I am epic and can find awesome revision games!
Venus - Sun Transit. The Shadow. Space.com.
Planet simulation game | Planet Simulation. What Would Happen If You Shot a Gun In Space? | Can Guns Fire In Space? | Can I Shoot a Gun in Space? Fires can't burn in the oxygen-free vacuum of space, but guns can shoot. Modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, a chemical that will trigger the explosion of gunpowder, and thus the firing of a bullet, wherever you are in the universe. No atmospheric oxygen required.
The only difference between pulling the trigger on Earth and in space is the shape of the resulting smoke trail. In space, "it would be an expanding sphere of smoke from the tip of the barrel," said Peter Schultz an astronomer at Brown University who researches impact craters. The possibility of gunfire in space allows for all kinds of absurd scenarios. Shooting stars Imagine you're floating freely in the vacuum between galaxies — just you, your gun and a single bullet. If you do the latter, Newton's third law dictates that the force exerted on the bullet will impart an equal and opposite force on the gun, and, because you're holding the gun, you.
Once shot, the bullet will keep going, quite literally, forever. Diversity of Exploding Stars Provides Cosmic Yardstick | Type 1a Supernovas & Standard Candles | Measuring the Universe. In universe spanning more than a billion light-years, distance can't be measured with a ruler. To judge how far away objects are, astronomers must rely on other objects whose properties are already known — such as certain kinds of exploding stars called supernova. New research is shedding light on the identity of one of these "standard candles," so-called because their brightness is standard enough that their true distance can be deduced from it.
Astronomers are hoping that analyzing one specific type of supernova explosion will give them a better understanding of how frequently it differs from another type. That, in turn, should allow for even more precise measurements of distance in the universe. One dwarf or two When a compact, dying star known as a white dwarf orbits another star closely enough, its strong gravitational pull can ultimately rip its partner apart. But the massive survivor can pack only so much material onto its surface. These events can be divided into two categories. Space.com. Giant Sunspot Unleashes Massive Solar Flare. A powerful solar flare that erupted Thursday (Nov. 3) from a huge blemish on the sun's surface has been classified as an X1.9 flare, ranking it among the most powerful types of storms our star can unleash. The flare originated in a humongous sunspot that was sighted earlier this week, which is one of the largest sunspots seen in years. The event began at 4:27 p.m. ET (2027 GMT).
The flare "triggered some disruption to radio communications on Earth beginning about 45 minutes later," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Scientists are continuing to watch this active region as it could well produce additional solar activity as it passes across the front of the sun. " NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin Stereo sun-watching spacecraft snapped photos and video of the huge solar flare during the solar storm. A flare is a powerful release of energy that brightens the sun, and is often associated with an area of increased magnetic activity on the solar surface. NASA Probe Discovers 'Alien' Matter From Beyond Our Solar System | NASA & IBEX Mission | The Solar System & Interstellar Space. This story was updated at 2:26 p.m. EST. For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy, researchers announced today (Jan. 31). This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth.
"This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of — it's really important to be measuring it," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a news briefing today from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. These atoms are remnants of older stars that have ended their lives in violent explosions, called supernovas, which dispersed the elements throughout the galaxy.
Weird World! 'Oozing' Alien Planet Is a Super-Earth Wonder | Exoplanets & 55 Cancri e | Super-Earths & Alien Planet Systems. A new look at an alien planet that orbits extremely close to its parent star suggests that the rocky world might not be a scorching hot wasteland, as was thought. In fact, the planet may actually be stranger and wetter than astronomers ever imagined. The exotic planet 55 Cancri e is a relatively close alien planet, just 40 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). The super-dense world circles so close to its host star that it takes a mere 18 hours to complete one orbital lap. Using our solar system for comparison, 55 Cancri e is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the sun, according to NASA officials. Because of its tight orbit around its stellar host, 55 Cancri e was long thought to harbor surface temperatures as high as 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2,700 degrees Celsius), researchers have said.
Super-hot Super-Earth Using Spitzer, researchers measured the faint dip in brightness caused by 55 Cancri e passing in front of its star. Alien Life May Depend on Planetary Tilt | Alien Planets & Solar Systems | Earth & Axial Tilt. Although winter now grips the Northern Hemisphere, those who dislike the cold weather can rest assured that warmer months shall return. This familiar pattern of spring, summer, fall and winter does more than merely provide variety, however. The fact that life can exist at all on Earth is closely tied to seasonality, which is a sign of global temperature moderation. The driver of our seasons is the slight "lean" Earth has in its rotational axis as it revolves around the sun, known as axial tilt or obliquity. According to René Heller, a postdoctoral research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, astrobiologists have not yet paid much attention to this variable in gauging the possibility for alien life to exist on distant planets.
