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Sorry Mount Everest — you’re not the king of the solar system. That honor belongs to Olympus Mons, a massive mountain on our planetary ne...
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Sorry Mount Everest — you’re not the king of the solar system. That honor belongs to Olympus Mons, a massive mountain on our planetary ne...
Archive for March 2013
Now researchers from NASA have discovered evidence that the planet may harbor pockets of water ice, along with organic material, in several permanently shadowed craters near its north pole.
New data from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft reveal bright spots (shown in yellow) on Mercury that are almost certainly ice.
Saturn is sometimes called the ”Jewel of the Solar System” because its ring system looks like a crown. The rings are well known, but often the question ”what are Saturn’s rings made of” arises. Those rings are made up of dust, rock, and ice accumulated from passing comets, meteorite impacts on Saturn’s moons, and the planet’s gravity pulling material from the moons. Some of the material in the ring system are as small as grains of sand, others are larger than tall buildings, while a few are up to a kilometer across.
Upon leaving the Moon, astronauts on the Apollo missions described moon dust as smelling like gunpowder and feeling extremely soft. Scientists, however, are still not exactly sure why this is because the two have extremely different compositions with Moon dust consisting mostly of small shards of silicone dioxide glass.
NASA scientists announced that after scouring reams of data from the Hubble Space Telescope they can say with certainty that our Milky Way is destined to eventually collide with our neighbour the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, it won’t happen for about 4 billion years
Andromeda is currently 2.5 million light-years from Earth, but moving at a pretty swift 250,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the collision won’t be happening until about 4 billion years from now. NASA says that their data suggests that Andromeda’s tangential — or “sideways” — motion is such that the Milky Way will experience a head-on collision from the neighboring galaxy.
A giant string of invisible dark matter has been discovered across the universe between a pair of galaxy clusters.
The filament forms a bridge between two huge galaxy clusters called Abell 222 and Abell 223, which lie 2.7 billion light-years away. The universe is thought to be filled with such strings of dark matter, a mysterious substance that cannot be seen, only sensed through its gravitational pull.
Scientists have made previous attempts to find dark matter filaments, which are predicted by theories that suggest galaxy clusters form at the intersections of filaments. Dark matter is thought to make up 83% of all matter in the universe.
Popular theories solving the mystery
So what caused the ships and aircraft to disappear mysteriously? There have been many research and explorations done to uncover the mystery. There is no single theory that can explain all the incidents of disappearances. The ships and aircraft have been victims of different circumstances and situations. Things happened quickly and unexpectedly. While many theories have come out, there are few that come close to solving the Bermuda Triangle Mystery.
Methane Gas trapped under the sea floor can erupt, as a result can lower the water density and cause ships to sink. Even planes flying over it, can catch fire and get completely destroyed during such gas blowout.
Sargasso Sea is a strange area that has no shores and bounded only by water currents on all sides. Many ships passing through it have been stranded and made motionless.
Electronic Fog, a strange thick cloud appears from nowhere and engulfs a ship or a plane. Instruments begin to malfunction, and finally the ship or the aircraft vanishes without a trace.
Compass Variation Do you know that magnetic and absolute North are not the same. Which means that the north where a compass points and the absolute geographic north which is the north pole are different. So ships need to make adjustment for this difference to keep to the right direction.
But in Bermuda Triangle, there is a narrow strip where both these North's become the same. Can this be the cause for fatal accidents?
Saturn floats. As big as the planet Saturn is, if you were to put it in the universe's biggest glass of water, it would float. This is because its density is .687 grams per cubed while water is .998 g per cubed. Unfortunately, you need a glass that is over 120,000 km in diameter to witness this.
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In 1999 a violent outburst at V4641 Sgr revealed it to be the closest known black hole to Earth. Originally thought to be positioned approximately 1,600 light-years from Earth, later observations showed it to be at least 15 times farther away.
Its radius in 25 km
mass is nearly 10 times that of the sun
Confirming what the Beatles always knew, astronomers have actually found a diamond in the sky - directly above Australia. It is the biggest known diamond in the universe, in fact
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It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tonnes - that's 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.
However, this cosmic jewel is hidden beneath a layer of hydrogen and helium gases, with the diamond core making up between 50 and 90 per cent of its mass. "It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers that studied the star
The greatest chance so far, according to astronomers, of a large asteroid colliding with the earth and wiping life out is in 2029. Asteroids have hit the planet before, and caused mass extinctions, so there is some precedent for it happening again.
The culprit this time is the Apophis Asteroid (99942 Apophis), which is headed our way in 2029. There’s a little less than a 3% chance that this bad boy will crash into terra firma. Let’s hope Apophis gives the planet a miss, otherwise you can stop paying into your retirement account right now.