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Tag: Astronomy

  • NASA Spots Milky Way Black Hole “Flare-Up”

    NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has taken its first images of the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy and caught it in the middle of a “flare-up.”

    “We got lucky to have captured an outburst from the black hole during our observing campaign,” said Fiona Harrison, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology. “These data will help us better understand the gentle giant at the heart of our galaxy and why it sometimes flares up for a few hours and then returns to slumber.”

    These results come from two days in July when NuSTAR and other observatories observed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way galaxy where observations have shown a black hole resides. According to NASA, Sgr A* is “quiet” compared to the black holes at the centers of other galaxies. Instead of taking in large amounts of the matter surrounding it, Sgr A* is thought to only take in only a little or none.

    “Astronomers have long speculated that the black hole’s ‘snacking’ should produce copious hard X-rays, but NuSTAR is the first telescope with sufficient sensitivity to actually detect them,” said NuSTAR team member Chuck Hailey of Columbia University.

    According to NASA, the NuSTAR is the only telescope capable of taking focused images of the highest-energy X-rays. The telescope is NASA’s newest X-ray telescope and was launched back on June 13, 2012. NASA states that these new observations will help researchers understand the physics of how black holes “snack” and grow.

    The other telescopes used in the observations were the W.M. Keck Observatory at the top of Muana Kea in Hawaii, which took infrared images, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which uses lower-energy X-ray observations and was recently used to determine that our galaxy is surrounded by a halo of hot gas.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Jupiter’s Atmosphere is Seeing Big Changes

    Jupiter’s Atmosphere is Seeing Big Changes

    The results of a paper on Jupiter’s atmosphere were released by NASA today, and it appears that big changes are happening for the solar system’s biggest planet. Among the roiling clouds covering Jupiter, belts of the atmosphere are changing color, hotspots are vanishing or reappearing, and clouds are gathering.

    Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues from around the world took infrared images and maps of Jupiter from 2009 to 2012, then compared them with high-quality visible light images from the amateur astronomy community. During that time the team saw fading and darkening of a brown-colored belt called the South Equatorial Belt and the thickening of deeper cloud decks. They also observed the disappearance and reappearance of blue-gray “hotspots” along the southern edge of the North Equatorial Belt that reveal radiation emerging from deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

    “The changes we’re seeing in Jupiter are global in scale,” Orton said. “We’ve seen some of these before, but never with modern instrumentation to clue us in on what’s going on. Other changes haven’t been seen in decades, and some regions have never been in the state they’re appearing in now. At the same time, we’ve never seen so many things striking Jupiter. Right now, we’re trying to figure out why this is all happening.”

    NASA announced last month that Jupiter has been suffering more impacts over the last four years than ever previously recorded, and released an amateur astronomer’s image of a recent meteoroid impact.

    The results from Orton’s Jupiter observations were presented by Orton today at the 44th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Other interesting findings revealed at the meeting include the hot cross bun on Titan, the four-star planet, and the color of Trojans orbiting Jupiter.

    (Image courtesy NASA/IRTF/JPL-Caltech/NAOJ/A. Wesley/A. Kazemoto/C. Go)

  • Four-Star Planet Discovered by Planet Hunter Volunteers

    Volunteers for the Planet Hunter project have discovered a planet that is part of a four-star system. The planet, named PH1, orbits a pair of stars that is itself orbited by a more distant pair of stars.

    The Planet Hunter project is a citizen science project that collaborates with Yale University and other organizations to cull through the light curves taken by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Planet Hunters search the data for the brief dip in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star.

    NASA announced this week that a Yale-led team of astronomers has confirmed the discovery of this circumbinary planet in a four star system. According to NASA, only six planets are known to orbit binary stars, though none of them are orbited by distant binary stars.

    “I celebrate this discovery as a milestone for the Planet Hunters team: discovering their first exoplanet lurking in the Kepler data,” said Natalie Batalha, Kepler scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “I celebrate this discovery for the wow-factor of a planet in a four-star system. Most importantly, I celebrate this discovery as the fruit of exemplary human cooperation — cooperation between scientists and citizens who give of themselves for the love of stars, knowledge and exploration.”