"Obliquity and seasonal aspects are an important issue in understanding exoplanet habitability that has mostly been neglected so far," Heller said. On the other hand, terrestrial planets around sun-like stars fare much better. Transhuman. Tiny Invisible Galaxy May Be Made Completely of Dark Matter | Dwarf Satellite Galaxy Discovered | Dark Matter & Hidden Universe. Astronomers have discovered a small galaxy that is invisible to telescopes and may be completely composed of dark matter, which reflects no light.
The newfound galaxy is incredibly distant and extremely small. It orbits as a satellite of a larger galaxy. Though telescopes can't spot the dwarf galaxy, scientists detected its presence through the tiny distortions its gravity causes to light that passes it by. Scientists think dark matter, which may be made of some exotic particle that doesn't reflect light, makes up about 98 percent of all matter in the universe. Warped light The new dwarf galaxy is about 7 billion light-years away, meaning its light has taken 7 billion years to reach us here on Earth. "This is the lowest mass galaxy that we've seen at this distance by far," said study co-author Matthew Auger of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"It's a subtle effect that by eye you would tend not to see except from subtracting a model from the data," Auger told SPACE.com. Northern Lights Mystery May Be Solved | Earth Magnetosphere & Auroras | The Sun & Solar Wind. Scientists may have solved a longstanding mystery about the origin of the energetic particles that cause Earth's dramatic aurora displays. The electrons responsible for the auroras — also known as the northern and southern lights — are likely accelerated to incredible speeds in an active region of Earth's magnetosphere, according to a new study.
This region is 1,000 times larger than scientists had thought possible, providing enough volume to generate lots of the fast-moving electrons, the study reports. "People have been thinking this region is tiny," lead author Jan Egedal, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. But now, he added, "we’ve shown it can be very large, and can accelerate many electrons. " Egedal and his colleagues analyzed data gathered by various spacecraft, including the European Space Agency's four Cluster probes.
Kraken has 112,000 processors working in parallel. "It used to be people said this was a crazy idea," Egedal said. Venus - Sun Transit. Astronomy picture of the day. Brightest Galaxy Ever Seen With Gravity Lens Shines in Hubble Photo | Amazing Hubble Space Telescope Images | Stars, Galaxies & Gravitational Lenses. A fluke of astrophysics has revealed what scientists are calling the brightest galaxy ever seen through a cosmic "zoom lens," NASA officials say. The distant galaxy is 10 billion light-years from Earth and was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope using a so-called gravitational lens created by a massive cluster of closer galaxies located about 5 billion light-years away. The distant galaxy is three times brighter than any other seen through a gravity lens, researchers said. "This observation provides a unique opportunity to study the physical properties of a galaxy vigorously forming stars when the universe was only one-third its present age," NASA officials explained in a statement released Thursday (Feb. 2).
The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old. A gravitational lens is created when a massive object, like a black hole or galaxy cluster, falls in between an observer (like the Hubble telescope) and a more distant target in the background. The Accelerating Universe and Dark Energy Might Be Illusions | New Theory Saves Universe from Accelerating Expansion, Big Rip | Physics & Cosmology | Space.com. In 1929, cosmologists discovered that the universe is expanding that space-time, the fabric of the cosmos, is stretching. Then in 1998, light coming from exploding stars called supernovas suggested that the universe is not only expanding, but that it has recently begun expanding faster and faster; its expansion has entered an "accelerating phase.
" This was bad news for the fate of the cosmos: An accelerating universe is ultimately racing toward a "Big Rip," the moment at which its size will become infinite and, in a flash, everything in it will be torn apart. The discovery was bad news for the state of cosmology, too. Because gravity pulls stuff inward rather than pushing it out, cosmologists believed that the expansion of the universe ought to be slowing down, as everything in it felt the gravitational tug of everything else. Now, a new theory suggests that the accelerating expansion of the universe is merely an illusion, akin to a mirage in the desert.
Cruising through space-time. How Cold Is a Y Dwarf Star? Even You Are Warmer | Stars & Brown Dwarfs | NASA & WISE Mission. Scientists have discovered the coldest type of star-like bodies known, which at times can be cooler than the human body. Astronomers had unsuccessfully pursued these dark entities, called Y dwarfs, ever since their existence was theorized more than a decade ago. They are nearly impossible to see relying on visible light, but with the infrared vision of NASA's WISE space telescope, researchers finally detected the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years. Y dwarfs are the coldest members of star-like bodies known as brown dwarfs, which are odd objects sometimes known as failed stars. Brown dwarfs are too puny to force atoms to fuse together and release nuclear energy, and so they have only the little heat they were born with.
