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Submission + - Can a 4K TV fool people into thinking they're about to get hit by an asteroid? 3

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: A video is going viral showing people in a job interview. What they think is a window in the room is actually a new 4K (3840x2160 pixel) TV, and when it shows an asteroid screaming in over the city and impacting nearby, hilarity (more or less) ensues. It may seem unlikely, but it turns out the TV pixels really are small enough that from a short distance away, they can fool people into thinking they're seeing reality and not a video on a TV.

Submission + - Watch the Crab Nebula expand over a 13 year period

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: A thousand years ago, the light from the explosion of a massive star reached the Earth. We now call this supernova remnant the Crab Nebula, and a new image of the Crab taken by astronomer Adam Block shows the physical expansion of the debris, made obvious in a short video comparing his 2012 observations with some taken in 1999. The outward motion of filaments and knots in the material can be easily traced even over this relatively short time baseline.

Submission + - Lowest mass exoplanet ever directly imaged. Probably.

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers announced today that they have taken a direct image of the lowest mass exoplanet ever seen. HD 95086 b has a mass about 4 — 5 times that of Jupiter, and orbits a star 300 light years away that is slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun. The planet is not 100% confirmed, but it appears very likely to be real. If so, it's a hot gas giant, still cooling from its formation less than 20 million years ago. The picture, taken in the infrared, clearly shows the planet, making it one of fewer than a dozen such planets seen in actual telescopic images.

Submission + - Missile test creates huge expanding halo of light over Hawaii

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect.

Comment Re:If this is what we currently have on our task l (Score 4, Insightful) 212

"National pride"? He's Canadian, you know. Which nation do you mean? Do you also know they don't work 24 hours per day? And on their off time, ISS astronauts still breathe? Of course, he did use up a lot of electrons saving the files and transmitting them to Earth, so I'll make sure NASA or the CSA reimburses you per Coulomb.

Submission + - Scientists may have detected neutrinos from another galaxy

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: A experiment called IceCube — consisting of sensitive light detectors buried deep in the Antarctic ice — has detected two ultra-high-energy neutrinos, each with over a peta-electronVolt of energy (a quadrillion times the energy of a visible light photon), the highest energy neutrinos ever seen. The two events, nicknamed Bert and Ernie, have a 99% chance of originating outside our galaxy, likely created either by a supermassive black hole or an exploding gamma-ray burst.
Space

Submission + - Astronomers discover third-closest star system to Earth

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers have found the third-closest star system to the Earth: called WISE 1049-5319, it's a binary brown dwarf system just 6.5 light years away. Brown dwarfs are faint, low mass objects 13 — 75 times the mass of Jupiter, and are so dim they are very difficult to detect. These newly-found nearby objects were seen in observations from 1978 but went unnoticed at the time, but since that date the large apparent motion of the binary made their proximity obvious. Only two star systems are closer: Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years) and Barnard's star (6 light years)."
Space

Submission + - Astronomers find planet barely larger than Earth's Moon

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A team of astronomers have announced the discovery of the smallest exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star yet found: Kepler-37b, which has a diameter of only 3865 kilometers — smaller than Mercury, and only a little bigger than our own Moon. It was found using the transit method; as it orbits its star, it periodically blocks a bit of the starlight, revealing its presence. Interestingly, the planet has been known for some time, but only new advances in asteroseismology (studying oscillations in the star itself) have allowed the star's size to be accurately found, which in turn yielded a far better determination of the planet's diminutive size. Also, the asteroseismology research was not funded by NASA, but instead crowd funded by a non-profit, which raised money by letting people adopt Kepler target stars."
Space

Submission + - Earth may have been hit by a gamma-ray burst in 775 AD

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Studies of carbon-14 in Japanese trees and beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice indicate the Earth was hit by a big radiation blast in 775 AD. Although very rare, occurring only once every million years or so, the most likely culprit is a gamma-ray burst, a cosmic explosion accompanying the birth of a black hole. While a big solar flare is still in the running, a GRB from merging neutron stars produces the ratio of carbon an beryllium observed, and also can explain why no bright explosion was seen at the time, and no supernova remnant is seen now."
Space

Submission + - No, life has not been found in a meteorite

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "News is going around the web that a scientist in the UK has found life (in the form of microscopic diatoms) in a meteorite, and has even published a paper about it. However, there are a lot of reasons to strongly doubt the claim. While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky. Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence. All in all, this claim of life in a space rock is at best highly doubtful, and in reality almost certainly not true."
Space

Submission + - 100 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A new study finds that there may be 100 billion alien planets in the Milky Way alone, with 17 billion of them the size of Earth. Announcements like this have been made before, but this new research is more robust than previous studies, using data from the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft over a longer period and analyzing it in a more statistically solid way. They also found that smaller planets are not as picky about their host stars, with terrestrial planets forming around stars like the Sun or as small as tiny, cool red dwarfs with equal ease."

Submission + - Giant Squid Caught on Film (discovery.com)

Submitted by
Edgewood_Dirk
Edgewood_Dirk writes: "From the Article: "Scientists and broadcasters have captured footage of an elusive giant squid, up to eight meters (26 feet) long that roams the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
Japan's National Science Museum succeeded in filming the deep-sea creature in its natural habitat for the first time, working with Japanese public broadcaster NHK and the US Discovery Channel.

The massive invertebrate is the stuff of legend, with sightings of a huge ocean-dwelling beast reported by sailors for centuries.""
Space

Submission + - Hubble sees tribe of baby galaxies 13+ billion light years away

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Using Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted seven galaxies that are all over 13 billion light years away... including one that appears to be a record breaker at a staggering 13.3+ billion light years distant. That one is seen as it was only 380 million years after the Big Bang. This observation reaches into the era of the young cosmos when stars were first forming, and allows astronomers to better understand what the Universe was like back then — a time we know very little about."

Submission + - Atheist blogger sentenced to 3 years of prison for insulting Islam (alarabiya.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Egyptian blogger Alber Saber, maintainer of the Egyptian Atheists Facebook page, has been
sentenced to three years in prison under Egypt's blasphemy law for posting the trailer for the anti-Muslim film Innocence of Muslims. This film was widely blamed for al-Qaeda's coordinated attacks on US embassies on September 11 of this year, which were meant to pressure the US for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is imprisoned in the US for his role in the World Trade Center attack of 1993.

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