Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission Summary: 0 pending, 39 declined, 97 accepted (136 total, 71.32% accepted)

×
Space

Submission + - Bizarre expanding light halo seen by Hawaii webcam (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A webcam mounted at the CFHT observatory in Hawaii caught a strange, expanding halo of light on the night of June 22. Announced on the Starship Asterisk forum, readers quickly honed in on the likely culprit: the terminal charge from the third stage of a Minuteman III missile. Very similar to the Norway Spiral of 2009, and scientific sleuthing at its best!"

Submission + - Cell phone link to brain cancer overhyped? (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Following up on the story posted to Slashdot earlier, the "possible" link between cell phones and brain cancer is very tenuous, to say the least. Looking at the actual data reveals the results are indistinguishable from no connection at all. Not surprisingly, these results are being widely misinterpreted."
Space

Submission + - The most distant object in the Universe. Maybe. (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A gamma-ray burst seen in 2009 may be the single most distant object ever seen. If the estimates pan out, it's at a whopping 13.4 billion light years away. The estimates look good, though the exact distance isn't known. If it holds up, this explosion occurred when the Universe was only 2% of its current age."
NASA

Submission + - The Sun is a sphere! (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: For the first time in history, scientists now have a 360-degree panoramic view of the Sun. The twin STEREO spacecraft, launched in 2006, are now 180 degrees apart on opposite sides of the Sun, and can see the entire surface of the nearest star. This new view will provide scientists with critical info about solar storms, surface activity, and the Sun's magnetic field.
Space

Submission + - Incredible double eclipse pic: Sun, Moon, and ISS (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: The exceptionally talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a picture extraordinary even for him: the space station passing in front of the Sun while the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon! He traveled all the way from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take this amazing shot. I have more information about the picture itself on the Bad Astronomy blog, but you should go to Thierry's website to see more amazing pictures he's taken over the years. They're simply jaw-dropping.
Space

Submission + - The galaxy may have billions of habitable planets (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A recent astronomical report came out stating that as many as 1 in 4 sun-like stars have earth-mass planets. But are they habitable? A simple bit of math based on some decent assumptions shows that there may be *billions* of potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy. Getting to them, of course, is another problem altogether..."
Space

Submission + - Astronomers find planets around weird binary star (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Exoplanets orbiting binary stars have been discovered before, but NN Serpentis is a weird system even in that category. One star is a red dwarf in an incredibly tight orbit around a white dwarf. The white dwarf used to be a star like the Sun but became a red giant as it died, engulfing the red dwarf. Now the two orbit each other almost as closely as the Moon orbits the Earth. Explaining how the two newly detected exoplanets survived such an event is very difficult, and astronomers think they may have actually formed from the material expelled by the star as it died."
Space

Submission + - Record-breaking galaxy found in deep Hubble image (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope have found a galaxy at the very edge of the Universe: the light from this far-flung object has been traveling a whopping 13.1 billion years to get here! The galaxy appears as a non-descript dot in the infrared Hubble Ultra Deep Field taken using the Wide Field Camera 3, but a spectrum taken using a ground-based telescope confirms that we're seeing this object as it was a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang itself."
Space

Submission + - Possible earthlike planet found around nearby star (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a planet orbiting a nearby star that may possibly be the most earthlike yet. The planet, called Gliese 581g, is 20 light years away, has about three times the mass of the Earth, and orbits its red dwarf star at a distance that would allow liquid water to stand on its surface. Mind you, we don't know if this planet is at all habitable, or how much like the Earth it is (so beware the typical media hyperbole). But the good news is that it implies smaller planets in their stars' "Goldilocks Zones" are common in the galaxy."
Space

Submission + - 1.4 gigapixel cam bags 1st asteroid (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) has discovered its first asteroid: a 50-meter rock over 30 million kilometers away — too far to hit us for now, but still close as asteroids go. The camera has 1.4 billion pixels, and is mounted on a 1.8 meter telescope in Hawaii — and that's just the prototype. This project is expected to find thousands of asteroids. The new rock, 2010 ST3, is actually potentially hazardous: it has a small chance of hitting us in 2098."
Science

Submission + - Climategate's final days (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at the Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee is another in a series of independent investigtions which have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."
Media

Submission + - Exoplanet reports exaggerated (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "The reports of the first direct picture of an exoplanet are misleading. The real news is that an image of a probable exoplanet taken in 2008 using a telescope in Hawaii have been confirmed — it's a planet. In fact, exoplanets have been directly imaged before; the first was in 2005. More images of other planets were released in 2008. To be specific: this new planet is the first to be directly imaged orbiting a sun-like star using observations made from the ground. That's actually still quite a technological achievement, but don't be mislead by hyperbolic headlines."
Iphone

Submission + - Followup: iPhone 4's display is about (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "AT WWDC, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone 4's display has about the same resolution as the human eye — held at one foot away, the iPhone 4's pixels are too small to see. After reading an earlier Slashdot post about an expert disputing Jobs' claim, I decided to run the numbers myself. I found that Jobs is correct for people with normal vision, and the expert was using numbers for theoretically perfect vision. So to most people, the iPhone 4 display will look unpixellated."
Space

Submission + - UFOs over Oz: one Falcon thing after another (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Reports popped up yesterday of a bright, spinning, spiral light in the skies over Australia, reminiscent of the same phenomenon over Norway last year. However, this was the slowly rotating second stage booster from yesterday's successful Falcon 9 rocket test from SpaceX. Or maybe it's just that my tin foil hat has a leak in it..."

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Close