One of the most exciting things about the exoplanet hunt is that it isn't confined to huge observatories, nor does it demand bankrolling by billionaires. Consider the news that a team of professional and amateur astronomers has collaborated on a new planetary find,...
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Astronomical Breakups in the News
The sky seems to be full of interesting objects that are breaking apart. They're always worth studying, as we learned through the impacts of the famous 'string of pearls' comet -- Shoemaker-Levy 9 -- on Jupiter in 1994. For one thing, the celestial display they afford...
Kuiper Belt Worlds Under Scrutiny
"Santa," "Easterbunny," and "Xena" may be odd names, but they beat the official designations given these objects by the International Astronomical Union -- 2003 EL61, 2005 FY9, and 2003 UB313. All three are Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) discovered with the 48-inch Samuel...
New Data on Catastrophic Asteroid Impacts
The recent images from Cassini's flyby of Mimas remind us how violent the history of the early Solar System was. Now a study at the Australian National University shows that three huge asteroids -- between 20 and 50 kilometers across and traveling as a cluster --...
Fourth Planet Completes Pulsar System
If the name Alex Wolszczan (pronounced VOL-shtan) isn't immediately familiar, it may be because we've become so inured to new extrasolar planet discoveries that we've forgotten about the first. But it was Pennsylvania State University's Wolszczan who, in 1991, was the...
The Motivation for Deep Space
As promised earlier in the week, here is a snippet of Frederick Turner's "Worlds Without Ends" essay from 1996; more on what he means by the 'charm industries' in a later posting. I'm not aware of an online version of this piece, but it's well worth seeking out in...
Remembering ‘Far Centaurus’
Although it originally ran in the January, 1944 issue of Astounding, I first ran into A.E. Van Vogt's "Far Centaurus" in a collection of short stories called Destination: Universe (New York: Signet Books, 1952). It would be hard today to re-create the power of the...