SpaceX is set to try and recover another Falcon 9. Launch is at 4:30 ET http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/13/wa...esupply-rocket-and-tries-drone-ship-recovery/
@elonmusk: Odds of rocket landing successfully today are still less than 50%. The 80% figure by end of year is only bcs many launches ahead.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/...osity-rover-finds-water-below-surface-of-mars Mars has liquid water just below its surface, according to new measurements by Nasa’s Curiosity rover. Until now, scientists had thought that conditions on the red planet were too cold and arid for liquid water to exist, although there were known to be deposits of ice. Prof Andrew Coates, head of planetary science at the Mullard Space, said: “The evidence so far is that any water would be in the form of permafrost. It’s the first time we’ve had evidence of liquid water there now.”
There's an 8 part documentary being made by some well known producer coming out soon. Can't wait to see it
Sarah Cruddas @sarahcruddas 37s38 seconds ago Spacex hit the barge!! Not a good landing, but it hit it. Eric Berger @chronsciguy 1m1 minute ago Rumors that the Falcon 9 booster landed on the drone ship, but not softly. At this point, who knows.
@sarahcruddas: Outcome still unconfirmed, but offical rumor is it hit the barge, but didnt land well.
Elon Musk @elonmusk 11s11 seconds ago Ascent successful. Dragon enroute to Space Station. Rocket landed on droneship, but too hard for survival.
SpaceX @SpaceX 4m4 minutes ago Falcon 9 first stage landing burn and touchdown on Just Read the Instructions https://vine.co/v/euEpIVegiIx
#7. How Many Planets Are in Our Solar System Since Pluto was surprisingly kicked out of the solar system treehouse, we've known that the membership of the Planets Club is subject to change at science's whim. What you may not have realized is that the current inventory of eight planets and one sun is pretty much just science's best guess for the time being. And somewhere out there, Pluto sheds a lonely tear. It sounds bizarre, considering you all saw the same model of the solar system in elementary school. And every time you hear anything about space in the news, it's alwaysbadass telescope this, ornew photograph of faraway galaxy that. We're mapping the edge of the freaking known universe over here. There's no way anything in our own cosmic backyard is escaping our notice, right? Faulkes Telescope Project We even took a picture of a space cloud that looks like a space pig humping a space turtle. The truth is out there, all right. And it's weird. But despite what Big Space wants you to believe, the vast majority of our solar system is stilluncharted and unknown. The area between Mercury and thesun is too bright to see, and the area beyond Uranus is too dark. Scientists are still finding new objects in theasteroid beltby the hundreds of thousands. Oh yeah, and some of astronomers think there might be a second sun. Seriously. NASA They've named it Nemesis because it flings comets at us. Nothing NASA says can convince us this isn't Galactus. You see, not even our best telescope technology can see things that are far behind Pluto, where sunlight doesn't illuminate things all that well and where we're essentially blind. So astronomers have to combine vague clues and guesswork to figure out what's going on out there,kind of like space CSI. First off, the fact that there's a huge gap in asteroids after a certain distance behind Plutotells scientists thatthere's very likely a planet between the size of Earth and Mars that gobbled up all the space rock out there, so yeah, our solar system is probably back up to nine planets again. They're getting really tired of rewriting those middle school textbooks. And speaking of Pluto, astronomers have also discovered an object namedSednaorbiting the sun, and although no one's a hundred percent certain of its size, they're pretty sure it's carrying at least Pluto's heft. Our next goal as a species should be to fashion these dwarf planets into a pair of Truck Balls for Earth. But wait, that's not all, folks. Another little anomaly that astronomers have noticed is that comets' orbits aren't exactly going along as predicted. The explanation? There must be another planet out there that's affecting the icy rocks' orbits. And according to their hypothesis, this mother of a planet is huge-- like, "four times the size of Jupiter" huge. Named Tyche, this giant gas ball is way too far away for sunlight to reach it, but still, scientists are pretty confident that evidence gathered from a NASA telescopewill prove its existence very soon. Who knows, in a few years, naming all the planets may be as hard as naming all 50 states.
In today's installment of "We really don't know as much as we think we do about space": http://www.iflscience.com/space/dark-matter-not-so-dark
For decades, scientific models of our universe have included the possibility that it exists as a long-lived, but not completely stable, sector of space, which could potentially at some time be destroyed upon 'toppling' into a more stable vacuum state. The Standard Model of particle physics opens the possibility of calculating whether the universe's present state is likely to be stable or merely long-lived. A catastrophic bubble of "true vacuum" could theoretically occur at any time or place in the universe, which means (because the bubble of "true vacuum" will expand at the speed of light) the end of our false vacuum could occur at any time. If the Standard Model is correct, the particles and forces we observe in our universe exist as they do because of underlying quantum fields. Quantum fields can have states of differing stability, including 'stable', 'unstable', or 'metastable' (meaning, long-lived but capable of being "toppled" in the right circumstances). If a more stable vacuum state were able to arise, then existing particles and forces would no longer arise as they presently do. Different particles or forces would arise from (and be shaped by) whatever new quantum states arose. The world we know depends upon these particles and forces, so if this happened, everything around us, from subatomic particles to galaxies, and all fundamental forces, would be reconstituted into new fundamental particles and forces and structures. A hypothetical 'vacuum metastability' event would be theoretically possible if our universe was in fact part of a metastable (false) vacuum in the first place. A false vacuum is one that appears stable, and is stable within certain limits and conditions, but is capable of being disrupted and entering a different state which is more stable. If this were the case, a bubble of lower-energy vacuum could come to exist by chance or otherwise in our universe, and catalyze the conversion of our universe to a lower energy state in a volume expanding at nearly the speed of light, destroying all that we know without forewarning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum For anyone looking to actually become competent at physics, you should reaaaally pick up the Feynman Lectures. Finally started reading it. Very good. It's expensive though ~$120 -> $220 depending where you buy it. http://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectu...e=UTF8&qid=1429459364&sr=8-2&keywords=feynman
Merica i know you just copied a post from some article, but I highly doubt rewriting textbooks is preventing scientists from naming new planets. If anything, they'd love to have a chance to add something new worthy of a new edition to force schools and students to buy.
So our telescopes cannot see things beyond Pluto but it is a fact that there is a gap in asteroids beyond Pluto?
I'm not against the idea that other planet like objects are beyond the orbit of Pluto, in fact that is probably likely, but there have been numerous sky studies that rule out anything Jupiter sized or bigger up to 26000 AU from the sun in our solar system
What about Nemesis? I thought it was a dumb idea until I watched a hour long documentary about it and it answers a lot of questions that people cant answer, like the current mass extinction pattern. Spoiler
It's a cool theory but scientifically is unfounded. The IRAS, 2MASS and WISE surveys have been unable to find a cool brown dwarf up to 10 light years away and the consensus of the scientific community because of it have written off the existents a of nemisis star. The 26 million year "cycle" of extinctions has also been debunked a bunch of times both statistically and with the crater record. The most accepted of many competing theories for comet bombardment of the inner solar system, the Keiper Cliff, and other gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system is a astronomically recent close passage of a rouge star to our solar system but not something that is tied to our solar system
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-universe/nemesis-the-suns-evil-twin-2450368/ My memory failed me, it was the show "The Universe" Season 6 Ep 2 "Nemesis: The Sun's Evil Twin