Solar Flare Activity Prompting NASA to Convene a News Briefing Thursday in Washington
Increasing solar activity and the threat that coronal mass ejections (CME) pose to Earth has prompted NASA to convene a news briefing at its Headquarter building in Washington on Thursday afternoon. Thursday’s briefing has been arranged, space agency officials say, in light of new information coming from NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), spacecraft and [...]
Solar Storms are Brewing, Possibility of Electrical Grid Failure
Storms are brewing about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, and if one of them reaches Earth, it could knock out communications, scramble GPS, and leave thousands without power for weeks to months. The tempest is what’s known as a solar storm, a flurry of charged particles that erupts from the sun. Under the [...]
Massive Sunspot 1263 Forms-Wider than the Earth!
Double sunspot 1263 is a whopper. Its two dark cores are each wider than Earth, and the entire region stretches more than 65,000 km from end to end. Yesterday in the Netherlands, Emil Kraaikamp took advantage of a break in the clouds and “a few moments of steady air” to capture this magnificent photo: “To [...]
Giant Asteroid to ‘Narrowly Miss’ Earth Monday
A newly discovered asteroid the size of an office block will narrowly miss the Earth on Monday - coming 23 times closer than the moon. The space rock will reach within 11,000 miles of the its surface and give off a light bright enough to be seen through a small telescope, experts said today. It [...]
U.S., Russia Fight Over Asteroid That Could Destroy Earth
BARELY two weeks after the failure of a doomsday prediction by a United States (U.S.) based preacher, Russia and U.S. scientists are at war over another perceived threat to human existence. The danger this time is not an apocalyptic occurrence, but the smacking of the Earth by a giant asteroid in five months time. The [...]
Astronomers Find New Massive Superstar
An international team of astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to carefully study the star VFTS 682 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way. By analysing the star’s light, using the FLAMES instrument on the VLT, they have found that it is about 150 times the mass of [...]
Discovery Rips Apart Comet Elenin Conspiracy
It’s nearly 300 million miles away and barreling toward us. The intruder from deep space, called called comet Elenin, crosses Earth’s orbit on its inbound leg and again on its outbound swing around the sun later this year. Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin discovered the innocuous little comet on Dec. 10, 2010, at International Scientific Optical [...]
NASA Will Lauch the Pope into Space
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA announced that Pope Benedict XVI will be on the next Space Shuttle. Speaking from the Vatican, the pontiff bestowed a historic blessing upon the 12 astronauts circling Earth during the first-ever papal call to space, wishing a swift recovery for the shuttle commander’s wounded congresswoman wife and condolences for a [...]
