Tag archives for solar
Posted by Beyond Neptune‘s orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place. But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies—or at least, so we think. Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered…
About 127 light-years away there’s a star like our sun that hosts at least five planets, each roughly the same mass as Uranus or Neptune, astronomers announced today. A closeup of the sky around HD 10180 —Image courtesy ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin The planets were found via what’s called…
Posted by By Rebecca Dolan Even though the U.S. Senate seems unable to commit to a plan to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, advocates for action on climate change have hope for a fallback plan to increase wind, solar, and other alternative energy. They began the drive soon after it became clear that a comprehensive…
NASA may have to bust out an Enigma Machine to figure out what’s going on with the Voyager 2 probe, the second most distant human-made object in space. Yesterday mission managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena announced that the craft recently started sending back science data in a format no one on Earth…
From huge patches of plastic in remote corners of the ocean to piles of consumer electronics in rural Nigeria, trash has a way of accumulating even in places few of Earth’s 6.8 billion people have ever been. Space is no exception: Even though the first satellite went into low-Earth orbit a little over 50 years…
After hunkering down to survive D.C.’s “snowpocalypse” this past week, I was definitely ready for some sun. —Image courtesy United Launch Alliance/Pat Corkery via NASA Luckily, NASA obliged me with Thursday’s launch of their latest space probe, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The SDO is a semi-autonomous craft that will orbit Earth, taking continuous observations of…
If Earth’s moon is made of green cheese, Jupiter‘s biggest moon is made of refrozen ice cream. False-color view of Ganymede — mmmmm, planetary Drumstick! —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/DLR According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the Jovian moon Ganymede used to be similar in structure to its neighbor Callisto. But then, about 3.8 billion…
Johnny Cash fans take heed: The first solar eclipse of 2010 will create a “ring of fire” over Africa, India, and China on January 15. That’s because it will be an annular eclipse, and no, that is not a typo: I mean annular, not annual. Solar eclipses in general happen because every now and then…
Dispatches From the Consumer Electronics Show: 10 Green(ish) Products to Look for in 2010
Posted by Tasha Eichenseher of National Geographic on January 11, 2010 Green Guide scoured the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for eco-friendly gadgets and devices. From batteries and solar chargers produced by (sometimes cheesy) small start-up companies to TVs and entire home-energy systems including manufacturing giants such as Panasonic and LG, these items stand out among thousands as having some real environmental benefit, or at least…
Meat Farms, Solar Shingles, Tank-Farmed TunaAmong Some of the Year’s Best Inventions
Posted by Tasha Eichenseher of National Geographic on November 13, 2009 Along with teleporting technology, electronic eyes, and HIV immunization, a handful of green innovations that could change the way we eat, heat, and drive made Time magazine’s 2009 list of best inventions, released today. Coming in at number two: Tank-bred southern bluefin tuna that successfully spawned in Port Lincoln, Australia. Southern bluefin, sought after for…
Of the more than 300 planets circling other stars we’ve found so far, only a handful have ever had their pictures taken directly. Astronomers strongly suspect the vast majority of these so-called exoplanets exist based solely on indirect evidence, such as their gravitational effects on stars. So the trick, then, is figuring out anything else…
Any allergy sufferer will tell you that dust can be a killer. But those dust bunnies under the couch have nothing on the planet-wide storms that periodically engulf Mars in late spring and early summer. —Image courtesy NASA, J. Ball (Cornell), M. Wolff (SSI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Such storms are kind of…
Japan proposed, and Kaguya said yes. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) yesterday released what’s being touted as the first ever picture of a penumbral eclipse as seen from the moon. —Image copyright JAXA/NHK The moon-orbiting probe Kaguya (named for a lunar princess in Japanese folklore) snapped the high-definition footage on February 10 as Earth…
I’ve been a baaaad blogger. Headed out to San Francisco for the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, I had grand ambitions of doing it all: writing stories, editing copy, meeting scientists, hobnobbing with other writers, and of course live blogging from the meeting. Life, it seems, had other plans. But never fear. Now…
The holiday season has officially descended upon us, and many a child is eagerly waiting for that jolly red roundness with a snowy white cap to appear in the sky. Meanwhile, anyone whose day job requires listening for and deciphering radio signals from Mars is probably only too glad that white-capped red ball has hidden…
Okay, not really, but I couldn’t resist. In reality, the agency has approved a new spacecraft dubbed Juno that will launch in 2011, making it into an elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter by 2016. The mission isn’t named for the teenage darling of independent film, but for the Roman goddess who was the jealous sister-wife…
The total solar eclipse of March 29, 2006 was photographed from the Space Station. The point of view, reported by National Geographic News on the day, shows how the moon passing directly in front of the sun throws its shadow on the Earth. Observers in the umbra, the dark middle of the shadow, experience a…
