In September 1859, a solar flare erupted so intense that the explosion itself was visible to the human eye. A ferocious geomagnetic storm ensued in which Northern Lights descended as far south as Cuba, the Bahamas and Hawaii. Meanwhile, telegraph engineers disconnected their batteries and powered communications by electricity from the auroras! Could it happen again?
Today, NASA-funded researchers released to the general public a new aamp;quot;4Daamp;quot; live model of Earth's ionosphere. Without leaving home, anyone can now fly through the layer of ionized gas that encircles Earth at the edge of space itself.
The latest resarch postulates that only about 5% of our universe is made of normal matter as we know it, consisting of protons and neutrons, or baryons, which along with electrons, form the building blocks of ordinary matter. The rest of our universe is composed of elusive dark matter (23%) and dark energy (72%). Astronomers using the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM (X-ray Multi-Mirror) Newton Observatory have now uncovered part of the missing matter in the universe.
Forty-seven years ago today, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr. became the first American in space. At exactly 9:34 a.m. EST on May 5, 1961, about 45 million Americans sat tensely in front of their black and white television sets and watched a slim Redstone booster rocket with a small and cramped Mercury spacecraft manned by Alan Shepard, lift off its pad at Cape Canaveral and go roaring upward through the clear blue sky. Shepard's capsule, named Freedom 7, made the historic 15-minute suborbital flight, officially kicking off manned Project Mercury flights. With six manned flights from 1961 to 1963, Project Mercury's objectives were very specific: 1) to orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, 2) to investigate man's ability to function in space, and 3) to recover both man and spacecraft safely -- a set of objectives it achieved with flying colors, thus opening the door for Projects Gemini and Apollo later in the decade.
Researchers have used the world's thinnest material, Graphene, to create the world's smallest transistor -- one atom thick and ten atoms wide. Does this achievement signal the the limit to how small semiconductors can become?
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- One issue the presidential candidates are not saying much about is space exploration. But some scientists, military experts and intelligence analysts say the next president may well determine whether America keeps an edge in space.
At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics. Using the unrivaled resolution of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers have watched material winding a corkscrew path outward from a supermassive black hole and behaving exactly as predicted by theory.
Most backyard astronomers wait for dark to observe, but one of most spectacular objects in the sky is right in front of us every day. Observing the sun through telescopes requires care and knowledge, and when you bring the enthusiasm and skill of Greg Piepol into the mix, well unbelievable views of our very own star are the result. Join OffOrbit.TV in its premier edition to explore what strange and beautiful images are possible right from your backyard.
During the next decade, solar physicists will learn more than they have dreamed possible about the Sun, thanks to current technologies that have advanced the capacity of land-based solar observatories. New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has led the effort to build the world’s largest and most capable solar telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). Scheduled for first light in Jume 2008, the 1.6-meter NJIT solar telescope will surpass the current record holder - a 1-meter solar telescope operating on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
An international team of astronomers has discovered the coldest brown dwarf star ever observed. This finding is a new step toward filling the gap between stars and planets. It appears that there is not much difference between cold Brown Dwarfs like the one discovered here and giant heat radiating gaseous planets like Jupiter.
Researchers using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have found evidence of material orbiting Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon. This finding is the first time that rings have been found around a moon.
A new stereo view of Phobos, the larger of Mars' two tiny moons, has been captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. The new view shows landslides along the walls of large craters. Also captured were Phobos' striking surface grooves and crater chains and craters hidden on the moon's dark side illuminated by qquot;Mars-shine.qquot;
