Daily iPhone app: Pocket Universe now lets you talk to it and it talks back too
Pocket Universe has been one of my favorite astronomy apps for the iPhone. Take it outside to easily identify what's up using the charts and the built-in augmented reality features. With an update that hit the app store yesterday, you can now talk to ...
Faint sunlight enough to drive weather, clouds on Saturn’s moon Titan
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, can seem like Earth viewed through a
funhouse mirror. Far colder than our home, water on the surface exists
only in a frozen state, while its liquid lakes and clouds are made of
methane,...
Tatooine-like planets may be common
Exoplanets—planets in star systems other than our own—have been found in orbit around single stars, with
a lone exception: Kepler-16b is circumbinary, having two host
stars in close orbit. Now, researchers workin...
Figuring out why most of Titan’s methane lakes have northern exposures
Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most intriguing bodies in our solar system. Its dense atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane make it both beautiful and bizarre, as well as a tantalizing target for...
The quasicrystal that fell to Earth
The 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Dan Schechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, materials that do not have the regular lattice structure of crystalline solids. Schechtman produced quasicrystals in the la...
Remains of gas giants, swallowed by red giant star, now orbit as small planets
There may come a day when exoplanet discoveries start to bore me, but we're not there yet. A day after the Kepler team announced the identification of Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star, they're...
Kepler-20′s oddball planet assortment challenges models of planet formation
NASA's press conference on the newly discovered Earth-sized planets has just concluded, and most of the time was spent reiterating what was in our earlier report. Most of the value of listening in came...
Kepler team spots Earth-sized planets orbiting sun-like star
Just two weeks after the confirmation of a planet that's within the habitable zone of a distant star, the Kepler team is back with the discovery of two Earth-sized planets orbiting in what is now...
The Milky Way’s black hole may spring to life in 2013
Quasars, the brightest objects we're aware of, are powered by the supermassive black holes that are thought to reside at the center of every galaxy. But many galaxies fail to feed their black holes...
Catch Tomorrow Morning’s Lunar Eclipse With SkySafari 3 iOS App [Daily Freebie]
For those of us setting out to catch the lunar eclipse early tomorrow morning — here’s a great piece in the Christian Science Monitor on why it’ll be so spectacular out here west of the Rockies — there’s nothing like an iPad armed with...Sun-like star hosts Kepler’s first confirmed habitable zone planet
This week, NASA is playing host to a conference dedicated to the results pouring in from Kepler, its first dedicated planet-hunting probe. The space-based telescope spots planets as they pass in front of their...
