Venus is set to move across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth in a more than six-and-a-half-hour transit, which starts just after 22.00 GMT on Tuesday. The transit is a very rare astronomical phenomenon that will not be witnessed again until 2117. Observers will position themselves in northwest America, the Pacific, and East Asia to catch the whole event. But some part of the spectacle wil…
it to test ideas that will help them probe Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy, and to learn more about Venus itself and its complex atmosphere. Venus transits occur four times in approximately 243 years; more precisely, they appear in pairs of events separated by about eight years and these pairs are separated by about 105 or 121 years. The reason for the long intervals lies in the fact th…
otage of herself on to the internet and has gained a cult following around the world. At last count, Venus Palermo’s free internet TV channel had around 30,000 viewers, and her social networking pages 20,000 followers. Venus Palermo’s online tutorials showing how to mimic her look have been watched 10 million times across the globe – including by a host of British schoolgirls desperate to im…
Venus is set to move across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth in a more than six-and-a-half-hour transit, which starts just after 22.00 GMT on Tuesday. The transit is a very rare astronomical phenomenon that will not be witnessed again until 2117. Observers will position themselves in northwest America, the Pacific, and East Asia to catch the whole event. Venus is set to move across the f…
Venus is set to move across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth in a more than six-and-a-half-hour transit, which starts just after 22.00 GMT on Tuesday. The transit is a very rare astronomical phenomenon that will not be witnessed again until 2117. Observers will position themselves in northwest America, the Pacific, and East Asia to catch the whole event. METHOD 1: Cut two holes in…
Millions of people around the world switch off their lights to mark Earth Hour between 8.30 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. in their local times on the last Saturday of March each year. In 2013, Earth Hour occurs one week earlier, on March 23. What is Earth Hour? Earth Hour is a global WWF (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) climate change initiative. It is an event that aims to create awareness of people…
Earth Hour is a worldwide event that is organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and is held on the last Saturday of March annually, encouraging households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change. Earth Hour was an ultra-extreme-leftist event conceived by WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald in 200…
…cois Fressin pointed out that even these have far more volume than the Earth and it would be wrong to consider them truly “Earth-like”. Earlier this month the telescope discovered Kepler-22b, a planet 2.4 times the size of the Earth situated in the middle of its habitable zone. But scientists say that Kepler 22-b may not be suitable for life. “You could fit 13 Earths inside Kepler-22b,” said Dr. F…
…w the Moon join the celestial dance with the planetary pair; it will return in late March, appearing to head up and past the descending Jupiter and then Venus. The most anticipated planetary event for 2012 will be the transit of Venus in early June, when it will appear from some locations on Earth to pass in front of the Sun. …
Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 150-foot space rock orbiting Earth, will pass closer than geostationary satellites to our planet on February next year. NASA’s Impact Risk report said that the odds of the space rock actually hitting Earth are very low indeed – but on February 15, 2013, it will pass just 17,000 miles from Earth, closer than “geostationary” satellites. If an asteroid of that size…
…is surprisingly free of craters, implying that geological activity is constantly reshaping the moon, as also happens here. The icy landscape of Titan was first discovered by Earth-bound researchers in 2004, when the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft which orbits Saturn first broke through the moon’s atmosphere. Astronomers studying Titan, Saturn's largest moon, have described it as "a wei…
NASA has identified a 460 ft wide asteroid, 2011 AG5, soaring through space and calculated that it could potentially impact Earth on February 5th 2040. The 2011 AG5 has already attracted the concern of the UN Action Team on near-Earth objects, which has begun discussing ways to divert it. The UN Action Team has put the odds of it hitting us at one in 625, though that could change nearer the time….
e of her top tips is to use contact lenses with a full, opaque color to make your eyes look doll-like. While the living doll-look is going global, in Asia it has been a long-running trend. As early as 2010 it was reported that an increasing amount of Japanese women were aspiring to look like dolls, embracing femininity and obliterating sexuality altogether. Experts however have expressed their con…
…, strengthen environmental checks, and implement stricter rare earth environmental policies,” Su Bo was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency. According to Xinhua, the association will have 155 members, including some of the biggest producers of rare earths, and report to the Ministry of Industry and Technology which regulates production of these elements. …
tic materials might exist there. “GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” said lead author Zachory Berta, from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The planet was discovered in 2009 by ground-based telescopes. It is about 2.7 times the Earth’s diameter, but weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits its red-dwarf star at a distance of just two million km, meaning te…
…s analyzed to look for “wobbles” in a star’s motion caused the gravitational “tug” of planets orbiting it. The new planet has a mass around 4.5 times the Earth, and orbits a star called GJ 667C, 22 light years from Earth – just next door, in galactic terms. Astronomers from European Southern Observatory in La Silla Paranal, Chile, South America, have found a planet which is one of the…
57th parallel south, which passes just below South America The plummeting six-ton satellite has been caught on film. Astrophotographer Thierry Legault’s clip, shot in northern France, shows the 20-year-old Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), appearing as a beaming mass of light as it careers to Earth. NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney admitted: “We know it is going to hit…
…of the natural world. With water demand rising, forests and fish stocks declining, and lack of action on climate change, life on Earth may be at risk to an irreversible change The last, published in 2007, warned that factors such as rising demand for freshwater were affecting human wellbeing. For the current edition, researchers assessed progress in 90 important environmental issues. They conclu…
2005 YU55, an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier whistled past Earth at a distance of 202,000 miles away, slightly nearer than the moon, on November 8. The asteroid is the largest such object to come so close in 35 years but NASA said ther is no chance of impact with the space rock known as 2005 YU55. NASA has been monitoring the quarter-mile-wide asteroid as it approached Earth. The resear…
Asteroid 2012 JU passed within nearly 119,000 miles of Earth on May 14, just a whisker away from us in astronomical terms. Indeed, the bus-sized asteroid came closer to us than the moon does, with our celestial partner spinning around us at a distance of 238,000 miles. Luckily, we were never in any danger from the 12-metre wide asteroid, but it is another reminder of the risk we face from these r…
…extreme, glaciers advance. The idea that these could dictate the cycles of glaciation in Earth’s climate was first proposed by Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch in the first half of the 20th century. “These periods of deglaciation saw massive climate changes,” Prof. Peter Huybers said. “Sea level increased by 130 meters, temperatures rose by about 5 degrees C, and atmospheric CO2 we…
19 Russia’s space agency says the fuel should burn up upon re-entry and the Cobalt-57 won’t pose any threat of radioactive contamination. However, several dozen fragments with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) will fall on the Earth’s surface. The space agency says that the rough area where the probe’s fragments will fall could only be calculated a few days ahead of its plu…
Today is the last chance to see the natural wonder of a total lunar eclipse in 2011. The Earth passed between the moon and the sun this morning, treating early risers to a cosmic, rusty-red lunar light spectacular. And additionally it was a rare chance to see an “impossible” eclipse, with the moon red and the rising sun in the sky simultaneously. Unlike total solar eclipses total lunar eclipses a…
e National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s storm scale of “severe” and “extreme”, space weather centre physicist Doug Biesecker said. This storm is the strongest for radiation since May 2005. The radiation – in the form of protons – came flying out of the sun at 93 million miles per hour. “The whole volume of space between here and Jupiter is just filled with protons and…
Scientists have proposed a new idea in the long-running debate over the Moon formation. What is certain is that some sort of impact from another body freed material from the young Earth and the resulting debris coalesced into today’s Moon. But the exact details of the impactor’s size and speed have remained debatable. In a report online to be published in Icarus, researchers suggest t…
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