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What Makes Balloons Bang When Popped

What makes it goes bang when popped, the science behind it.

History of Solar System Buried on the Moon

Unlike the Earth's surface, which is being constantly scrubbed dean by erosion and plate tectonics, the face of the moon is ancient and scarred, sporting some of the largest impact craters in the Solar System.

New Type of Cosmic Background

A team of scientists using a sensitive balloon-borne instrument has found an unexplained hiss of relatively low-frequency radio pervading the universe. The discovery represents yet another type of "cosmic background radiation" - distant emission coming from everywhere on the sky - to go along with the backgrounds previously discovered in microwaves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays.

Planets Without Stars, Wanders Galaxy Alone

Astronomers have found a new type of planet drifting by itself through space, unbounded to any star. By scanning the crowded center of our Milky Way Galaxy, the international team discovered up to 10 Jupiter sized "orphan planets; about 10,000 to 20,000 light-years from Earth. Details appeared in a May 19 study in Nature.

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The Most Distant Galaxy Super Cluster

Galaxies are usually found as members of clusters. Rich clusters can have thousands of members and poor clusters may have only dozens of galaxies. The clustering of galaxies is an important constraint on cosmological models and the degree of clustering in the Universe today is related to the anisotropies in the matter distribution of the early universe.

New Types of Supernovae

Supernovae - stars that explode completely? - come in an ever more bewildering variety. They were originally classified by their spectra rather by any understanding of what was actually happening, but we now know that they come in two basic varieties. Spectral Type Ia explosions are the complete thermonuclear detonation of a carbon-rich white-dwarf star that becomes overloaded with more than 1.4 solar masses of material.

The Ogopogo

Hidden treasures and lost cities are often a sparkling targets to bounty hunters. Now it seems mythical beasts are also the object of bounty hunters' affections. Between August 2000 and September 2001three companies from around Lake Okanegan promised $2 million to anyone who could find definitive, living proof that the fabled Ogopogo monster did exist.