    PH1 is slightly larger than Neptune and is thought to be a gas giant. It orbits its stars every 137 Earth days.

    A research paper on the phenomenon was presented this week at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. It has also been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

    Earlier this year NASA announced that Kepler had found a planet orbiting a binary star. Like Tatooine.

    (Photo courtesy Haven Giguere/Yale)

  • Jovian Trojan Asteroids’ Secrets Uncovered by NASA’s WISE

    NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) may have been decommissioned last year, but the data it has provided is continuing to reveal clues about our solar system.

    NASA today announced that researchers using data from WISE have discovered a bit more about the mysterious asteroids called Jovian Trojans. The Trojans orbit the sun on the same path as Jupiter and travel in “packs,” with one group orbiting ahead of Jupiter, and one trailing behind.

    The observations of the WISE data by the NEOWISE team (the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission) show that the Trojans are made up of dark, reddish rocks and have a matte, non-reflective surface. Also shown is that the leading pack of Trojans outnumbers the pack that trails Jupiter. In addition, scientists have been able to determine that the packs are “strikingly” similar to each other and do not include any objects from elsewhere in the solar system. The Trojans do not resemble asteroids from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or objects from the Kuiper belt on the outskirts of the system.

    “Jupiter and Saturn are in calm, stable orbits today, but in their past, they rumbled around and disrupted any asteroids that were in orbit with these planets,” said Tommy Grav, a WISE scientist from the Planetary Science Institute. “Later, Jupiter re-captured the Trojan asteroids, but we don’t know where they came from. Our results suggest they may have been captured locally. If so, that’s exciting because it means these asteroids could be made of primordial material from this particular part of the solar system, something we don’t know much about.”

    The NEOWISE team has analyzed the colors and classified 400 Trojans so far. Grav stated that the Trojans are D-type asteroids, which are dark burgundy, though some are C- and P-type grey-bluish asteroids.

    “More research is needed, but it’s possible we are looking at some of the oldest material known in the solar system,” said Grav.

    These results were presented today at the 44th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Two studies outlining the results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Planet With Two Suns Is Part Of A Newly Discovered Type Of Solar System

    A new planet has been discovered by a team of amateur astronomers from the Planet Hunters project. It’s called PH1, but may remind some Star Wars fans of Tatooine thanks to the two suns it orbits. On top of that, the whole thing, with its two suns, is orbited by two other stars, making up a type of solar system that has not been discovered in the past.

    Other than the two suns, it’s not much like Tatooine at all. It’s actually a gaseous planet, as opposed to Luke Skywalker’s home. Space.com reports:

    The alien planet, called PH1, is a gas giant planet slightly bigger than Neptune. Its discovery in the midst of a strange, four-star planetary system is the first confirmed world discovered as part of the Yale University-led Planet Hunters project, in which armchair astronomers work with professional scientists to find evidence of new worlds in the bountiful data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

    “Planet Hunters is a symbiotic project, pairing the discovery power of the people with follow-up by a team of astronomers,” said Debra Fischer, a professor of astronomy at Yale and planet expert who helped launch Planet Hunters in 2010, in a statement. “This unique system might have been entirely missed if not for the sharp eyes of the public.”

    Until this discovery, there were a reported six known planets that orbit two stars, but none with this particular solar system set-up.

    Here’s a CBS segment form 2011, with a NASA scientist talking about the planet Kepler-16b:

    “This is the first definitive detection of a circumbinary planet, and is the best example we have of a Tatooine-like world from Star Wars,” a NASA scientist explains in the video. “Now, we don’t expect Luke Skywalker or anything else to be living on Kepler-16b, but if you could visit there, you would see a sky with two suns just like Luke did.”

    Here’s a report from earlier this year about another Tatooine-like planet.

  • Hubble Constant More Accurately Measured by Astronomers

    Astronomers have used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to obtain the most precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the universe is expanding. The Hubble constant is named for Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who discovered that the universe is expanding.

