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Tag Archives: blog8
Messenger’s Last Legs
The MESSENGER mission, short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging sent up the probe in August 2004. In March 2011 it became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The probe has done a lot in its years around the Solar System’s first planet including: constructing the best-ever maps of Mercury and discovering carbon-containing […]
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Gamma-ray Bursts
Let’s start this post with what gets everyone’s attention during class: mass extinction. This somber topic always seems to turn heads. If collisions and exploding suns aren’t enough to make you fear extinction billions of years away, a new paper introduces us to a new threat that potentially could have wiped out most of life […]
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The Mystery of the Mass Extinction
Before reading the section in Chapter 12 of the textbook on cosmic collisions (Section 12.4), I had not realized that there exists some controversy as to whether or not an impact killed the dinosaurs. I had always been taught that an asteroid hitting the Earth resulted in the mass extinction and had never considered that […]
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Posted in Historical
Tagged asteroids, astro201, blog8, Comets, Dinosaurs, impactors, massextinction
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What would life be like on Pluto for humans?
photo from space.com Above is an artist’s conception of what Pluto would look like if one could stand on one of the dwarf planet’s moons and stare back at Pluto. But this article goes on to tell us what our experiences would be if we were to actually step foot on the surface of Pluto […]
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Posted in Dwarf Planets, Space Travel
Tagged astro201, blog8, pluto, Solar System
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Searching for intelligent life
Humans have always fascinated themselves with the idea that maybe we aren’t so alone in the universe. We have made efforts to find extraterrestrials and so far turned up nothing. Is there any hope for them finding us first? A number of organized attempts have been made to let “others” know that we exist. The […]
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Voyager 2
Almost all of the information and pictures scientists have today from the outer planets is due to flyby missions such as NASA’s Voyager 2. As we learned in the last unit, flyby space probes are especially helpful because they can pass by and gather information on multiple planets within one single mission, and that is… Continue reading Voyager 2
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Posted in Space Travel
Tagged astro201, blog8, mission, Solar System, voyager2
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White dwarf supernovae
White dwarf supernovae only occur in a binary system, in which one of them is a white dwarf while the other can be a giant star or just a main sequence star. As far as we know, a white dwarf is the remnant of a star after the nuclear fusion inside its core has ceased,…
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Predicting Impact Events
In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 created a large impact event on Jupiter, giving the scientific community a greater sense of urgency in detecting possible impact objects before they reached Earth. These efforts to detect near-Earth objects, known collectively as “Spaceguard”, have enjoyed both successes and failures. For example, in 2008, the Catalina Sky Survey discovered … Continue reading Predicting Impact Events →
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Predicting Impact Events
In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 created a large impact event on Jupiter, giving the scientific community a greater sense of urgency in detecting possible impact objects before they reached Earth. These efforts to detect near-Earth objects, known collectively as “Spaceguard”, have enjoyed both successes and failures. For example, in 2008, the Catalina Sky Survey discovered … Continue reading Predicting Impact Events → Continue reading
Exoplanets: Planets Not Orbiting the Sun
Hey there! Today I’m going to be discussing the topic. The definition of an Exoplanet is a planet which orbits a star (or stellar remnant or brown dwarf) which is not the Sun. Thus far, over 1900 exoplanets have been discovered. 480 of these exoplanets are confirmed to exist in multi-planet systems. These planets are […]
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Posted in Class, Exoplanets
Tagged astro201, blog8
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