This heat fades over time until all the light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths. [Photos From NASA's WISE Telescope] So far, WISE has helped find 100 new brown dwarfs. The coldest "failed stars" 7 Surprising Things About the Universe | Big Bang, Expanding & Accelerating Universe | Dark Matter, Dark Energy & Multiverse. Comets Created Earth's Oceans, Study Concludes | Comets & Asteroids, Water in Space | Earth's Water & Life on Earth.
The dirty snowballs known as comets might be the sources of Earth's water after all, scientists say. Water is critical to life on Earth — life is found virtually wherever there is water on our planet. Researchers have spent decades debating where Earth's water and other key ingredients of life came from. Prior studies had suggested that early Earth was dry, lacking water and other so-called volatile materials.
Now Earth-like water has been discovered in the small oddball comet Hartley 2, which the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft flew by in November2010. This comet originated in the disk-shaped Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, suggesting this is ultimately where much of Earth's water came from. [Photos: Comet Hartley 2 Up Close] Measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory show that comet Hartley 2, which comes from the distant Kuiper Belt, contains water with the same chemical signature as water in Earth's oceans. Earth water from comets?
Could Blasts from Cosmic Collisions Destroy Life on Earth? | Gamma-Ray Bursts, Space Radiation & Earth Extinctions | Neutron Stars & Space Explosions. The persistence of life on Earth may depend on massive explosions on the other side of the galaxy, according to a new theory that suggests powerful bursts of space radiation could have played a part in some of our planet's major extinction events. The explosions — gamma-ray bursts thought to occur when two stars collide — can release tons of high-energy gamma-ray radiation into space.
The researchers found that such blasts could be contributing to the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer. Disruption of the ozone layer lets ultraviolet light filter down to the surface of the Earth, where it can change organisms by mutating their genes. Now, researchers are beginning to connect the timing of these gamma-ray bursts to extinctions on Earth that can be dated through the fossil record. The research will be presented Sunday (Oct. 9) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Minneapolis. Bursting out Life on Earth. Smiley Face on the Sun? New Video Shows All | Solar Dynamics Observatory & Sunspots | Solar Magnetic Activity Cycles & Sun Weather. Our sun is apparently a happy star according to the latest video from a NASA observatory. The video shows a pattern of sunspots that, when viewed from afar, forms a vast happy face smiling across face of the sun. Sunspots are darker, cooler patches on the sun caused when intense magnetic activity blocks heat convection.
These spots are normal, but they don't usually align to give the sun's face such character. The smile on the sun is visible through 11 photographs taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which images the sun from Earth orbit. Each picture was taken at the same time, but through a different filter that separated out a narrow wavelength band of light. These different temperatures correspond to different layers of the sun's atmosphere, starting with the sun's surface and gradually moving out to the sun's upper corona.
Magnetic activity on the sun generally follows an 11-year cycle of waxing and waning. Earth Magnetic Field. Planetary Transits Page. Transit of Mercury on 1973 Nov 10. The transit or passage of a planet across the disk of the Sun may be thought of as a special kind of eclipse. As seen from Earth, only transits of the inner planets Mercury and Venus are possible. Planetary transits are far more rare than eclipses of the Sun by the Moon. On the average, there are 13 transits of Mercury each century. At the present time, all transits of Mercury fall within several days of May 08 and November 10. To determine whether a transit of Mercury is visible from a specific geographic location, it is simply a matter of calculating the Sun's altitude and azimuth during each phase of the transit using information tabulated in the Seven Century Catalog of Mercury Transit.
In 1716, Edmond Halley published a paper describing exactly how transits could be used to measure the Sun's distance, thereby establishing the absolute scale of the solar system from Kepler's third law. Maor, Eli. The Strangest Alien Planets | Exoplanets & Extrasolar Planets, Solar System & Universe Space Exploration. Physics Simulation Game | Powder Game. Bose–Einstein condensate. What Is a Black Hole? Earth Magnetic Field. Black hole. Super Smash Bros. Pokemon. Kirby. Metroid. Mario. The Legend Of Zelda. Quantum mechanics/physics/theory. The Higgs boson. Dark Matter & Dark Energy.
Gasland/Fracking. Nikola Tesla. GMO FOODS. Google Search 3T. Lasers. LEGO NXT.