Astronomy

Astronomers have found the first Earth-sized exoplanet within a star's habitable zone. The planet is the closest thing yet to the coveted 'Goldilocks' orb that scientists have long sought — a world roughly the size of Earth orbiting a star at a distance that is just right for liquid water to exist.

"We definitely think it's one step closer to finding a true Sun–Earth analogue," says study co-author Elisa Quintana, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and at the nearby NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field. But because the star that the exoplanet orbits is a cool, dim one unlike the Sun, Quintana and her colleagues consider the planet more of a cousin to Earth than a twin.

Rabe formed in an instant when a large rock slammed into the surface of Mars long ago. It may have started as a normal, if large, impact crater, but things change. The cause of the flat floor isn't well known, but likely due to volcanic deposits filling it, plus material blown in over time.

Actually, that last bit is very important. Mars has an atmosphere, though a thin one, pushing down with less than 1% of the pressure on the surface as Earth's air does here. But it's enough.

The pictures were snapped with the two infrared channels that still work at Spitzer's still-quite-chilly temperature of 30 Kelvin (about minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit). The two infrared channels are part of Spitzer's infrared array camera: 3.6-micron light is blue and 4.5-micron light is orange.

One evening when cloudy weather put a halt to his astronomy research, Harvard Ph.D. student Alex Parker was inspired to get creative -- so he uploaded the top 100 images from the Hubble telescope into a mosaic-making program and recreated Van Gogh's iconic 1889 painting.

No big deal.

Want more? This guy recreated Starry Night from door knobs.

This is an approximate true color image of Titan's haze layers, taken by Cassini's Imaging Science Subsystem during Cassini's 91st encounter with Titan on April 5, 2013.

The same phenomenon that causes a bumpy airplane ride, turbulence, may be the solution to a long-standing mystery about stars' birth, or the absence of it, according to a new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe, held together by gravity. These behemoths contain hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies that are immersed in gas with temperatures of millions of degrees.

This hot gas, which is the heftiest component of the galaxy clusters aside from unseen dark matter, glows brightly in X-ray light detected by Chandra. Over time, the gas in the centers of these clusters should cool enough that stars form at prodigious rates. However, this is not what astronomers have observed in many galaxy clusters.

1925 - what were you doing on h'alloween 1925- i had tickets to a houdini show at the moulin rouge but missed it because i was on the titanic hanging out with the cast of downton abbey. #history

1944 - although i can't find a source for this, several well-respected war historians have told me that for hal'loween 1944, hitler dressed up as a sexy pumpkin

1955 - in 1955, dwight eisenhower was president of the united states

1974 - this was the only time in at least 1,000, years that hallowe'en, a full moon, and friday the 13th all coincided ON THE SAME DAY!!!

2020 - this is the biggest gap between halloween full moons (almost 46 years)

2039 - if you plan on trick-or-treating on this day in 25 years, watch out for werewolves and/or weremice (bats) because the full moon activates their powers

2058 - the full moon on 10/31/2058 will mark the start of armageddon which will conclude on november 5th of the same year

2077 - here is a good costume idea for 2077: a witch who is part robot

2096 - it is said that 'halloween 2096 may not happen because of global warming. it's up to you to do what's right for mother earth.