Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Let It Snow... in Outer Space

It seems strangely appropriate that my next post after White Christmas should also involve frozen water. I first saw this photo on El Pais and thought: how cool! Then I did a little research to figure out the story behind the picture (because my Spanish, as we all know, sucks: all I got from El Pais was "a moon of Saturn exhales columns of water vapor"). I find here that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons that I didn't even know existed, is supplying ice to the A-ring around the giant planet. Scientists had been observing water in the ring since the 1990s but didn't know the source of it. Now they do.

It seems that things in space operate pretty much the same as here on earth: finding the puddle is easy—finding the leak ain't.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

A Long Time Ago, In A Voorwerp Far, Far Away...

A schoolteacher in the Netherlands has discovered... something... in space... near IC 2497 (you know the place: it's a real up-and-coming section of the galaxy—the Jersey City to our Milky Way's Manhattan, basically). But other than suspecting that it's gaseous, no one is really sure what is. For the moment, it's being called Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny Van Arkel is the teacher's name and "voorwerp" is Dutch for "object") and the gang over at galaxyzoo are hard at work trying to figure out what the heck it is.