Lost planet

Saw this article on Discover.com earlier this month and thought it was really interesting: The Solar System’s Lost Planet. Nesvorny, who runs computer simulations to study how the solar system evolved over time, kept encountering the same problem: The four giant gas planets, whose orbits are comfortably far apart from each other today, kept violently jostling… Continue reading Lost planet

Yuri’s Night

Tomorrow, April 12th, is a pretty momentous date: it is the 50th anniversary of the first human being to launch into space (which took place on April 12, 1961) by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Appropriately enough, the 12th is also when Yuri’s Night is celebrated, a sort of unofficial holiday “world space party” that commemorates… Continue reading Yuri’s Night

Much Ado About Pluto

More geeky space news! This is more mainstream-popular, though, as I’ve seen it popping up everywhere. Pluto is no longer a planet. I’m actually a bit surprised at the uproar this seems to be causing; Slashdot has more on this. Me, I guess I’ve always been suspicious of Pluto; I mean, the thing has this… Continue reading Much Ado About Pluto

Orion

The February issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article about Project Orion: a project that was developed during the ’50s and ’60s to build a spaceship that was as big as a skyscraper, weighed eight million pounds, and was propelled by—get this—nuclear bombs. While Discover’s article was good, focusing more on the people and… Continue reading Orion

Blue Moon

One for the weekend: tomorrow, July 31, (er, rather, today now I guess) is a blue moon. One definition of it, anyway. Enjoy!

Water on Mars

Forgot to point to this the other day: Opportunity finds evidence of water in Mars’ past. Probably you’ve all heard this by now, but it’s still incredible. “Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for… Continue reading Water on Mars

Lunar eclipse

In case you live in a cave somewhere and don’t look up into the night sky, there was a total lunar eclipse tonight. Unfortunately, here on the west coast we missed most of the show; by the time the moon rose over the cloudy horizon, it was just past totality and starting to emerge from… Continue reading Lunar eclipse