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A composite post I've been thinking about for a while, and finally got off my asteroid to assemble.

Most recently - the discovery that the centaur (icy asteroids orbiting out past Saturn) Chariklo not only has two rings, but most likely a moon.

And the asteroid that sprouted six tails, each pointing in a different direction.


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Five million years ago, protohuman hominids were stumbling around South Africa, and around their feet the industrious dung beetles rolled their precious balls of shit. I'll give you three guesses which one was paying more attention to the wider universe.

Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden has proven in a series of elegant experiments that ( Read more... )

via Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society - Saturn's moon Methone


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Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, on Mars' Tornado Alley

In March, I wrote about a dust devil on Mars spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was 800 meters high, which I said was "huge".

Yeah. A week later, MRO spotted another dust devil… that was 20 kilometers high!

Click to view

from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

"In the race to find the weirdest planet orbiting another star, we may have a front runner: GJ 667Cc, a super-Earth orbiting one star in a triple system that’s actually relatively closeby. And oh yeah: it just so happens to be in just the right spot to be potentially inhabitable!"
And GJ 667 is only 22 light ( Read more... )

via Phil Plait

Photographer Alistair Chapman traveled to Tromso, Norway - 300 km north of the Arctic Circle - to capture video of the aurorae from the recent spate of solar storms. What he caught on camera is remarkable: shimmering, waving, dancing lights moving in real time!

Click to view

Argh! Why didn't anybody tell me that Comet Lovejoy was now a brilliant naked-eye comet!

Comet C/2011 W3 ( Lovejoy) was discovered less than a month ago, and was soon determined to be one of the Kreutz sungrazers, a family of comets thought to have all derived from a single giant comet that broke up a few orbits back, and may have been the one ( Read more... )

Since various near misses by asteroids have been in the news lately, an overdue post about a near miss that was as near as you can get, without it becoming a 'nearly missed'.

Click to view

This is Linda Baker's footage taken from the Grand Teton National Park, of a small, merely car-to-house sized asteroid that skimmed through the Earth's atmosphere over the ( Read more... )

via Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

Astronomers Discover A Wretched Hive Of Scum & Villainy

Or rather, a planet orbiting both stars in a binary system. The search for exoplanets has discovered some pretty awesome stuff out there - such as the fact that at least 40% of the stars surveyed have planets , or systems with 6 planets, 5 orbiting closer ( Read more... )