Back in February these pages discussed a newly discovered long-period comet, ISON (otherwise known as C/2012 s1), that is falling sunwards for what is probably its first passage through the inner solar system later this year – on a beautiful near parabolic orbit...
Links for the top five stories: The Other Blue Planet Neptune’s New Moon Sizing Up Neutron Stars Meteorite Reveals History of Mars’ Crust Black Hole Devours Cosmic Cloud
I’m writing this post for two reasons. One is to recommend a new book by Columbia astrobiologist Caleb Scharf (who also writes a terrific Scientific American blog, “Life, Unbounded“), and the other is to defend an old book of mine...
“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet.” -Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest While I am a also a fan of work more scientifically accurate in nature, the imaginative leap [...]..
Since quite early in the history of the discovery of planets around other stars it’s been apparent that the likelihood of certain types of planets around a star is related to the abundance of heavy elements in that system...
Do yourself a favor. Don't read this article just yet--first, take a moment to zoom around this incredible panorama of our galaxy and soak in the splendor: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/glimpse360/aladin...
More to explore: Earth life ‘may have come from Mars’ (BBC News) Maybe Mars Seeded Earth’s Life, Maybe It Didn’t (Scientific American Blog Network) China Plans Its First Unmanned Moon Landing This Year (New York Times) China to launch lunar probe for landing mission (Xinhua) NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon under Greenland Ice Sheet (NASA) Space [...]..
Pedro Ferreira’s book “The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity” essentially tells us what other people did with Einstein’s general theory of relativity after he developed it...
Earlier this week I had the very great pleasure of catching up with Lee Billings, the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude, a beautifully written and provocative new book about the quest to find other Earths, other life in the universe...
More to explore: Exoplanet colour confirmed for first time: it’s blue, but not pale — and nothing like Earth (Scientific American Blog Network) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/b… Diamond ‘Super-Earth’ May Not be Quite as Precious (University of Arizona) http://uanews.org/story/diamond-super… Strange Exoplanet’s ‘Backwards’ Orbit Explained by Extra Star, Planet (Space.com) http://www.space.com/19421-backward-a… Astronomers Find Most Ancient Planet Yet (Scientific [...]..
In the Star Trek universe, handheld medical tricorders became standard issue for Starfleet vessels as early as the mid-22nd century. Here in a little place we like to call “reality,” a competition seeks to help deliver such all-in-one health analyzers at least 100 years ahead of schedule...
Stunning new images of young planetary systems create a profound cosmic perspective
The first 21st-century images of a dark vortex in Neptune's atmosphere will help probe the ice giant's atmospheric behavior
A pair of scientific papers suggest that the ALMA observatory may have detected 2 new "planet-scale" objects associated with the outer realms of the solar system. But should we be awed or skeptical?...
As the art director of information graphics at Scientific American, I’m charged with developing explanatory art for some pretty mind-blowing topics.
![Brown Dwarf Boasts Brightest Auroras Ever Seen [Slide Show]](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/0D318D03-95F2-4B34-969DB446C5D963FD_agenda.jpg?w=275&h=154&fit=crop)
Astronomers just spotted auroras on a brown dwarf for the first time, but this is just the latest case of known extraterrestrial auroras
The rare spectacle of a total solar eclipse has given scientists throughout history fleeting opportunities to delve into everything from the sun’s chemistry to Einsteinian relativity to Earth’s place in the solar system...
The second-closest, properly sunlike star seems to be at least as interesting as the Alpha Centauri stars
Ever feel that broadcast TV fails to tackle the big issues? I don’t mean the state of the economy, healthcare, the future of clean energy, or what B-list celebrities had for breakfast – I mean the Really Big Issues...
We’re used to thinking of the space between the stars as void, bereft of all but the most sparsely distributed atoms and molecules, or the occasional microscopic grain of silicon or carbon dust...
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