    The new measurement improves the accuracy of the previous most-accurate measurement (from the Hubble Space Telescope) by a factor of three, and brings the uncertainty of the measurement down to 3%. The new, more accurate value for the Hubble constant is 74.3 plus or minus 2.1 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

    “Just over a decade ago, using the words ‘precision’ and ‘cosmology’ in the same sentence was not possible, and the size and age of the universe was not known to better than a factor of two,” said Wendy Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena. “Now we are talking about accuracies of a few percent. It is quite extraordinary.”

    Freedman led the aforementioned Hubble Space Telescope study that determined the previously most-accurate optical measurement of the Hubble constant. The Spitzer Space Telescope uses infrared light, rather than visible light when gazing into space. Infrared light passes more easily through dust, providing the Spitzer with better views of some objects.

    “Spitzer is yet again doing science beyond what it was designed to do,” said Michael Werner, project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “First, Spitzer surprised us with its pioneering ability to study exoplanet atmospheres, and now, in the mission’s later years, it has become a valuable cosmology tool.”

    In addition to the Hubble constant measurement, researchers have combined the Spitzer findings with already-published data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and came up with an independent measurement of dark energy. Dark energy is believed to be tied to the accelerating expansion of the universe.

    “This is a huge puzzle,” said Freedman, who is also the lead author of the new dark energy study. “It’s exciting that we were able to use Spitzer to tackle fundamental problems in cosmology: the precise rate at which the universe is expanding at the current time, as well as measuring the amount of dark energy in the universe from another angle.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Milky Way is Surrounded by Hot Gas, Says NASA

    Astronomers at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence that the Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by a halo of hot gas. Extending for hundreds of thousands of light years, the mass of the gas cloud is estimated to be comparable to the mass of all the stars in the galaxy.

    “Our work shows that, for reasonable values of parameters and with reasonable assumptions, the Chandra observations imply a huge reservoir of hot gas around the Milky Way,” said Smita Mathur, astronomy professor at Ohio State University and co-author of the paper, which has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. “It may extend for a few hundred thousand light-years around the Milky Way or it may extend farther into the surrounding local group of galaxies. Either way, its mass appears to be very large.”

    A team of 5 astronomers using data from the Chandra, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory, and Japan’s Suzaku satellite have determined that the temperature of the halo is between 1 million and 2.3 million kelvins. The surface of the Sun is around 5778 kelvins.

    The published observations used X-ray sources located far outside the galaxy to measure the absorption of the X-rays by oxygen ions outside the Milky Way. Using this method, the astronomers were also able to estimate that the gas halo is as massive as 10 billion suns, and perhaps as massive as 60 billion suns. The density of the halo, however is so low that similar halos around other galaxies might have been missed.

    NASA stated that the size and mass of the gas halo, if confirmed, could explain the “missing baryon” problem for the Milky Way. The “missing baryon” problem has to do with the measurement of baryonic matter from the beginning of the universe. While measurements indicate that baryonic matter (such as neutrons and protons) present when the universe was only a few billion years old was one-sixth the mass and density of the unobservable (dark) matter, current measurements of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies show around half the expected baryons are missing.

    (Illustration courtesy NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; NASA/CXC/Ohio State/A Gupta)

  • NASA Finds What Could be the Most Distant Galaxy Yet Seen

    NASA today announced that it has snapped a picture of what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen.

    Using the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, astronomers have captured an image of what could be a young galaxy from when the universe was just 500 million years old. The current age of the universe is calculated to be 13.7 billion years old, making the spotted object close to 13.2 billion years old. This galaxy, called MACS 1149-JD, was one of the first galaxies to form.

    “This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of a paper on the galaxy sighting that has been published in the journal Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”

    In the image above, the galaxy appears red because the light traveling from the galaxy has redshifted, or lengthened in wavelength. Astronomers use this redshift, which is the result of the expansion of the universe, to describe cosmic distances. The light from MACS 1149-JD has traveled 13.2 billion light-years before reaching Earth, and has a redshift of 9.6.

    To spot the galaxy, astronomers used what is called gravitational lensing. Since even modern telescopes are not sensitive enough to capture an image of an object so old, the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster situated between the Milky Way and MACS 1149-JD was used to magnify the new galaxy’s light, brightening it by around 15 times.

