After completing a rigorous, detailed worldwide survey of candidate astronomical sites for the Thirty-Meter Telescope, the TMT Observatory Corporation board of directors is now considering two optional sites, one in each hemisphere. The first site is Cerro Armazones, which lies ...
One Ticket to Space, Please
A small California-based private aerospace company, called “XCOR Aerospace”, has announced the development of what could be the first “consumer-oriented” suborbital spaceship. According to the company, the aircraft, which was named “LYNX”, is scheduled to be launched in just two ...
Swift Catches Exploding Star
NASA’s scientists recently used the Swift Satellite in order to see a star explode and become a supernova. Although over the past 100 years astronomers have observed thousands of supernovas, every time it was seen, it was only after the ...
The Phoenix Has Landed
Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the “Phoenix Mars Lander” touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving ...
Next Extinction Coming Soon?
Scientists from the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology have developed a model showing that our solar system goes through the plane of the galaxy every 35-40 million years. This is accompanied by comets hurtling into the inner solar system, coinciding with ...
Illogical Secret of Superconductors Discovered
A research conducted at Princeton University has uncovered part of the mechanism that transforms matter into a high-temperature superconductor – a medium that conducts electricity without resistance-related energy loss. This mechanism, which has eluded scientists for over 20 years, seems ...
Black Hole Sheds Light on a Galaxy
An international team has observed the light echo of an enormous X-ray flare, which was apparently produced when a single star was disrupted by a super-massive black hole. The importance of this observation is that it offers researchers a new ...
Gun Stops Bullets in Mid-Air
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have built a “coilgun” that works in reverse, stopping atom-sized and molecule-sized ‘bullets’ in mid-flight. Coilguns have been a standard feature in science fiction books and movies, and decades of military research ...
Black Hole’s Secrets Revealed
Many galaxies have super-massive black holes at their core, which expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s very long baseline array, scientists recently confirmed the leading theory, according to which ...
How the Peruvian Meteorite Made It to Earth
Professor Peter Schultz, an expert in extraterrestrial impacts from Brown University, has come to interesting conclusions that could upend the conventional wisdom about the size and type of meteorites that can strike Earth. His recent findings regarding the meteorite that ...