The Milky Way and its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are on course for “ a head-on collision,” says astronomer Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute. But no need for precautions because the crash won’t happen for another 4 billion years. Researchers have long known that Andromeda, currently some 2.5 million light-years away, is moving toward […]
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Astrobiologists searching the heavens for extraterrestrial life have a simple motto: “Follow the water, ”says The Washington Post. Water is an essential ingredient in all earthly biochemistry, so scientists believe it’s logical to look for life first on planets and moons with liquid water.New data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicate that Enceladus, a tiny, ice-encrusted moon orbiting Saturn, may be […]
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Scientists have been looking into Pluto’s possibility of having an ocean under its icy (a minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit) surface according to NASA’s New Horizon mission. This finding may shed some light on the internal world of Pluto. It has always been thought that Pluto was a frigid planet totally frozen over. They have discovered that Pluto may have an […]
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Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has blistering 800-degree temperatures at its equator—but its poles are full of ice. New data from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, which began orbiting Mercury last year, has revealed that as much as a trillion tons of ice exists in shadowy polar craters, where temperatures can drop to minus 370 degrees. Much of the ice […]
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Scientists have found telltale evidence that an asteroid twice as large as any previously known smashed into Earth about 300 million years ago. Previously, the largest asteroid impact was believed to have occurred 66 million years ago, when a massive space rock hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, causing such havoc that it led to the extinction […]
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Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]
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When we see a magical light show from the sun it is called “stretched loops” that are visible when the sun is rotated showing its profile to the earth. These lights move along a magnetic line that shows us these yellow lights that are charged particles of ultraviolet light. In about 5 billion years the sun will shine its last […]
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Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, and could all but disappear within the next 500 years—exposing our planet to intense solar radiation that would scour its surface of life, Reuters.com reports. Researchers say I the geological record indicates that Earth’s * magnetic field tends to switch polarity f every 250,000 years—and that it’s about 550,000 years overdue for a swap, which […]
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British astronomers have identified a celestial object so large that it challenges scientists’ basic assumptions about the nature of the universe. Huge-LQG is a cluster of 73 quasars, each of which lies at the center of its own galaxy.The structure measures 4 billion light-years across at its greatest dimension; our own Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, is […]
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