The Beast of Bodmin Mystery

The Beast of Bodmin, also known as "the Beast of Bodmin Moor" like "the Beast of Exmoor", is a phantom wild cat which is claimed to range in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Bodmin Moor became a centre of these sightings with frequent reports of crippled slain livestock: the alleged panther-like cats of the same region came to be popularly known as the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

The Unstable Crab Nebula

History

On the 4th of July 1054 or maybe even earlier, in April or May that year, a new bright star near the Sun was observed in the constellation of Taurus by witnesses in Italy, Armenia, Iraq, China, Japan, and North America. The unusual object appeared with a magnitude between –4 and –7.5 and was visible to the naked eye, even in the daytime sky. Apparently, maximum brightness coincided with the solar conjunction. Chinese astronomers observed the star in daylight until the 27th of July 1054, and they were able to see it in the night sky until the 17th of April 1056, before it faded from naked-eye visibility. In Europe, sightings of the supernova were probably censored, since the catholic church saw this celestial event as a bad omen in connection with the split from the orthodox church in the same year.

Kepler's Latest Hunting Trips

Torrents of likely new exoplanets are pouring in from NASA's Kepler space telescope - more than 1,200 of them so far, large and small, including weird worlds and systems that no one expected. The Kepler science team unveiled its latest batch of findings on February 2nd, based largely on data from just the first four months (May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009) of Kepler's planned 3½-year mission. The Kepler scientists highlighted two themes. One was the sheer number and variety of likely planets being found, especially small ones, including several small ones in their stars' habitable zones. The team also highlighted one system in particular. A 14th-magnitude star dubbed Kepler-11 seems to have six super-earths and Neptunes transiting it. All are orbiting in nearly the same plane, five of them in compactly nested orbits closer to the star than Mercury is to the Sun. Two or three of these planets have such unexpectedly low average densities that they would float in water.

Listening to black holes

The lowest note ever produced in the universe is B flat !

Ever wondered what a black hole "sounds" like? As NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope recently discovered, is B flat.

Unfortunately there's no way of listening to it because the note is 57 octaves below middle C.

That's a million billion times lower than the limit of human hearing, making it the deepest note that's ever been detected in the universe.

The Hunt For New Planets

The Extra Terrestrial Planets

They have been among the hottest things in astronomy for more than a decade. But let's face it. Giant Jupiters, fried Neptunes, inflated fat Saturns, pairs of giants in resonant orbits - these are just lead-ups to the main act. What we really need to know about are Exo-Earths. By an "Earth," astronomers generally mean a planet that's small enough to have a solid, rocky surface but big enough to hold a considerable atmosphere, and maybe with the possibility of "liquid" water. In other words, a place where life as we know it might arise and remains. Perhaps even, with a lot of luck, a place where humans could someday walk around on it's surface with nothing more than an oxygen tube, or even without.

Is This an Alien Planet

Most methods for finding extra-solar planets favor worlds very close to their stars. Direct imaging, on the other hand, favors those far away - at least when it looks for an object's own infrared heat glow, rather than reflected starlight. Young giant planets should still be glowing from the heat of their formation. This Gemini Observatory infrared image shows the young star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 and a suspected planet-mass object 2.2 arc seconds from it. This separation amounts to at least330 astronomical units (8 times Pluto's average distance from the Sun) at the star's distance of 500 light-years.

The Mystery of the Million-mass Smith’s Cloud

The beginning

Gail Bieger-Smith is a 69 old woman who lives a quiet life in Wassenaar, a small, wealthy town west of Leiden, the Netherlands. She never expected to be dragged again by her brief astronomy career 45 years ago, but in early January she started getting phone calls from reporters and radio astronomers. The extragalactic cloud she discovered in 1963 had been found to be on a collision course with our Milky Way Galaxy. Some 20 to 40 million years from now, a million Suns' worth of hydrogen gas will smash into the galactic plane, likely causing a huge burst of star formation in the Perseus Arm about a quarter of the way around the galaxy from us. Long forgotten, Smith's Cloud was suddenly headline news.

Meteorites from Mercury

A rare few rocks lying around on Earth may have been blasted here from Mercury, say two Canadian theorists. It is known that most meteorites which found on earth comes from asteroids, but a few only came from the Moon and Mars and they are very rare. They end up here after asteroids or comets smash into these objects hard enough to kick some debris to escape velocity. The ejected pieces go into solar orbit, and a few eventually end up hitting Earth, and even fewer find its way on it's surface if they survive the rough journey of Earth's atmosphere.

Camping and Outdoor Lanterns

What is a lantern

A lantern simply is a portable flashlight case with transparent sides to give to allow the light to be spread around the lantern 360 degrees unlike the spot-bean of the regular flashlight, it is like you taking a living room lamp with you. It usually bring fainter bean than the focused flashlight but you will gain the wide benefit of it's beam.

The Future of Energy from Tides and Waves

Think about taming the huge ocean powers from tides and waves to produce a clean endless energy, water crashes against the steep, rocky cliffs on the western coast of Mainland, the largest of the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. The waves comping from the Atlantic are typically 6 to 10 feet high in the summer. In winter, they can reach 30 feet(about 10 meters). It's a perfect location for the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC), a testing ground for wave and tidal-power installations.