NASA’s Operation IceBridge has launched its Antarctic 2012 campaign, flying high-priority missions measuring polar ice from a base of operations at the tip of Patagonia on the Strait of Magellan. They have even made a return visit to the Pine Island Glacier, the site of last year’s discovery of a massive rift in the ice.

Sea ice doesn’t always hold the allure of a massive ice sheet, or a crevassed blue glacier spilling between mountains, but it comes in array of shapes and sizes and has its own ephemeral beauty. Operation IceBridge studies sea ice at both poles, and also runs across interesting formations on route to other targets. Operation IceBridge returned to the Pine Island Glacier twice in 2012, and NASA glaciologist Kelly Brunt discusses the implications of the glacier’s impending calving event.

Operation IceBridge has now returned to the Pine Island Glacier, not once, but twice in 2012. And the year-old giant crack in the glacier, poised to create an iceberg the size of New York City? Well it’s still there, and that iceberg has yet to break free. But the rift has grown longer, much wider, and spawned a secondary crack. Before we talk about when that mighty berg Continue reading What Scientists Are Seeing Over Antarctica →

It was one of the greatest mysteries in modern science: a series of brief but extremely bright flashes of ultra-high energy light coming from somewhere out in space. These gamma ray bursts were first spotted by spy satellites in the 1960s. It took three decades and a revolution in high-energy astronomy for scientists to figure out what they were.

Far out in space, in the center of a seething cosmic maelstrom. Extreme heat. High velocities. Atoms tear, and space literally buckles. Photons fly out across the universe, energized to the limits found in nature. Billions of years later, they enter the detectors of spacecraft stationed above our atmosphere. Our ability to record them is part of a new age of high-energy astronomy, and a new age of insights into nature at its most extreme. What can we learn by witnessing the violent birth of a black hole?

The outer limits of a black hole, call the event horizon, is subject to what Albert Einstein called frame dragging, in which space and time are pulled along on a path that leads into the black hole. As gas, dust, stars or planets fall into the hole, they form into a disk that spirals Continue reading Birth of a Black Hole →

Watch for the full episode, coming soon to Cosmic Journeys. Far out in space, in the center of a seething cosmic maelstrom. Extreme heat. High velocities. Atoms tear, and space literally buckles. Photons fly out across the universe, energized to the limits found in nature. Billions of years later, they enter the detectors of spacecraft stationed above our atmosphere.

Our ability to record them is part of a new age of high-energy astronomy, and a new age of insights into nature at its most extreme. What can we learn by witnessing the violent birth of a black hole?

There have been times when our understanding of the universe has reached a standstill, when our grasp of the workings of time and space, the nature of matter and energy, do not fully square with what we observe. In those times, opposing worldviews cannot be resolved.

So it was in the spring of 1920, when astronomers debated the scale of the universe. The scene was the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. On one side was the astronomer Harlow Shapley, known for his groundbreaking work on the size of our galaxy and the position of the sun within it.

Shapley described the Continue reading Cosmic Journeys: Birth of a Black Hole – Preview →

Note: population figures in this video are for metropolitan areas. Humans have created thousands of settlements, and we are lucky enough to be able to see some of them from the eyes of ISS astronauts. These images are incredibly difficult to take from a spacecraft traveling along at almost 28,000 kilometers per hour. The images are held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in a special archive for astronaut photography. Watch for the great cities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Johannesburg, New Delhi, Toronto, Sydney, and many others. All included population numbers are based on estimated metropolitan populations.

Original ISS Images –
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From Hubblecast and the incomparable Dr. J. We live in a brightly colored world, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. But if you hold a prism up to the whitest of lights, you get a rainbow. For scientists, unweaving this rainbow tells them about the properties of the Universe. Hubble’s ability to study its colors is at the heart of many of its most important discoveries.

City lights broadcast our existence into the night of space. Imagine how the Earth will look to astronauts in a century’s time or longer? These images are incredibly difficult to take from a spacecraft traveling along at almost 28,000 kilometers per hour. The images are held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in a special archive for astronaut photography. Watch for the great cities of Beijing, Istanbul, Melbourne, Montreal, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Buenos Aires, Brasilia (one of our favorites), and more.

From NASA and Bela Lugosi. An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests. A new analysis of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a “zombie” world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet — known as Fomalhaut b — is actually just a giant dust cloud.

“Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we’re seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud,” co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, has made it’s first major heliospheric discovery. Finding unprecedented temperature changes, we are gaining critical data about how heat travels from the sun’s core to its various destinations in our solar system.

IRIS is designed to provide significant new information to increase our understanding of energy transport into the corona and solar wind and provide an archetype for all stellar atmospheres. The unique instrument capabilities, coupled with state of the art 3-D modeling, will fill a large gap in our knowledge of this dynamic region of the solar atmosphere. The mission will extend the scientific output of existing heliophysics spacecraft that follow the effects of energy release processes from the sun to Earth.

IRIS will provide key insights into all these processes, and thereby advance our understanding of the solar drivers of space weather from the corona to the far heliosphere, by combining high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy for the entire chromosphere and adjacent regions. IRIS will resolve in space, time, and wavelength the dynamic geometry from the chromosphere to the low-temperature corona to shed much-needed light on the physics of this magnetic interface region.

From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. While Curiosity prepares to snap pictures at Point Lake on Mars, here’s a round up the rover’s 17 cameras, including why some shoot in color and others go for black-and-white.

Astronomers working at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile have discovered seven planets orbiting the star Gliese 667C.

Two exoplanets have been discovered in the star’s habitable zone, which has just the right range of distance where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.

A super-Earth is an extrasolar planet with a mass higher than Earth’s, but substantially below the mass of the Solar System’s smaller gas giants Uranus and Neptune, which are both more or less 15 Earth masses.

The term super-Earth refers only to the mass of the planet, and does not imply anything about the surface conditions or habitability.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile found out that 40 per cent of red dwarves are orbited by super-Earths. Red Dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy, so there might be tens of billions of such planets in our galaxy alone.