Tag Archives: blog8

Orbital Resonance and the Asteroid Belt

Posted on April 10, 2013 by gerretyc

Why is it that all of the matter in the inner solar system accreted to form planets, while in between Mars and Jupiter there is still a bunch of stuff […] Continue reading →

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Social Astronomy!

Posted on April 10, 2013 by sharpew

I am always interested in new ways that information, ideas and stories can be shared or exchanged online. I love all forms of social media including blogs, tumblr, twitter, google plus, you name it. It always helps me learn a new concept if I have a variety of ways to interact with the subject, like […] Continue reading →

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A Sea of Metal

Posted on April 10, 2013 by michaelglindsay

Jupiter’s Composition Jupiter freaks me out. It is huge, big enough to greatly affect the path of any smaller body that is unfortunate enough to cross its path, with potentially adversarial results for Earth. Even more so is its composition. Should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself on a ship heading towards where the […] Continue reading →

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A Comet Heads For Mars

Posted on April 10, 2013 by jacksonlangham

NASA has discovered that there is “small but non-negligible” chance that Comet 2013 A1 will strike Mars in October of 2014. The comet is between 1 to 3 kilometers in […] Continue reading →

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A Breakthrough in Space Travel

Posted on April 10, 2013 by AlanL

There is currently a project underway which aims to send astronauts in a fusion powered spacecraft to Mars and cutting the travel time to just 30 days round trip. Using existing rocket fuels it would take at least 4 years to travel the same round trip and would cost more than $12 billion. Using this […] Continue reading →

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Binary (Double Star) Systems

Posted on April 10, 2013 by marknshirleyvu

If you’ve ever seen any kind of sci-fi movie, I’m sure you’ve seen an example of a binary star system.  Countless space movies (most notably Star Wars) feature an alien sky with more than one Sun.  While the effect is usually dramatized in film, these binary star systems are in fact very real. A binary […] Continue reading →

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Comets

Posted on April 10, 2013 by jhughes216

Near Earth Experience The snowballs of the universe, comets are amazing bodies of ice and rock orbiting a star from a great distance. In our own solar system, these balls of ice mostly inhabit an area known as the Oort Cloud. This outer region surrounds our solar system from all different directions. Because the cloud […] Continue reading →

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M-theory Might Explain Everything

Posted on April 9, 2013 by surujdeka

Have you ever thought about the Big Bang? And what might have happened before it? If you have come to blindly accept the widely accepted theory about how our universe was created, you might have missed the various loopholes the theory presents. For instance, the Big Bang theory states that before the huge explosion took […] Continue reading →

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Neutrinos and Other Strange Things in Space

Posted on April 9, 2013 by mirandaskunz

An article on SPACE.com lists the “Top 10 Strangest Things in Space” including antimatter, exoplanets, quasars, and many others. I thought this list gave a very interesting overview (and cool pictures) of these more cutting-edge areas of astronomical research. It also explained why the existence of these things are significant. For example, galactic cannibalism may […] Continue reading →

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A Big Snack

Posted on April 9, 2013 by a2megal

The physics major in me has always been incredibly interested in black holes. We haven’t spoken about them much in this course, but there are likely black holes at the center of each galaxy, and thus studying black holes can tell us a lot about galaxies in other parts of the universe. For the first […] Continue reading →

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