NASA Mystery Announcement Reminder!

Posted by Chris Jensen | May. 14, 2008 07:26AM PST | 560 views | 0 comments

FILED UNDER: News. Science.

At 10:00 a.m. Pacific, NASA will be announcing the discovery of an object in our galaxy that brings to an end a 50 year search for...whatever it is. Many theories abound, but only NASA knows for sure.

If you'd like to hear the announcement when it's revealed to the media, then you'll want to head here and listen in on the live audio conference.

Read More (Source: NASA)

Tags astronomy, galaxy, announcement, mystery, nasa

Ten Things You Don't Know About the Milky Way Galaxy

Posted by Chris Jensen | Mar. 13, 2008 08:17AM PST | 93 views | 0 comments

FILED UNDER: Features. Science.

One of my favorite astronomy blogs, Bad Astronomy, has posted an informative article that covers 10 things you probably don't know about our little home in the Universe.

Bet ya didn't know this!

6) You can only see 0.000003% percent of it.

When you got out on a dark night, you can see thousands of stars. But the Milky Way has two hundred billion stars in it. You’re only seeing a tiny tiny fraction of the number of stars tooling around the galaxy. In fact, with only a handful of exceptions, the most distant stars you can readily see are 1000 light years away. Worse, most stars are so faint that they are invisible much closer than that; the Sun is too dim to see from farther than about 60 light years away… and the Sun is pretty bright compared to most stars. So the little bubble of stars we can see around us is just a drop in the ocean of the Milky Way.

Read More (Source: Bad Astronomy)

Tags lists, milky way, galaxy, astronomy, space