    Astronomers estimate that the galaxy was less than 200 million years old when it was viewed. It is small, with only around 1% of the mass of the Milky Way. This fits with currently accepted cosmological models, which show that early galaxies would have been small, then merged to form more sizable, modern galaxies.

    (Image courtesy NASA/STScl/JHU)

  • Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered by NASA’s Kepler

    As technology and measurements have improved, astronomers have begun finding extra-solar planets at a breakneck pace. It was only last year that the first planet orbiting a binary star system was discovered. Today, NASA has announced that it has discovered a planet orbiting a binary star system that is also within the habitable zone of the system.

    The planet, named Kepler-47c, orbits its two suns with a period of 303 days, and is joined by another planet in the system, Kepler-47b. The system is located 4,900 light-years from Earth and is in the constellation Cygnus. The discovery is proof that more than one planet can exist in a binary star system, a first for a circumbinary system.

    “Unlike our sun, many stars are part of multiple-star systems where two or more stars orbit one another. The question always has been — do they have planets and planetary systems?” said William Borucki, Kepler mission principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “This Kepler discovery proves that they do. In our search for habitable planets, we have found more opportunities for life to exist.”

    Unfortunately for Star Wars fans, no future humans will be traversing the deserts Kepler-47c digging for Krayt Dragon fossils. Astronomers say the planet is most likely a gaseous giant slightly larger than Neptune. Still, the planet could have water-vapor clouds, and its discovery will push cosmological models of star-system formation forward.

    “The presence of a full-fledged circumbinary planetary system orbiting Kepler-47 is an amazing discovery,” said Greg Laughlin, professor of astrophysics and planetary science at the University of California Santa Cruz. “These planets are very difficult to form using the currently accepted paradigm, and I believe that theorists, myself included, will be going back to the drawing board to try to improve our understanding of how planets are assembled in dusty circumbinary disks.”

    NASA has prepared a short documentary about the Kepler-47 system that can be seen below:

    (Picture courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

  • Galaxy Discovery Reveals Record-Breaking Star Formation

    Astronomers have found a galaxy cluster that is one of the largest objects in the known universe, and it is breaking records. The cluster, named the Phoenix cluster, has been observed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope, and eight other observatories. Their findings suggest that the evolution of galaxy clusters may be more complicated than previously thought.

    The most perplexing observations for astronomers are the facts that the rate of star formation and hot gas cooling in the middle of the Phoenix cluster are the highest ever observed. It is also the most powerful X-ray-producing cluster ever discovered. These observations were outlined in a study published this week in the journal Nature.

    “While galaxies at the center of most clusters may have been dormant for billions of years, the central galaxy in this cluster seems to have come back to life with a new burst of star formation,” said Michael McDonald, a Hubble Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study. “The mythology of the Phoenix, a bird rising from the dead, is a great way to describe this revived object.”

    Galaxy clusters are thought by astronomers to be prevented from Phoenix-type growth by a supermassive black hole located in the central galaxy of a cluster. Those black holes release jets of energy into the cluster and prevent the hot gas in the system from cooling, condensing, and forming new stars. The energy being released by the black hole in the Phoenix cluster is not powerful enough to prevent the cluster’s gas from cooling, and so stars in the cluster are forming at around 20 times faster than in the Perseus cluster – a relatively normal galaxy cluster. As a result, astronomers predict that its rapid growth end relatively soon.

    “The galaxy and its black hole are undergoing unsustainable growth,” said study co-author Bradford Benson, of the University of Chicago. “This growth spurt can’t last longer than about a hundred million years. Otherwise, the galaxy and black hole would become much bigger than their counterparts in the nearby universe.”

    (Photos courtesy NASA/CXC/MIT/JPL-Caltech/AURA/NOAO/CTIO/M.McDonald [left] and NASA/CXC/M.Weiss [right])

  • This Asteroid Nearly Went Clobberin’ Time on Earth & Hardly Anyone Noticed

    Actually, it didn’t really, but it was the sixth-closest grazing ever recorded and a helluva lot closer than Asteroid 2012 LZ1 came earlier this month.

