Coolest Science Videos of the Day

By on Dec 8, 2012 in Video | 0 comments

Here are the Coolest Science Videos of the day:   The first one was shown to me by my favorite @BadAstronomer or Phil Plait. This is a video by a young guy in London. His videos are fun and random and it’s hard not to enjoy them.  Check this out:     Also the picture of Saturn’s eclipse he was talking about. You can even see Earth in the background photo bombing the picture haha. Click to enlarge! Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_eclipse.jpg   This next video is for anyone who wants 1.5 hours of official Apollo footage. Check it here: http://www.dvidshub.net/unit/NASA#.UMOE2ZPjnvZ   Last but not least I couldn’t help but post this awesome Carl Sagan video that recently popped up. It’s done with some great animation. Short but sweet.   Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo....

NASA on Comets that Can Survive the Sun

By on Dec 7, 2012 in Video | 0 comments

Comets are extraordinary, so extraordinary in fact that some comets can survive the sun! Most sun grazing comets that we have observed don’t survive grazing the sun. However, observations by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) we can actually SEE comet Lovejoy survive! This comet was discovered last year by Terry Lovejoy an amateur Australian astronomer who was observing during an ongoing comet survey in November 2011. Now check this video out:

Golden Spike Announces Commercial Trip to the Moon for… $1.5 billion

By on Dec 6, 2012 in Breaking News | 0 comments

Credit: Golden Spike Company   Well you may or may have not heard the news today. The Golden Spike announced that it would be offering a trip to the moon aimed for 2020. Why do we care even though last time we were on the moon was in 1972? Well it’s that very fact that we haven’t been back to the moon in 40 years! Obviously this isn’t for any regular joe like you or I. This is aimed at the rich and powerful leaders who can afford this. Nonetheless it’s a step in the right direction to me. It’s always risky offering commercial space flight because it’s so high in cost as well as how many people can you really get on board with this? Well here is a promotional video they released to go along with this.     I am really excited about this because to me it means we are thinking more about space and that hopefully it is inspiring someone who...

Taking Some Pictures of Jupiter and Betelgeuse

By on Dec 5, 2012 in Pictures | 0 comments

Have you seen Jupiter or Beteleguese in the night sky? Well I went out to take pictures of Jupiter and Betelgeuse in the night sky. I live in Maple, ON or where Canada’s wonderland is. The light pollution is still pretty bad I even had to darken the photo and then make the temperature cooler so that you could see the stars better. I just wanted to point out one star in particular Betelgeuse.   Click the image to get a better look!   So hopefully you can see the comparison of the two. One I took of course and the other is from a free program I use on my Mac called Stellarium. You can see the cross in picture  near the roof of the house that I took and you can compare it with this second one. Betelgeuse is on the left end of the cross. What’s so crazy about Betelgeuse is REALLY BIG. If it were in our solar system it would go PAST Jupiter! Now we know that from the...

Spectacular Jets of a Supermassive Black Hole

By on Dec 4, 2012 in Pictures | 0 comments

Source: Hubblesite.org   This is a picture of a supermassive black hole located in Hercules A. You can see the two extremely large jets shooting out from the core of the black hole. This galaxy is located 2.1 billion light years away and also 1000 times the mass of our own milky way. The jets themselves are about 1 and half million light years long! It’s quite a beauty to look at even though we’ll never ever get there, it’s great to at least appreciate these images in the wild.     Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/98729/gigantic-plasma-jets-pour-from-the-heart-of-hercules-a/  

Recent Flyby of Titan by Cassini

By on Dec 3, 2012 in Pictures | 0 comments

Titan’s South Pole   Titan is one of the only moon’s in our solar system that has an atmosphere. It’s amazing what they saw on the recent flyby of Titan. What they recently discovered is a swirling vortex of gas forming over the moon’s south pole. They say it’s a result of the upcoming winter for Titan. Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/96209/cassini-spots-surprising-swirls-above-titans-south-pole/#ixzz2DzhVlnkA   Here is an animation of that south pole:   Titan itself  

Biggest Supermassive Black Hole and Most Unusual Discovered

By on Dec 1, 2012 in Astonishing Discoveries | 0 comments

Credit: NASA/ESA/Andrew C. Fabian The biggest supermassive black hole was recently discovered by astronomers thus far. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory astronomers have discovered this beast, located in the constellation Perseus,  to have a mass of 17 billion solar masses! A solar mass is the mass of our own Sun. So you can almost imagine how dense and heavy this supermassive black hole is. Now what makes this even more unusual is how much of the galaxies mass it has inside. Now to give you a little context astronomers have only measured the weight of about 100 or less black holes. So that data isn’t exactly all there but what the norm has been is that a typical black hole usually consists of 0.1% of a galaxy’s mass. However this behemoth has 14% of it’s galaxy’s mass! You can imagine how extreme...

Have You Seen a Picture of a Supernova?

By on Nov 29, 2012 in Supernova | 0 comments

Supernovas are probably one of the coolest events that happen in our universe. It’s just amazing of the sheer amount of energy these death machines put out. I came across a famous supernova called Supernova 1987A. As I researched the story behind it I gained a lot of appreciation for supernovas and how incredibly hard it is to catch one in the act. Before I move on to the story let me just give you an overview of what a supernova is exactly. Well a supernova depends on a few factors first actually. One of them being the size of the star. Our own Sun for example will not go supernova at the end of it’s life (you have around 5 billion years or so until that happens) because the size of it is too small. A star would have to be several times the size of that to actually go supernova. There are also two types of ways a star can go supernova: Type I – a star accumulates...