Astroengine.com jQuery(function(){ jQuery('ul.superfish').superfish(); }); .tcf_input {display:none !important; visibility:hidden !important;} Home About Contact Lifestream Radio Astronomy IYA2009 Conspiracies 2012 Pseudo-science Earth Meteors/Meteorites Moon Featured Articles Breaking news Guest articles Research Focus Opinion Misc. Astroengine news Site development Brian Bat Foundation Carnival of Space! Conferences Coolness Discovery News Discovery Space Humour Interviews Movies Off the Record Outreach Radio Shows Astroengine Live! Sci-Fi/Sci-Fact Social media Space Lifestyle Magazine Physics Black Holes Chaos Theory LHC Neutron stars & Magnetars Quantum Mechanics Relativity Solar Physics Stellar Physics Supernovae String Theory Virtual Reality Warp Drive Wormholes Planets Exoplanets Jupiter Mars Saturn Solar System Asteroids Comets Space Settlement Space Weather Space Flight ESA JAXA Missions NASA NewSpace UKSA Universe Cosmology Dark Energy Dark Matter Galaxies Gravitational Waves Posted by Ian O'Neill in Astronomy, Coolness, Discovery News, Exoplanets, Featured Articles, Humour, Sci-Fi/Sci-Fact on May 19th, 2011 | View Comments Could Kepler Detect Borg Cubes? Why Not. "That's no sunspot." Assuming Star Trek‘s Borg Collective went into overdrive and decided to build a huge cube a few thousand miles wide, then yes, the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope should be able to spot it. But how could Kepler distinguish a cube from a nice spherical exoplanet? With the help of Ray Villard over at Discovery News, he did some digging and found a paper dating back to 2005 — long before Kepler was launched. However, researcher Luc Arnold, of...Read More // Posted by Ian O'Neill on May 22nd, 2011 When an Astrophysicist Nee... Stars of the Northern Hemisphere, Ashland Astronomy Studio Imagine the scene: I’m having a romantic walk on a clear night with my wife along the beach. We see a brief flash of light and Deb says, “Hey, a meteor!” I then proceed to tell her that most meteors are actually no bigger than a grain of sand and they originate from comets, even though she already knew that. Feeling quite...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on April 21st, 2011 Want to Feel Good? Watch t... The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo. I actually posted this jaw-dropping video on Discovery News last month, but today it got picked up on Digg, so I was reminded why I had to feature it. The video is actually composed of 22,000 high-definition photographs, stitched together is a finely crafted time lapse video. The photographer in question is Terje Sorgjerd who braved -22C temperatures in the...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on April 20th, 2011 Screaming Exoplanets: Dete... Exoplanets may reveal their location through radio emissions (NASA) In 2009, I wrote about a fascinating idea: in the hunt for “Earth-like” exoplanets, perhaps we could detect the radio emissions from a distant world possessing a magnetosphere. This basically builds on the premise that planets in the solar system, including Earth, generate electromagnetic waves as space plasma interacts...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on April 20th, 2011 Sometimes, You Just Have T... It's a chocolate Mars rover! Photo credit and cake-making skills: Will Gater OK, so Astroengine has been a little quiet of late due to some uber-cool space news writing over at Discovery News, but to kick off an era of increased productivity (and not just Photoshop fun), I just had to share this superb chocolate-covered tribute to Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Created by my mate Will Gater, science...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on April 1st, 2011 What Happened to Mars Rove... "A big rusty transporter came over the hill and the Jawas sold it for scrap metal..." -- Paul Quinn NASA is giving Mars rover Spirit one more month to signal that she’s still alive before search operations are scaled back and attention shifted to her sister rover Opportunity. Unfortunately, the prognosis isn’t good. It’s been a little over a year since Spirit last communicated...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on March 28th, 2011 The Ultimate Paternity Tes... "Dad?" A scene from War of the Worlds. This rather outlandish, sci-fi notion comes straight from the fertile minds of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University who are proposing a biology experiment that could be sent on a future Mars surface mission. If their hypothesis is proven, we wouldn’t only have an answer for the age old question: Are we...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on March 6th, 2011 The Day Aliens InvadedR... UPDATE (Mon. 9:50 a.m. PT): Shocker. NASA refutes Hoover’s claims. Apparently his paper failed peer review for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology… in 2007! More here: “NASA Refutes Alien Discovery Claim — Discovery News” Original post: On Saturday, a NASA astrobiologist announced his “irrefutable proof” that aliens — the size of...Read More Posted by Ian O'Neill on February 15th, 2011 When Stardust Met Tempel, ... Comet Tempel 1 near Stardust-NExT close approach (NASA) A NASA spacecraft, a lonely comet and a Valentine’s date with no comparison. Last night, NASA’s veteran Stardust-NExT mission successfully visited its second comet, Tempel 1. Having already been visited by NASA’s Deep Impact mission in 2005, it’s hard not to wonder whether Tempel 1 was a little apprehensive. Deep Impact...Read More Recent From Astroengine Opinion The Day Aliens Invaded… [UPDA... It’s Official: “2012... Who Cares if Ashton Kutcher is Prep... Life on Mars? Only in The Sun.... Indonesia ‘Meteorite’ W... NASA’s Asteroid Mission: Scar... Warning, Over-Hyped Title Alert: Bu... What’s NASA’s Biggest A... Recent From No Doomsday in 2012