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Astronomy: The New Way

January 3, 2011

Our video based astronomy course Advanced Astronomy for Beginners is now open. Check out the free videos at www.advancedastronomy.com, all you need is to enter your email (which of course will not be sold, shared or whatever) . The videos are unique, you cannot see them anywhere else. There is also our Youtube channel with [...]

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Powerful micro-quasar discovered

November 11, 2010

A micro-quasar is a stellar black hole system showing the same features as quasars, but at a much smaller scale. This NASA video is about such an object in the galaxy NGC 7793, which is only 13 million light-years away. Fascinating.

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Evolution of the Universe

November 11, 2010

This NASA video is a (very) short summary of the evolution of the Universe. It’s nice since it discusses the large-scale structure evolution and the origin of galaxies. What’s not there is a discussion about dark matter, since that controlled the baryon assembly into the first stars and the protogalaxies. Natural, since the video is [...]

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Mysterious structures in the Milky Way

November 11, 2010

NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray telescope has discovered two bubbles, stretching out perpendicular to the galactic plane. My guess is that they are formed by the supermassive black hole, as a low power variant of jets in active galaxies.

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Comet Hartley surprises

November 5, 2010

There was a fly-by of comet Hartley the other day, which shows surprising detail. There small objects become quite active when heated by the Sun, producing jets of gaseous material. They are together with asteroids remnants of solar system formation 4.6 billion years ago.

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Quasars reionized helium in the early universe

November 2, 2010

Shortly after big bang both hydrogen and helium was ionized and had lost their electrons. At recombination a few hundred thousand years later hydrogen atoms were formed and the background radiation was released. But what about the helium? Using Hubble’s new spectrograph, the helium was in fact reionized a few hundred million years after big [...]

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Motion of stars in globular cluster

November 2, 2010

The well-known Omega Centauri has been studied with Hubble, which led to insights as to individual future star movements inside the cluster. Very cool!

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Amazing landscapes on Mars

November 2, 2010

The HiRISE experiment with a low-flying camera above Mars produces amazing pictures of the landscape, now about 16,000 pictures to be used as e.g. wallpapers.

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Genetic Engineering in Space

November 2, 2010

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — NASA’s human spaceflight program might take some giant leaps forward if the agency embraces genetic engineering techniques more fully, according to genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. The biologist, who established the J. Craig Venter Institute that created the world’s first synthetic organism earlier this year, told a crowd here Saturday (Oct. [...]

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