material toward Earth and interfere with satellites in space
Nasa has unveiled a breathtaking video that shows three years on activity on the solar surface condensed into three minutes. It reveals solar flares and coronal mass ejections caught in the act in unprecedented detail. The images from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory also reveal space weather that can send radiation and solar material toward Earth and interfere with satellites in space. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 23, 2013 |
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What appears to be a meteor flash turned the nighttime skies over Argentina as bright as day on Sunday. Amateur video shows the green streak and flash in the background of a concert setting. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 17, 2013 |
San Francisco's Exploratorium has always set the bar for experiential science learning. Its newly completed space full of new exhibits (and old favorites) should help it keep revolutionizing hands-on science education for years more.
Visit San Francisco's Pier 15 anytime on or after April 17 and you'll get to take in a bridge enveloped in manmade fog, a 3-D topographic map of the Bay Area with data sets projected onto its surface, mouse stem cell research, and items from patients who lived at a now-shuttered mental institution. It's all part of the new Exploratorium, a $300 million upgrade to the mother of all experiential learning science museums. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 14, 2013 |
- Obama wants Nasa to begin search for a suitable asteroid
- Animation looks simple enough - capture it like a fish in a net
- Nasa working on heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule for the mission
- The programme is expected to cost less than the estimated £1.7 million
The idea of capturing an asteroid may seem unbelievable to most. Yet following U.S President Barack Obama's instructions to Nasa that he wants to snare an asteroid and then launch it into the moon/earth orbit, the space agency has released a video of how it could be done. This is all part of the development of a potential manned mission to Mars.
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Science-Astronomy
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April 10, 2013 |
Stephen Hawking, who spent his career decoding the universe and even experienced weightlessness, is urging the continuation of space exploration — for humanity’s sake.
The 71-year-old Hawking said he did not think humans would survive another 1,000 years “without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”
The British cosmologist made the remarks Tuesday before an audience of doctors, nurses and employees at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he toured a stem cell laboratory that’s focused on trying to slow the progression of Lou Gehrig’s disease. |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 09, 2013 |
You’ve probably heard of or seen photos of the Aurora Borealis – a natural light show in the northern night sky. But did you know this phenomenon is actually caused by solar storms, happening on the Sun's surface 93 million miles away?
As it happens, the storms aren’t just in the business of putting on a great show. They can also interfere with GPS and satellites, and even cause major power outages. Later this year, solar activity is expected to increase, and so will the likelihood that these storms will affect our everyday lives on Earth. Travel, communications, phone service and basic power are all vulnerable to solar storms. [YAHOO] |
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Science-Astronomy
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April 05, 2013 |
Researchers at the University of Leeds may have solved a key puzzle about how objects from space could have kindled life on Earth. While it is generally accepted that some important ingredients for life came from meteorites bombarding the early Earth, scientists have not been able to explain how that inanimate rock transformed into the building blocks of life.
This new study shows how a chemical, similar to one now found in all living cells and vital for generating the energy that makes something alive, could have been created when meteorites containing phosphorus minerals landed in hot, acidic pools of liquids around volcanoes, which were likely to have been common across the early Earth. [SD] |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 26, 2013 |
Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lyk
The Higgs boson helps explain why particles have the mass they do. The Higgs particle that the LHC has found possesses a mass of approximately 126 giga-electron volts (GeV)—roughly the combined mass of 126 protons (hydrogen nuclei). (One GeV equals a billion electron volts.)ken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable." [SA] |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 23, 2013 |
East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky –in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be “a single meteor event.” He said it “looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports.”
“Judging from the brightness, we’re dealing with something as bright as the full moon,” Cooke said. “The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast.” |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 22, 2013 |
- Study claims there's not enough debris to account for massive asteroid
- For a smaller rock to cause such a huge crater it would have to be faster
- Long-period comets hurtling in from outer space fit the bill, it is claimed
The extraterrestrial object that slammed into the Earth 65million years ago and sparked the extinction of the dinosaurs was most likely a speeding comet, new analysis claims. New research has suggested that the 110 mile-wide Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico, was caused by the impact of a smaller object than previously thought. But for a smaller object to have caused such a cataclysmic impact it must have been moving at speeds usually only reached by comets hurtling through our solar system from outer space. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 20, 2013 |
What if a rogue planet swept through the solar system, altering Earth's orbit? Potentially, the death of all life on the planet, according to a new Weather Channel special.
"Forecasting the End," a new Weather Channel series, premieres March 21, exploring the possible results of a rogue planet fly-by. Rogue planets, or planets not linked to stars, may outnumber actual stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Myths about "Planet X" or "Nibiru" hold that a stealth rogue planet is headed this way (actually, it was supposed to hit on the Mayan apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012).
In fact, the likelihood of a rogue planet swinging by is slim. Astronomers have yet to find any evidence that any of the planets in our own solar system are captured rogues. And the average space between rogue planets and other bodies in our galaxy is quite expansive, Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait has calculated. In other words, a collision isn't likely. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 12, 2013 |
- Made up of 66 giant antennae which gather faint radio waves from space for processing by a supercomputer
- ALMA is situated in the Chile desert at 16,400ft – roughly half the cruising height of a jumbo jet and almost four times higher than Ben Nevis
- By collecting radio waves rather than optical light, ALMA can look through the dense dust clouds of deep space
It looks like it belongs in a science fiction film but this ‘time machine’ could provide us with the facts about where we came from. To be switched on tomorrow, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, is the world’s most powerful telescope. It is also the highest on the planet and, at almost £1billion, the most expensive of its kind. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 11, 2013 |
In the last seven days, an asteroid the size of a city block and three smaller space rocks have zoomed safely by Earth, the latest demonstration that we live in a solar system that some scientists have dubbed a "cosmic shooting gallery."
