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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.

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.

Alien Signal Detected?

A remarkable radio emission from a close by galaxy cough on June 2010 may be the indication of an alien civilization astrophysicists have been looking for.

Infrared Astronomy

Infrared light or (IR) is an electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light that naked eye can see, starting from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.7 micrometres, and extending gradually to 300 micrometers.

These wavelengths correspond to a frequency range of approximately 430 to 1 THz, and also it includes most of the thermal radiation emitted by objects near room temperature.

So it simply bring us to a new world that we never saw before with our naked eyes, and opens up many areas of studies in many field, including astronomy.

Near Earth Objects Danger and Studies

Near-Earth Objects or NEOs are those asteroids that have escaped the confines of the main belt.They roam freely among the planets of the inner Solar System in which Earth is the largest target.Asteroid 433 Eros was the first discovered to have left the main belt and crossed the orbit of Mars.Eros comes within 13 million miles of Earth's orbit. In March 1932, another Mars-crossing asteroid was discovered with a perihelion of 1.08 AU. It was given the name 1221 Amor. It became the prototype Mars-crosser with a perihelion between 1.0 AU and 1.3 AU.

Book of the Dead Mystery and Secrets

The "Book of the Dead" is an illustrated papyrus scroll placed in the tomb as a guidebook for the deceased during his perilous journey through the "Nether World" in the after life. The Book of the Dead is a composite of ancient Egypt's oldest and most important religious texts and magical spells. Some of the writings come from Egypt's Pre-dynastic period, and were 4,000 years old during the time of Jesus. The Book of the Dead is not a book as we know it, but rolls of papyrus that contain a collection of spells, incantations, prayers, hymns, and rituals that were written by the priests over Egypt's long history.

The Book of Gates in the Egyptian Mythology

One of three major myths about the sun god compiled in the New Kingdom(1550–1069 B.C.), the Book of Gates refers to the 12 gates separating the hours of the night.

It is a vast body of writings, spells, and incantations collected from the religious literature stored in temple libraries. The Gates divide the 12 hours of the night and separate the enemies that the sun god will encounter.

Similar myths tell a slightly different story of RE's perilous journey through the 12 hours of the night, and of his joyous rebirth in the eastern sky each morning.

Epsilon Aurigae Solved at Last?

A strange mystery puzzled scientists for years, now it might be solved with the help of newer technologies. A group of astronomers claims a breakthrough in the long-standing mystery of Epsilon Aurigae. This 3rd-magnitude star, a type-F super giant 130,000 times brighter than the Sun, loses half its light for almost two years every 27.1 years when a nearly opaque dust disk, seen edge-on, slides across its face.

Barlow Lenses and Focal Reducers

Simply, it's a concave (negative) lens placed between a telescope objective and eyepiece to increase the magnification, usually by two or three times. The negative lens reduces the angle of convergence of the light cone, effectively making it appear to the eyepiece that the primary has a longer focal length. It was invented in the early1800s by English physicist Peter Barlow (1776–1872)

Crop Circles, History and Theories

Strange circles or unusual geometric designs have been discovered in cereal crops around the world, even in the rice paddies of Japan. The designs are often hundreds of feet in diameter and length and may cover many acres. While many people believe that crop circles are a comparatively recent UFO-related phenomenon that began in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the mystery of the crop circle is hardly new. Unexplained geometric designs occurred in the fields of wheat and corn in Scotland in 1678, and rural residents of England speak of the "corn fairies" that made similar designs in the fields in the late 1800s.

Eyepieces for Telescope

What is the Eyepiece

The eyepiece is the lens assembly at the focal point of the telescope that forms and magnifies the image. Most telescopes, even department store types, come with at least one for initial use. Sadly today many of the major manufacturers deliver their telescopes with just that one eyepiece. Today’s Celestar 8 and Nexstar 8 telescopes,the current editions of the legendary Celestron C8, come with only a single 25-mm Plossl eyepiece (though Celestron does offer a nice observing kit that adds five more eyepieces and a filter set for under $100).