( Read more... )

Pluto Is an Exceedingly Minor Planet
( Read more... )

By Mike ("Plutokiller") Brown:

Ten years of Eris

"You got a tumble dryer? That's nice. My dryer is powered by NUCLEAR FUSION." pic.twitter.com/HLHU2hlrgm
- Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) November 8, 2014

From Tom Chivers. This comet is currently being visited by the ESA's Rosetta Spacecraft.
( Pictures behind cut )

Notes from A Song of Fire and Ice and SCIENCE: A panel on George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Saturday, July 5, 2014, at Convergence 2014.

One of the distinctive features of this world is that the seasons last for multiple years, and the length of each season is unpredicable. How can this happen? Not by axial tilt, as on our Earth. Nicole ( Read more... )

Nathan Taylor, Why Astronomers and Journalists should pay heed to Biologists about ET.

Years ago I wrote something that mentioned similar issues: Extraterrestrial Intelligence: A skeptical view. This was long before the Kepler space probe. However, Taylor seems to be saying the fundamentals of the issue have not changed ( Read more... )

Astronomer Mike Brown.

Rachel and I heard him speak at the University of Minnesota two years ago. I wrote about it here.

The Disappearing Universe

Also see Why does light stretch as the Universe expands?.

Another Incredibly Distant Member of the Solar System
Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from the Sun! That’s 80 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. No other solar system object ( Read more... )