Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Water in Martian Soil     The Mars rover called Curiosity has been revealing a great deal about the conditions and topography of Mars. Curiosity has been examining loose rocks, sand and dust which has helped us understand the global changes on Mars. One of the biggest discoveries is finding water in the martian soil. It accounts for 2% of the soil or rather 1 liter of water from 1 cubic foot of soil they dig up. This is truly a wow moment because water is a valuable resource and being able to find it anywhere on Mars makes it a little easier for humans to live on Mars or stay there for long periods of time. This is just 1 out of 5 papers published in the journal Science for September 26 2013. The data is actually from the first 100 days that Curiosity was on Mars. The soil was found on the Gale crater where Curiosity landed. It was charged with...

A New Theory Suggest that the Birth of the Universe May Have Been from a 4-D Black Hole     A new journal published by astronomers at the University of Waterloo suggest that the birth of the universe didn’t happen from the Big Bang but a 4 dimensional black hole. If your brain hurts then just bear with me because this article is going to get rough. Let’s say that of course nobody actually knows how the universe was born without understanding what happened in the planck era, which deserves another write up but for now you can read this if you are interested.   Before we move on it is my duty to explain that this paper is only raising questions and not exactly answering them. Furthermore, these ideas are not entirely new to the scientific community and have been kicking around for about 20 years.   So before we had the stars, planets and galaxies we had a...

New Images from Apex Camera   Credit: ESO   This is a brand new image of star formation region called NGC 6334 or called the Cat Paw nebula, taken by the new Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) camera. Actually APEX isn’t new but a camera called ArTeMiS, a new wide-field submillimetre-wavelength camera, was installed and can bring more in depth details to the images. The telescope is a 12 meter diameter telescope located high in the Atacama Desert. It operates at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths which is between infrared light and radio waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. The camera completed the tests and will now take a trip to Saclay in France in order to install the additional detectors in the instrument. According to the ESO (European Southern Observatory),”The new generation detector array of ArTeMIS acts more like a CCD camera than the previous...

Hubble Finds Densest Nearby Galaxy     Hubble finds new evidence for densest galaxy in nearby galaxy. Well nearby in astronomical terms which is 54 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy M60-UCD1 is located near a massive elliptical galaxy known as NGC 4649 or M60. The galaxy weighs more than 200 million times the mass of our own sun or if you took all the matter within 80 light years of us it would equal that much weight. The density of the stars in that region weigh 15,000 times more than found in the Milky Way neighborhood. They describe this galaxy as an ultra compact dwarf galaxy. The stars are also 25 times closer than typical stars in a galaxy so you can start to see a sense of how close the stars are. With further observations astronomers found an interesting x-ray emitting energy source at its center. Finding it at the center wasn’t the interesting...

Young Stars are Born in the Prawn Nebula     This image is one of the latest news releases from the VLT or Very Large Telescope which is operated by the European Southern observatory. This is the Prawn Nebula located 6,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius. This is a star forming region with heavy amounts of gas and dust that are being condensed into new stars as well as planets. What causes these clouds to glow is the ultraviolet light that is given off from the stars. The radiation strips the electrons from the hydrogen atoms, then later recombines and emits the bright light you see here. The Prawn nebula is 250 light years across or 4 times the size of a full moon in our sky. The Prawn Nebula is also located within our Milky Way. The VLT is supported by 15 countries and has been focusing on studying nebula’s within the Milky Way. The Prawn...

It’s Official Voyager 1 has Finally Reached Interstellar Space!     For a long time now there has been quite the debate over whether Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space. It’s clearly out of the solar system and the last barrier is the heliopause before Voyager 1 is truly in interstellar space. Here’s a breakdown of the voyage.     The 36 year old spacecraft is approximately 19 billion kilometers (12 billion miles) from our sun. Interestingly Voyager 1 has shown data that it has been traveling through plasma or ionized gas which is present between stars. This is quite the historic event for mankind to have a working spacecraft reach interstellar space. Voyager 1 first felt the increased pressure when it reached the heliosphere. What was shocking was when the plasma was analyzed they found that the spacecraft was bathed in plasma 40 times denser...