Space
Space includes outer space, the sun and planets in the solar system
50 Facts for the 50th Anniversary of the First Man in Space
1 ) Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space in Vostok 1 on the morning of April 12, 1961, 50 years ago today.2 ) He was a 27-year-old military pilot.3 ) He and his family were thrown out of their house by the Germans during World War II.4 ) They had to live in a dugout in the garden.5 ) Gaga...
April 12, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Meet Earth’s New Companion Asteroid
Name? 2010 SO16Discovered? In images from the WISE infrared survey satellite, launched in 2009.Orbit? Very Earth-like, say it's discoverers, Apostolos Christou and David Asher, of Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, who report their finding in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Socie...
April 07, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Something New Under the Sun
Scientists are probing deep beneath the surface of our nearest star to calculate its profound effect on Earth
April 2011 |
By Robert Irion
Help Scientists Track Light Pollution By Looking At the Stars
In my neighborhood, some of the street lamps aim their light directly down on the sidewalk and road. Others spew their illumination in a sphere of light, wasting it as it streams into the sky. All those poorly aimed lights add up to 17 billion kilowatt-hours of lost energy each year, costing us aro...
March 21, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Neutron Star May Have Superfluid at Its Core
The light from an exploding star traveled for more than 10,000 years across the galaxy before it reached the Earth some 330 years ago. (No one noticed it at the time or, at least, no one wrote it down.) Named for the constellation in which it appears, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was once thought...
March 11, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Why the Sun Was So Quiet for So Long
Our Sun goes through cycles of activity on average every 11 years. At the height of a cycle, the Sun is a busy place, with flares, eruptions and sunspots. At its lowest point, the Sun is quiet. That quiet period usually lasts for about 300 days, but the last solar minimum stretched for 780 days fro...
March 03, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Brilliant Space Photos From Chandra and Spitzer
Two unsung space telescopes create eye-opening images of the universe from light we can't see
February 2011 |
By Abigail Tucker
Edgar Allan Poe and the World of Astronomy
I've read my share of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but I was nonetheless intrigued by a caption in an article in the latest Smithsonian special issue, Mysteries of the Universe. It read: "The hollow Earth theory inspired authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Edgar Allan Poe." I knew that Poe, l...
January 19, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
NASA Picks Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies. What Are Yours?
Scientists attending a recent meeting at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory picked their top seven worst and best science fiction movies of all time. Their lists (clips can be seen here):The Worst:1) 2012 (2009): Neutrinos from a solar flare heat up the Earth's core, setting off the end of life as w...
January 06, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Year in Science: A List of Lists
It's the end of the year, so you know what that means—it's time for the parade of "year in review" articles. Start with Smithsonian.com's Top 10 Stories of 2010, which features lots of science, and then move on to these others:* Discover magazine picked the top 100 stories of 2010 (and my brother w...
December 29, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Will Happen When We Find Alien Life?
No one knows when, or even if, we will discover alien life in the universe or what it might look like. But that hasn't stopped those who are looking from planning on that eventuality, as I discovered when reporting "Ready for Contact," one of the stories in Smithsonian's new special issue, Mysterie...
December 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Moon That Might Have Had Its Own Moon
Saturn's moon Iapetus is just weird. When Giovanni Cassini discovered the moon in 1671, he found that he could see Iapetus only when it was on the west side of the planet; the moon, it turns out, is much darker on one side than the other and is tidally locked with Saturn so that one side always fac...
December 14, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Glorious Sun: An Idea for Christmas Ornaments
I was looking at images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the latest satellite to study our star, and was struck by their beauty. SDO records the Sun in several wavelengths, producing gorgeous images of its ever-changing surface. And then I had a great idea: wouldn't these make fabulous ornam...
December 10, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Ready for Contact
Humans have searched for extraterrestrial life for more than a century. What will we do when we find it?
December 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Caroline Herschel: Assistant or Astronomer?
After a recent visit to the National Air and Space Museum's "Explore the Universe" exhibit, a local astronomy post-doc, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, wrote the following about one of the displays:magine my dismay when I got to the section about Caroline and William Herschel, a sister-brother team of a...
December 08, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
More Stars in the Universe
There may be as many as three times more stars in the universe as astronomers previously though, according to new study published by Nature.Pieter G. van Dokkum of Yale University and Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics looked for red dwarf stars—which are about 10 to ...
December 02, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Who Would You Send on a One-Way Trip to Mars?
Here's something to ponder over Thanksgiving dinner: who among your fellow diners would you send on a one-way trip to Mars? Or would you choose to go yourself and leave all you know behind for an uncertain future as a bold explorer?Two scientists, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington St...
November 23, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Stars on the Move
Two thousand years ago Ptolemy listed Omega Centauri in his catalogue of stars. In 1677, Edmund Halley (of comet fame) named it a nebula. But we now know that Omega Centauri is actually a globular cluster, a swarm of almost 10 million stars that all orbit around a common point. (That point may be a...
November 05, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week: The Witch Head Nebula
The Witch Head Nebula—formally named IC 2118—sits in the constellation Orion about 1,000 light years from Earth. (In case you're having a hard time seeing the witch, her face is in profile facing to the right.) That bright blue star in the center of the image is Rigel, Orion's brightest star and th...
October 29, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Georgian Planet: A Case of Clever Marketing
On March 31, 1781, William Herschel, a German musician and composer, looked through a homemade 7-foot-long telescope in his back garden in Bath, England and saw something odd. He thought it was a comet, but it didn't act quite like other comets. And when scientists of the time calculated the object...
October 26, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
