Tag Archives: space

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Hubble telescope directly observes an exoplanet

Via pretty much everywhere, here’s some space-pr0n for your Friday morning – real-light images from the Hubble telescope show a planet orbiting the relatively near-by star of Fomalhaut.

Fomalhaut star system image including planet

Astronomy types have been inferring the presence of exoplanets by gravitational lensing for a few years now, but this is apparently the first time one has been imaged directly. [image from linked NASA webpage, which has a full credit list nearly as long as this entire blog post]

Personally, I can’t read this story without being taken back to the golden years of staying up stupidly late to play Elite – if I remember correctly, Fomalhaut was an Imperial system where you could get a great price on slaves…

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Incoming magnetic storm – activate deflector shield!

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Chalk one up for us Brits in the space tech column; boffins at the Rutherford Appleton Labs have developed a ‘mini-magnetosphere’ that could well protect astronauts in spacecraft from harmful solar radiation:

… their prototype offers almost total protection against high energy solar particles. By mimicking the natural protective environment of the Earth, the researchers have scaled the protective magnetic bubble down into an energy efficient, yet powerful deflector shield. This astounding achievement is a big step toward protecting sensitive electronics and the delicate human body against the radioactive effects of manned missions between the planets.

The best bit?

… they have devised a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle.

All of a sudden, space seems a lot more open to colonisation, and a pulp sf trope edges close to being a mundane sf reality. w00t! [via Paul McAuley]

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‘Flux transfer events’ connect Earth and Sun

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News to me:

Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star.

Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.

Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined, according to space scientists who attended the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Ala., last week.

“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said David Sibeck, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

There must be a use for these things, in fiction or real life…

[Image: NASA]

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The Earth’s cooking… so let’s move it further away from the sun!

solar systemTowing an entire planet out of trouble… sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? About as gloriously pulpy a sci-fi plot as you could ever think up. Thankfully it’s not the latest geoengineering idea designed to cope with global warming, but a suggestion on how we might cope with the expansion of the Sun as it ages, which won’t be a problem for a good billion years or so. Then again, it won’t be a problem for us at all unless we get through the next century or two…

Either which way, moving entire planets isn’t something that could be accomplished in a timescale of any great use to humans in a solar emergency, but it makes a nice hypothetical scenario for scientists modelling the dynamics of planetary systems. [image by alicepopkorn]

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Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space – suborbital sex movies delayed

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Virgin Galactic logoSay what you like about Richard Branson, but the man’s got standards and he sticks to ’em. One of those standards would appear to be not corrupting his brands with what some punters might consider to be unsavoury business… at least that’s my guess after hearing that Virgin Galactic have declined an up-front offer of US$1 million cash to film the first* zero-G pr0n movie on SpaceShipTwo.

Who says ethics and entrepreneurship are incompatible, eh? Looks like Rule 34 as applied to zero-G will have to rely on camera tricks and cartoons for a while longer. [via SlashDot]

[ * – Well, the first one featuring humans, at least. ]