Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a huge body of water around a black hole some 12 billion light years away. They say that it’s big enough to distribute the same amount of water we have here on Earth to 28 galaxies the size of the Milky Way, provided there are ten Earth-like planet in each of the galaxies’ 400 billion stars. That works out to 140 trillion Earths of water.
“It’s a Supermoon, dicknose!”
Tomorrow there will be a full moon, and it’s going to be the biggest one of the year. It’s one of those Supermoons. And it’ll be on May 5th, 2012 (5/5!!). Does this mean the Moon will grow so much that it will reverse the Earth’s magnetic poles, causing massive earthquakes and tsunamis which will then awaken the sleeping Mayan god Quetzalcoatl? And will Quetzalcoatl then destroy the world in accordance with the unwritten ancient prophecies? Probably!
That’s the kind of thing you get with Supermoons. At least that’s what happened last year during another supermoon, so we can probably expect it again.
Emily Lakdawalla is a former planetary geologist and current science writer for the Planetary Society blog. We talk about robots, space exploration, robots exploring space and other cool astronomy stuff.
Flat Earthers believe our planet looks something like this.
“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” -Thomas Paine
Last weekend my Twitter timeline blew up when Kirk Cameron showed up at CPAC to lecture at the attendees about creationism and the worldwide mad deadly evolution conspiracy. But the mocking wasn’t coming from scientists or secular activists who work at keeping religion out of science classrooms. Those people tend to not show up at events like CPAC. No, it was coming pretty much exclusively from liberal political activist bloggers and journalists. And not only that, it was also exclusively coming from bloggers and journalists who, as far as I could tell, have never once written about biological evolution or the fallacies involved in creationist arguments. I speculated that most of them have never even opened a text on evolution before.
Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestial Life (SETI) Institute and the author of such books as Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Lifeand Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We talk about SETI, its recent budget difficulties, and whether or not aliens are going to destroy us all in an act of mercy.
A few months back I wrote about some recent findings about an exoplanet called Corot-7b and added some of my own uninformed speculation on it. And now there’s a new paper for me to pretend I understand. Hooray!
This past weekend was SETIcon, a convention set up by the scientists who search for evidence of intelligent life on other worlds via radio. And at that convention, Seth Shostak said that he thought the chances of finding such life are “pretty high.” And he’s basing that on the Drake Equation. But the problem with trying to calculate that kind of probability is that most of the factors involved can vary wildly, literally astronomically. So you end up with estimates that vary even more wildly. From Space.com:
It’ just surprising this wasn’t written by Rick Sanchez:
It sounds like a Hollywood movie. An impending disaster — think the disabled spacecraft in “Apollo 13″ or the asteroid hurtling toward Earth in “Armageddon” — prompts a daring intervention by engineers to save the day. (more…)
So I went to see Neil deGrasse Tyson last night at UB. He spoke for about 2 hours, doing his normal talk about basic physics and astronomy, then did a pretty long Q&A afterwards.
At least not for life, that is.
CoRoT-7b is the first rocky exoplanet to be discovered. It’s only 480 light years away, which is about 2,821,740,179,128,132 miles.
OK, that’s kind of boring since all stars are really fucking far away. But Space.com is reporting some new interesting details about CoRoT-7b.
Atheist Hobos 