    In video recorded last month by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, which you can see below, the Asteroid 2012 KT42 likely wouldn’t have yielded much damage had it even been on a collision course with our pale blue dot of a planet. According to Richard Binzel, an MIT planetary scientist who spoke to Nature, the asteroid would have incinerated in the Earth’s atmosphere before it could bring about some Deep Impact-style destruction.

    As things go, Asteroid 2012 KT42 was definitely the closest near-hit that Earth has been party to this year and yet it seems to have received much less attention than two much-hyped asteroids from earlier this year. As mentioned, Asteroid 2012 LZ1 passed through Earth’s neighborhood last month and, despite being much, much further away than KT42, received much more attention from the pedestrian community, although that may have been in part to the asteroid passing at the same time that the transit of Venus was happening.

    Asteroid 2012 KT42 was also much closer than the dreaded Asteroid 2012 DA14, which was greatly exaggerated to be on course to smash into Earth around February 2013. For some reason, DA14 seemed to earn the most attention, but then again it was, to my incomplete knowledge, the first big asteroid story of the year.

    To put humanity’s death-by-celestial object levels of concern into perspective, compare the three scenarios:

    Asteroid Distance from Earth (km) Chance of Deep Impact Terror
    2012 KT42 19,000 So close, yet so far away.
    2012 DA14 27,000 Don’t count on it.
    2012 LZ1 5,300,000 My sources say no.

    So really, the general public really has no sensibilities when it comes to panicking over one astroid’s would-be imminent collision with Earth over another. In the meantime, keep calm, carry on, and enjoy the indisputably amazing video of KT42 zipping past stars at over 10 miles per second.

    [Via Nature.]

  • NASA to Extend Kepler Mission to 2016?

    The Kepler mission may be extended for another two years after a report from NASA’s senior review board. The spacecraft was named in honor of the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and was launched in March 2009. It was supposed to return around September of 2012.

    The purpose of the mission is to survey portions of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.

    It has been determined that Kepler has, “enabled remarkable stellar science” through its discovery of several exoplanets.

    In the past few days we have gotten news that there are quite possibly billions of planets in the Milky Way that can suport life. Including up to 100 planets within 20 light years.

    Astronomers have been reaching out for funding in reaction to these discoveries to continue their Kepler-related work through websites like PetriDish. In an effort to answer whether we are alone in this world or not PetriDish has been trying to gain funding for the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) project. The donations will go towards the creation of a super computer dedicated to finding exomoons.

    The importance of such research comes from the theory that there may be more habitable exomoons in the cosmos than exoplanets.

    Do you think we are in a golden age of planetary research?

  • Asteroid 2012 DA14 Will Not Seek & Destroy Earth In February 2013

    Asteroid 2012 DA14 Will Not Seek & Destroy Earth In February 2013

    In case you’re having a lovely Monday morning, here’s some news that will positively change that for you: an asteroid will smash into our planet in precisely eleven months and we earthlings no longer have enough time to prepare our defenses. The asteroid will simply incinerate everything and that’s just the way it will be.

    Now. In case that totally put a damper on your lovely Monday morning, here’s some news that will swing that pendulum back up into good times: It’s not true! Earth isn’t going to get any nasty asteroid abuse next year so we’re all probably going to be okay.

    Whew!

    This hit-not hit news comes by way of an article RT.com published over the weekend that suggested asteroid 2012 DA14 was on a collision course with earth. The article awkwardly suggests that there is “a possibility the asteroid will collide with Earth” but then explains that “more scrupulous calculation is required to estimate the threat of collision.” Regardless of whatever calculations may be required, simply throwing the words “asteroid,” “earth,” “destroy,” and “next year” into a Yahtzee cup and then spilling out some disaster-porn news is more than enough kindling to ignite the apocalyptic imaginations of the public. Who cares about facts when you’ve got Twitter, the observation lab of the world’s eminent armchair astronomers?

