Archive for the ‘Science and Technology’ Category

Earth impact hazard

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Simulated Meteor Crash

By  Tasha Moideen

An ominous simulation of the effects of a large meteor crash featured on the Discovery Channel program, Miracle Planet, depicts our blue planet being transformed into a glowing, fiery ball of death and destruction.  See also Britannica’s entry “Earth impact hazard.”The danger of collision posed by astronomical small bodies whose orbits around the Sun carry them near Earth. These objects include the rocky asteroids and their larger fragments and the icy nuclei of comets.
Space in the vicinity of Earth contains a great number of solid objects in a range of sizes. The tiniest (millimetre-size and smaller) and by far most abundant ones, » Read more of Simulated Meteor Crash

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Science and Technology

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Hubble Images Solve Galactic Filament Mystery.

By KENNETH CHANG

This post comes from The New York Times. A tangle of spidery filaments stretches outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 as if they were dendrites of an intergalactic nerve cell.

NGC 1275, located 235 million light-years from Earth near the center of a clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster, has posed a puzzle: How have these filaments, which are made of gas much cooler than the surrounding intergalactic cloud, persisted for perhaps 100 million years? Why haven’t they warmed, dissipated or collapsed to form stars? Click Here to read the rest of this article.

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