All four asteroid flybys occurred between March 4 and Sunday, March 10. The asteroids were also all discovered this month, some just days ago. The biggest space rock encounter occurred Saturday, when the asteroid 2013 ET passed just inside 600,000 miles of Earth. That asteroid is about 460 feet long and approached within 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the moon. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 10, 2013 |
A comet sailing through the inner solar system make its closest approach to the sun and will be at its brightest at sunset tonight, but the glare of twilight may make it tricky to see, NASA says. The Comet Pan-STARRS will be 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) from the surface of the sun when it swings around the star today, and should be bright enough to see without the aid of telescopes or binoculars, weather permitting. But the comet is also appearing low on the western horizon at sunset so some planning is needed to spot the celestial wanderer with the naked eye tonight.
"Look too early and the sky will be too bright," said Rachel Stevenson, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Look too late, the comet will be too low and obstructed by the horizon. This comet has a relatively small window." |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 09, 2013 |
An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500. Discovered just six days ago, the 460-foot long (140-meter) Asteroid 2013 ET passed about 600,000 miles from Earth at 3:30 p.m. EST. That's about 2-1/2 times as far as the moon, fairly close on a cosmic yardstick.
"The scary part of this one is that it's something we didn't even know about," Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands. Moving at a speed of about 26,000 miles per hour, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had impacted the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 09, 2013 |
Life's building blocks can form in the harsh environment of deep space, a new study suggests, bolstering the odds that a comet or meteorite strike may have jump-started biological evolution on Earth.
Linked pairs of amino acids called dipeptides can take shape in space-like conditions, a team of chemists found. Dipeptides brought to Earth aboard a comet or meteorite billions of years ago may have then catalyzed the formation of even more complex molecules necessary for life as we know it, such as proteins and sugars, researchers said. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 08, 2013 |
- 2013 was due to be year of the 'solar maximum'
- As this picture shows, in fact the sun is incredibly calm - baffling experts
'Something unexpected' is happening on the Sun, Nasa has warned. This year was supposed to be the year of 'solar maximum,' the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low. 'Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,' the space agency says.m The image above shows the Earth-facing surface of the Sun on February 28, 2013, as observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 03, 2013 |
- Comet C/2013 A1 could pass within 23,000 miles of Mars in October 2014, but the unpredictable nature of comet orbits mean it could veer closer
- If it hits it would leave a crater hundreds of kilometres across
- Huge blast would destroy all probes on and around the Mars
A comet hurtling into our solar system from deep space could next year score a direct and cataclysmic impact on Mars, astronomers say. According to current calculations, comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is set for a near miss that will bring it within 23,000 miles of the surface of the Red Planet. But the unpredictable nature of comet orbits, which can change as jet-like geysers of steam erupt from their surfaces as they near the Sun, means it could pass further away, or veer into a direct collision course. |
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Science-Astronomy
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March 03, 2013 |
Britain has committed £88m towards the construction of the world's largest telescope. The huge observatory, to be built in the Chilean Andes, will allow astronomers to capture images of the universe's earliest moments.The giant eye on the sky, known as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will cost more than €1bn (£900m) to build. Its main mirror, which will gather light from distant stars and galaxies, will be 39 metres in diameter, made of 798 segments. The observatory will gather 15 times more light than the largest telescopes today.
"Every area of astronomy, from planets around other stars to the first galaxies in the universe, will be revolutionised by this telescope," said Professor Simon Morris of Durham University. |
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Science-Astronomy
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February 18, 2013 |
NASA, universities and private groups in the US are working on asteroid warning systems that can detect objects from space like the one that struck Russia last week with a blinding flash and mighty boom. But the US space agency reiterated that events like the one in the Urals, which shattered windows and injured nearly 1,000 people, are rare.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. |
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Science-Astronomy
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February 18, 2013 |
The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10,000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century.
Large pieces of the meteor have yet to be found. However, a team from the Urals Federal University, which is based in Yekaterinburg, collected 53 fragments, the largest of which was 7 millimeters, according to Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist at the university.
Data from a global network of sensors indicated that the disintegration of the Russia fireball unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy, more than 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. |
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Science-Astronomy
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February 18, 2013 |
The shock wave from Friday's (Feb. 15) meteor explosion above Russia sent subsonic waves through the atmosphere halfway around the world. Up to 11 sensors in Greenland, Africa, Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and other far-flung regions detected the Russian meteor blast's infrasound, or low-frequency sound waves. The sensors are part of the global network of 60 infrasound stations maintained by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).
Infrasound's long wavelengths (about 20 to 0.01 Hertz) can travel far distances in the atmosphere, at frequencies humans can't hear. Elephants, whales and even pigeons use infrasound for communication and navigation, scientists have discovered. [LS] |
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Science-Astronomy
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February 15, 2013 |
An asteroid hurtled toward Earth's backyard, destined Friday to make the closest known flyby for a rock of its 150-foot size. In a startling coincidence, a meteor exploded above Russia's Ural Mountains just hours before the asteroid was due to zoom past the planet.
Scientists insisted the meteor had nothing to do with the incoming asteroid since they appeared to traveling in opposite directions. The asteroid is much more immense object that was expected to miss Earth by 17,150 miles, avoiding catastrophe.But that's still closer than many communication and weather satellites. Scientists insisted these, too, would be spared. |
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Science-Astronomy
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February 14, 2013 |
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Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York is an amateur astrophotography enthusiast who captures amazing photographs of the Sun through a telescope in his backyard. His highly detailed photographs show the sun in ways you never see with your naked eye. Using special filters that allow the photos to be captured without destroying his camera or his eyes, Friedman creates images of our life-giving star that look more like something you might see under a microscope. |
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Science + Astronomy 
