Posted by Davin Flateau on 22 Mar 2006 at 5:04 pm.
Filed under Astronomy.
Yes, astronomy and space fans, here’s a list of recent articles worthy of your unwavering attention. It’s the return of our Astronomy News Roundup!
Phil Plait “The Bad Astronomer” gets into a spin about Sirius.
British astronomers use a computer simulation to show how solar systems can form big rocky planets, like have been observed around other stars.
More amazing discoveries keep coming from carefully studing the afterglow of the Big Bang (called the cosmic microwave background radiation). The latest findings by analyzing data from the WMAP satellite tells us that the Universe’s first stars were formed about 400 million years after the Big Bang, and there’s even more evidence that the Universe might have gone through a huge, almost instantaneous growth spurt, called inflation, in its first .00000000000000000000000000000000001 (10-35) second of its existence. Stop and think about that - science has allowed us to see back to the very birth of all matter, space and time.
For decades now, we’ve been trying to figure out what causes explosions in the sky so powerful, they pack the power of a billion suns in just a few seconds. These gamma ray bursts seen regularly in the sky were thought to be colliding neutron stars, or a neutron star spiraling into a black hole. But recent findings hint that there may other causes for some of the explosions we’re seeing.
Comet dust from Comet Wild 2 retrieved by the Stardust mission indicate that some of the comet’s materials were originally formed near the sun or possibly other stars. This shakes up the theory of comet formation, which theorizes that the dirty snowballs all formed in the outer reaches of the solar system, where most of them currently reside today.
