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March 20, 2008
Show 151: Venus Collision
Venus is much like planet Earth its composition, but also very different in other ways — it’s bone-dry with little sign of water, experiences temperatures hot enough to melt lead, is enshrouded in a thick poisonous atmosphere of CO2 and sulfuric acid, and even rotates “backwards.”
Now we may have an explanation for this weirdness — a tremendous head-on collision of two bodies may have formed our planetary neighbor.
March 13, 2008
Show 150: Natural Telescopes
Gravitational lenses are like giant magnifying glasses in the sky. They occur where huge accumulations of matter, like galaxy clusters, create enough gravity to warp and magnify the light of objects beyond them. This enables us to see objects normally too far away to be viewed by even the most powerful telescopes.
Gravitational lenses were once thought to be rare. But astronomers using Hubble have found several, and new sky surveys found more. Scientists are now training a “digital robot” to find additional lenses.
March 6, 2008
Show 149: Shoot the Moon
A mission to the Moon will search for water. Scientists would like to know if the Moon does have residual water, as hinted at by earlier missions.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will send an impactor into a dark crater at the Moon’s south pole. Instruments will measure the plume produced by the impact to see what materials are present, looking particularly for water. LCROSS will launch in October 2008 and the impact will take place early in 2009.
February 28, 2008
Show 148: HubbleWatch for February 2008
Gravitational lensing is highly useful quirk of the universe. When vast amounts of matter accumulate — as in enormous clusters of galaxies — the intense gravity created distorts and magnifies the light of objects behind the cluster. The effect is like creating a giant magnifying glass in space. Astronomers recently used the effect to find one of the youngest galaxies ever seen, and track the placement of dark matter.
February 28, 2008
Show 147: Orphan Stars
Stars were recently found forming in a long tail of gas trailing away from a galaxy. We normally would not expect to see stars being born so far from their parent galaxy. Scientists believe the pressure of the galaxy’s motion through space as it plummeted toward the center of a huge cluster of galaxies stripped away the gas that formed these “orphan stars.”
February 21, 2008
Show 146: NASA's 2008 Launch Plans
NASA has a full launch schedule coming up, with something being launched nearly every month. Astronauts will make four shuttle flights to the International Space Station, as well as a critical trip to Hubble to make repairs and add new instruments to the telescope. NASA will also provide the vehicle for lifting new science spacecraft into orbit, in addition to a few military launches. Finally, in 2009, NASA will launch the Kepler mission, meant to find Earth-sized planets around other stars.
February 14, 2008
Show 145: Lunar Eclipse
Get ready for a total eclipse of the Moon on Feb. 20. Eclipses of the Moon only happen when the full Moon passes through the shadow cast by our planet. This eclipse is visible for most of North America, all of South America, western Europe and western Africa.
February 7, 2008
Show 144: Message to Mercury
Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is hard to observe from Earth. We know a little about it from the Mariner 10 spacecraft that flew by Mercury in 1974, but a large part of the planet was never mapped. Messenger, launched in 2004, recently reached Mercury, taking color pictures and probing the planet’s mysterious magnetic field.
