Saturn, the movie
This extraordinary excerpt is from an upcoming Imax movie that uses Cassini orbiter imagery (NO computer generated images) to create some stunning flybys and flythroughs of the Saturnian system...
Life, Unbounded
Discussion and news about planets, exoplanets, and astrobiology
Starbreath
Deserving of a quick post is a series of extraordinary time-lapse movies showing the complex motion of jets of matter expelled from baby-stars. Followed for more than ten years by the Hubble Space Telescope these systems are some 1,300 light years from us...
Pitch Black: The (almost) dark truth about hot Jupiters
Not an exoplanet - but the same principle: Venus transiting the Sun as seen in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths by the TRACE spacecraft (NASA/LMSAL) The first exoplanet discovered around a normal star in 1995 was anything but normal in comparison to our own solar system...
The X Factor: Solar storms and life as we know it
Back in February 2011 the Sun underwent a so-called X class solar flare event, prompting the following Life, Unbounded post. I thought I'd bring it out to air again in light of the solar flare events happening right now, and the potential for some disruption of our Earthly activities...
Old briny: Mars, water, and the search for life
Let’s get something clear right away, Mars has lots of water on and close to its surface. Over the years we’ve seen an increasing number of measurements and discoveries that indicate very significant reservoirs of martian water...
Old Briny: Mars, water, and the search for life
Northern polar ice cap of Mars (NASA/Mars Global Surveyor) Let's get something clear right away, Mars has lots of water on and close to its surface. Over the years we've seen an increasing number of measurements and discoveries that indicate very significant reservoirs of martian water...
Juno
Juno and Jupiter (NASA/JPL) Another quick refurbishment from the archives, this one about the Juno mission to Jupiter. With any luck in a few hours Juno will launch and be on its way, arriving at Jupiter in 2016...
The Juno Mission to Jupiter: What the Probe Will Look For
Another quick refurbishment from the archives, this one about the Juno mission to Jupiter. With any luck in a few hours Juno will launch and be on its way, arriving at Jupiter in 2016.
Favorite nuclear flavors
Light or heavy? The nuclear choice On the heels of #SciAmChem day I thought I'd pull a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that could use a little airing and has a chemical slant...
The Molecules That Made the Universe
“We are starstuff”, it’s a well-used phrase in popular astronomy (yes, we are. The nuclei of most heavy atoms in your body were forged long before our solar system existed, a million kilometers down inside the cores of long-since-gone massive stars)...
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