Astronomers have spent a lifetime chasing the holy grail according to Michio Kaku, the author of the New York Times best-selling book Physics of the Future. On December 5, 2011, the Kepler space mission discovered an extrasolar planet that has been referred to as Earth’s twin in the media. This planet is also in the Goldilocks zone as it orbits its host star.
A lot of UFO sightings and alien abductions happen in Arizona. Maybe it's because the clear, unobstructed skies over Arizona make it easier to see UFO's, or because of our close proximity to Area 51 and Roswell, New Mexico, or maybe it's because the red rocks of Sedona and elsewhere in the state are said to have mystical powers. Whatever the reason, space aliens love Arizona and its inhabitants.
While we may have thoroughly conquered the moon in the last century, this century is going to be all about the red planet as far as space exploration goes. We know a good deal about our neighbor planet--enough to have mapped it plenty--but there are still plenty of mysteries within that red soil. We've seen traces of water--does that mean there must have been some kind of tiny life on Mars once? Are we really Martians, brought over as microbes to Earth via wayward rocks? We're not sure, but NASA's latest exploratory bot is on its way to find out.
I felt that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos would be a great way to start familiarizing yourself with astronomy if you are a space enthusiast. This thirteen-part television series is really an enjoyable way to learn about space although it is three decades old. However, all of the episodes have an update at the end which shows developments that occurred in the early 1990s.
An unmanned Atlas V rocket launched towards Mars from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory rover. The rover, dubbed Curiosity, will explore Mars's Gale Crater, looking for organic materials that might suggest life forms once existed on the planet.
It will take 8 1/2 months before Curiosity reaches the surface of Mars, more than 350 million miles away. It is scheduled to land on the planet's surface in August 2012.
I have a real interest in life that exists outside of the Earth and I guess you could have gleaned that from the articles that I have written on this blog. This post will continue on that trend.
The question of how the universe came to be has always been a hot topic for clerics and scientists alike. It's pretty much the biggest unanswered 'why?' out there, yet there are loads of smaller mysteries about the origins of our more local astronomical surroundings. We think all things began as gas and space dust, but how did solar systems form out of the amorphous chaos? How did our revolving planet and its gravitational dance with its neighbors come about?
