Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Drake Equation, revisited

Posted on April 29, 2013 by astrdylan

The Drake Equation, as we’ve discussed in class in the most recent unit, is a formula intended to project an estimate of how many intelligent societies could exist in the universe. The formula multiplies a series of interdependent variables–the rate of formation of Sun-like stars, the number of planets in a habitable zone per solar … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Earth like Planets

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Elizabeth Merriman

It is interesting to think about the existence of extrasolar planets. Now that we are starting to find a lot of giants, the new thing is finding Earth like planets. Recently, Kepler has found three Earth-like planets. I am anxious … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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New Discoveries: The New Age of Astronomy

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

This picture compares the inner planets of our solar system to Kepler-62, a newly discovered planetary system NASA’s Kepler mission has recently discovered three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” or the range of distances form a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water.  It is planets like these […] Continue reading →

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Impacts on Saturn and the Drake equation

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed meteors colliding with Saturn’s thin rings.  This marked the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings, although astronomers already expected this to be occurring regularly.  However, specific details of such impacts were merely speculation, much of which is cleared up via […] Continue reading →

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Miller-Urey experiment

Posted on April 29, 2013 by YanruChen

One of the most mysterious questions of human beings is that: how did life come to existence? Where did first trace of life come from? One hypothesis is that conditions and elements on early Earth gave rise to the first single-cell organism. To testify this hypothesis, chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey animated the conditions […] Continue reading →

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Astronomy201: Reflection and Take Away

Posted on April 29, 2013 by jacksonlangham

The best part about this class has been the breadth of knowledge I have accumulated. We tend not to go too far into any one subject, but we cover enough […] Continue reading →

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We are so unbelievably tiny!

Posted on April 29, 2013 by zoodrey

above is a photo of what one artist pictures the Milky Way to look like. I googled “What the Earth looks like in the Milky Way” to see a range of ideas and predictions that currently exist. The Google Image results got me thinking. We are absurdly small. The Sun is massive compared to us, … Continue reading » Continue reading →

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The End of an Era

Posted on April 29, 2013 by theskyisbeautifultonight

Or, more accurately, the end of a semester.  I’ve had a lot of fun blogging for this class, and I’ve learned a lot about that vast expanse above our heads known as the cosmos.  One of the most important things I’ve learned, I think, is the vastness of space.  Even in our solar system, planets […] Continue reading →

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Origins Of Life

Posted on April 29, 2013 by jacksonlangham

Two scientists, Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon, have plotted the genome size of different kinds of organisms against their presumed date of origin. They only had five data points, but […] Continue reading →

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11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Posted on April 29, 2013 by zoodrey

The Fermi Paradox is the current contradiction between the estimates about the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and our current lack of proof and interaction with such a civilization. According to Wikipedia’s page on the Fermi Paradox, Fermi argues that The Sun is a young star and here are billions of stars in our galaxy that are more … Continue reading » Continue reading →

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