This week in space

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Aliens hanging out in the Kuiper Belt? We could see the light from their cities

Well, we can see out to the Kuiper belt, so now we need to see out a few lightyears!

When it comes to searching for ET, current efforts have been almost exclusively placed in picking up a radio signal – just a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Consider for a moment just how much lighting we here on Earth produce and how our “night side” might appear as viewed from a telescope on another planet. If we can assume that alternate civilizations would evolve enjoying their natural lighting, wouldn’t it be plausible to also assume they might develop artificial lighting sources as well?

Read more HERE

 

ASU cosmologist suggests studying moon for alien artifacts

We've already discovered plenty of alien artifacts on the moon, they just don't tell us about them.

If you were part of a team sent to explore an unknown planet; and that planet had a natural orbiting moon, wouldn’t it make sense to use that moon as a base camp or remote observation post? Especially if you didn’t want those being observed to know you were there? Professor Paul Davis and research technician Robert Wagner think so, and that’s why they’ve published a paper in Acta Astronautica that suggests we humans begin taking a little closer look at our own moon to see if any alien life forms might have left behind some evidence of their visit.

Read more HERE

 

What if the earth had two moons?

I don't have much to say about this one, just read it. It's interesting.

The idea of an Earth with two moons has been a science fiction staple for decades. More recently, real possibilities of an Earth with two moon have popped up. The properties of the Moon’s far side has many scientists thinking that another moon used to orbit the Earth before smashing in to the Moon and becoming part of its mass. Since 2006, astronomers have been tracking smaller secondary moons that our own Earth-Moon system captures; these metre-wide moons stay for a few months then leave.

Read more HERE

 

Can Earth-sized planets survive their star's expansion?

See we really don't know what we are talking about when we throw how ideas on how things work in space. We've got a lot to learn, I wish a much older race would stop by and give us all their space science... no other tech, just their knowledge of space.

Two Earth-sized planets have been discovered circling a dying star that has passed the red giant stage. Because of their close orbits, the planets must have been engulfed by their star while it swelled up to many times its original size.

Read more HERE

 

WISE presents a cosmic wreath

This is just a beautiful one (I actually have two this week) for you to enjoy.

Just in time for the holidays, astronomers have come across a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, that some say resembles a wreath. You might even think of the red dust cloud as a cheery red bow, and the bluish-white stars as silver bells.

Read more HERE

 

A 'Rose' made of galaxies

Here is the second beautiful one for you, enjoy!

In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble's eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273.

Read more HERE

 

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed

One of these days we will find out about alien contact this way. "Oh well, we formed an alliance xx decades ago and we've been keeping their secret as per their request until a certain time" or something like that...

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

Read more HERE

 

Three More Wins for Gun Owners

H.R. 2055—the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012—has been passed by the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and has been sent to the President for his expected signature.  This bill contains three NRA-backed provisions that will strengthen our Second Amendment rights and prohibit your federal tax dollars from being used to advance an anti-gun agenda.

 

 Rumor Alert: Appropriations Bill Blocks New Shotgun Ban—Does Not Repeal “Sporting Purposes” Test:  This year, NRA-ILA worked with pro-gun legislators to include a provision in the 2012 Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations legislation to help prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from banning the importation of shotguns that are currently legally imported.  That legislation was a part of a consolidated appropriations bill that Congress passed to fund major portions of the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2012.

Firearm Accident Fatalities at an All-Time Low:  Data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2008, the number and per capita rate of firearm accident deaths fell to an all-time low. There were 592 firearm accident deaths (0.19 such accidents per 100,000 population) in 2008, as compared to 613 accidents (.20 per 100,000) in 2007. In 2008, the chance of a child dying in a firearm accident was roughly one in a million.

List of Congressmen Calling for Holder’s Resignation Continues to Grow:  Attorney General Eric Holder remains embroiled in controversy over the highly publicized and ill-fated “Operation Fast and Furious.” 

This week in space: special post

in

Earth Has a Second Moon, Astronomers Say

In a research paper called "The population of natural Earth satellites", astronomers say that Earth has a second moon at any given time. While these moons are small, the scientific implications of this discovery are phenomenal.

Think about it: instead of having to send crews to asteroids, now we know that they come to us—they orbit Earth and we can intercept them to learn more about the origins of our solar system. All with a small price tag.

 

Interesting, however how do they know it wasn't an ET craft?

Read more HERE

Mother ship detected near Mercury after a solar flare revealed it.

 

 

"A gigantic object the size of a planet has appeared on astronomers screens lurking near Mercury, with UFO hunters around the world wondering whether it’s an alien ship.

The object appears from nowhere in a sequence of images of a coronal ejection from the Sun, taken by a Nasa telescope.

As the flare races past Mercury, a huge round object appears next to it – but Nasa scientists insist that the object is merely a result of the way the images are processed."

 

The image from the telescope was analysed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, with engineer Nathan Rich explaining that the ‘object’ is actually the image of Mercury from the previous day.

To make sure that the solar flare stood out, researchers compare the image with one taken the day before and subtract anything that appears twice – because that means it’s interfering background light.

Stars are easily eliminated, but moving objects, like planets, are more difficult to remove.

Rich told Space.com: ‘When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.’

Astronomer Dr Heather Couper also agrees that it’s not a huge death star.

 

AWESOME. Absolutely AWESOME.

 

Read more about it HERE, HERE and HERE

 

 

 

An impressive girl spins some words

To geek or not to geek--there is no question:
Whether 'tis Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
on the Enterprise's five year mission to boldly go
Or to take arms against the Galactic Empire
and by Rebelling, end them. To beam, to warp--
And more--and with a towel to say we end
The panic, and the infinite improbability drive
That The Heart of Gold is heir to. 'Tis a fiction
scientifically to be wished. To beam, to warp--
To warp --perchance in space: ay, there's the Macguffin,
For in that Twilight Zone what twist may come
When we have shuffled off this Outer Limit,
Must give us cause. Where's the Doctor
Who makes calamity of so long life?
For who would bear the daleck battle cry,
Th' Silence oppressor, the weeping angels
The pangs of dimensional love, the loss of Gallifrey,
The insolence of Cybermen, and the sadness
That patient merit of th' too worthy takes,
When he himself must her memory make
A void and forget her purpose? Who would fez's bear,
To wear a bowtie inside a large blue box,
But that the dread of The Boy Who Lived,
The Good Omens, from whose bourn
No Postman returns, puzzles the Apocalypse,
And makes us rather troll those friends we have
Than make memes for those we know not of?
Thus minecraft does make junkies of us all,
And thus the native Bat of vigilance
Is watching o'er Gotham as laughing echoes die,
And Aquarians of great pitch and moment
In this regard their currents turn to geek
And take up searching for the Higgs. -- Soft you now,
and blame Canada.

I did not write this, "Someone Different" is the author. I had to share it.