    @eddiebravo
    Eddie Bravo    Legit? Hoax?Where my scientists at? RT @SalmonSnakeDoc Asteroid(2012 DA14) to impact Earth in 11 months?! February 2013 http://t.co/OFZ7jwsm 11 hours ago via Echofon ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @GodOfTheJews
    Ĕlōhîm☼God☼Ĕl’ō-hēm    NASA Confirms Asteroid 2012 DA14 Could Hit Earth Next February. – http://t.co/Uj1bR6Uw 27 minutes ago via Tweet Button ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @Tim_Bousquet
    Tim Bousquet    We’re all gonna die!!!!eleventylll!!! http://t.co/IBSQOdQ4 3 hours ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @SciNewsBlog
    Science News    Earth face possible 60-meter asteroid in February 2013 and it is too late to do much about it: 2012 DA14 orbit d… http://t.co/CvjKrHON 1 day ago via twitterfeed ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @area51org
    area51 . org    Earthfiles: #NASA Confirms Asteroid 2012 DA14 Could Hit Earth Next February. http://t.co/MrkWEXzy 1 day ago via Ping.fm ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @britlighthouse
    lighthouses    Asteroid 2012 DA14 heads for Earth next year – possible impact?: Scientists are predicting that … http://t.co/qds1NEbb #space #Science 1 day ago via twitterfeed ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @ISCOSEU
    Ian T. Cruz    Newly-Discovered Asteorid 2012 DA14 could hit Earth in February 2013: TAGS: Space,SciTech, Thrills&Spills To av… http://t.co/fXQCruMn 1 day ago via twitterfeed ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    However, Bruce Willis’ services will not be required (at least next year, that is) to avert our asteroid-born annihilation, so says Phil Plait, an astronomer who addressed RT’s disaster-mongering. So as to leave as little confusion as possible, here is what Plait wrote in regard to how likely we will be visited by DA14 next year:

    Let’s be very clear: it will miss. In astronomical terms, 27,000 km is pretty close, but in real human terms it’s a clean miss.

    While DA14 will come within 17,000 miles of Earth next year – which Plait describes as a “a close shave” as far as asteroid-passing-closeness goes – we’re not in any extraterrestrial danger of getting a serious backhand from the asteroid. Will this stop people from speculating on our impending doom in spite of all reliable evidence pointing towards our survival? Probably not.

    So in order to satiate the unquenchable desires of people who really want to see what happens when asteroids batter the daylights out of Earth, through the use of anonymous sources we here at WebProNews gained exclusive access to video footage from the Great Asteroid Impact of 2013 that reveals the exact time and manner in which asteroids will attack Earth. Viewer discretion is advised:

    And just in case anybody is still impossibly confused about this article: No. There is not going to be an asteroid hitting Earth next year. No DA14 asteroids, no next year, no armageddon. Okay?

    UPDATE: If you haven’t seen it, go check out the video animation a savvy YouTube user put together depicting the near-hit of DA14 with our beloved Earth.

  • How To Save The World From Giant Asteroids

    Earlier this month an asteroid whizzed by, narrowly missing us by about 200,000 miles. Of course, that seems like a long way away – and it is. But it’s actually inside the orbit of the moon. Giant rocks are out there hurling around in space, and that’s a pretty terrifying thought when you actually think about it.

    Here’s a little “Did You Know” for your Monday afternoon:

    Did you know that there is an asteroid, about the size of two and a half football fields, that is going to pass quite near to Earth in April of 2029? How close? Well, it’s going to pass close enough to fly under our weather satellites. And Earth’s gravity is going to affect the giant space rock ever so slightly.

    If that asteroid passes through a small area (give it a one in a million chance), the Earth’s gravity will bend its trajectory in such a way, that seven years later on a Friday the 13th, that asteroid will hit Earth.

    This is just one of the fun facts explored in this TED talk, held by Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait.

    The main point of the talk, other than the scare the absolute crap out of everybody, is to discuss how we protect our lovely planet from mayhem. Basically: deflect them. No landing on them and blowing them up with an A-bomb. And no, we probably don’t need Bruce Willis for this. Deflect, and then coax it away. The coaxing it away is the really interesting part. Enjoy:

    So in theory, we could avoid total annihilation if that asteroid comes hurling toward Earth in 2036. That’s good news. Because like he says, the dinosaurs had a really bad day millions of years ago. That would sure suck if humans had to experience the same fate.