Comet of the Week: 17P/Holmes
Perihelion: 2007 May 4.50, q = 2.053 AU With the light pollution that is endemic to large metropolitan areas, it would seem difficult to believe that any significant astronomical observational activities could be conducted from cities like London these days. But things were different during the late 19th Century . . . On the evening of …
Special Topic: The Death of Comets
What happens to comets when they “die?” Our solar system has been around for 4.6 billion years, and, obviously, a large percentage of the comets that the solar system started off with are no longer with us. While many comets still remain in the reservoirs of the outer solar system, i.e., the Kuiper Belt and …
New NASA Posters Feature Cosmic Frights for Halloween
Depicting some of the Universe’s most mysterious astronomical phenomena with artistic flairs, NASA has released its latest Galaxy of Horrors posters just in time for Halloween. Presented in the style of vintage horror movie advertisements, the new posters feature a dead galaxy, an explosive gamma ray burst caused by colliding stellar corpses, and ever-elusive dark matter. …
Three reasons why black holes are the scariest things in the Universe
Halloween is a time to be haunted by ghosts, goblins and ghouls, but nothing in the Universe is scarier than a black hole. Black holes – regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape – are a hot topic in the news these days. Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in …
Check out these experiments on the International Space Station
Think of the International Space Station as a floating science lab that’s constantly conducting experiments. In most cases, NASA, the U.S. space agency, provides logistical support to international partners as they prioritize experiments, schedule them, deliver necessary materials to the station and receive results on Earth. U.S. astronauts and those from international partner countries conduct …
This Week in History: October 25-31
OCTOBER 25, 2020: Comet ATLAS C/2020 M3, discovered this past June 27 by the ATLAS survey in Hawaii, will pass through perihelion at a heliocentric distance of 1.268 AU. Comet ATLAS, which is a Halley-type object with an approximate orbital period of 139 years, has been unexpectedly bright (8th magnitude) lately, and may become even …