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Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:01:08 -0600

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Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:00:55 -0600

oliphillips: Hey World by Marc Johns

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:58:07 -0600

oliphillips:

Hey World

by Marc Johns

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:08:58 -0600

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:54:42 -0600

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:45:41 -0600

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:45:13 -0600

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:45:09 -0600

mydarkenedeyes: The Early Morning by Steven Rhodes

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:45:06 -0600

mydarkenedeyes:

The Early Morning by Steven Rhodes

beautiful-guys: Francisco Lachowski

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:45:01 -0600

beautiful-guys:

Francisco Lachowski

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:44:57 -0600

oxane: Ghost bear by Karin Hagen Study for a painting

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:37:07 -0600

oxane:

Ghost bear by Karin Hagen

Study for a painting

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:36:53 -0600

oliphillips: The Barrage Lifts by Thomas Doyle

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:35:09 -0600

oliphillips:

The Barrage Lifts

by Thomas Doyle

justforyoufranciscolachowski: polaroid!

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:33:17 -0600

justforyoufranciscolachowski:

polaroid!

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Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:33:07 -0600

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Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:18:43 -0600

oliphillips: A Dinosaur on a Skateboard. Available on Society6

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:18:38 -0600

oliphillips:

A Dinosaur on a Skateboard.

Available on Society6

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Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:44:02 -0600

ikenbot: Astronomers Use Kepler Spacecraft to Search for...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:43:27 -0600

ikenbot:

Astronomers Use Kepler Spacecraft to Search for Exomoons

Illustration: Concept rendering of a Jupiter-like planet is seen orbiting from the perspective of a life abundant exomoon.

We’ve been reassured time and again on the presence of ‘Exoplanets’ and the possibilities they hold, but like our very own planet Earth, could they too hold a moon of their own? If so could these ‘Exomoons’ potentially harbor conditions favorable to life? Take Jupiter’s own moon Europa for instance, a moon shown to possibly hold oceans underneath its icy crust. Were we to send our manned tools to Europa and dig enough could we find life underneath? In this article SciAm talks with renowned Exomoon hunter David Kipping to lend his expertise on the subject of such Extra solar moons and how they might go about spotting them:

Astronomers have discovered a trove of exoplanets—more than 700 worlds in orbit around distant stars, with leads on thousands of additional suspects. So now, naturally, they’re beginning to ask: What moons might be in orbit about these planets?

It is a reasonable question. Most of the planets in our solar system host sizable natural satellites. And in some planetary systems, the moons of an extrasolar planet could themselves be favorable habitats for extraterrestrial life.

To answer it, a team of astronomers is now digging through publicly available data from Kepler, NASA’s prolific exoplanet-finding spacecraft, in hopes of detecting the faint signal of the first known exomoon.

“It’s something that I’ve been very passionate about for a long time,” says David Kipping, who wrote his PhD thesis at University College London last year on exomoons. Now a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Kipping is leading the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project, or HEK. He and his colleagues described the HEK campaign in a recent study posted to the preprint Web site arXiv.org that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

“When I first started this, I was just seeing what was possible,” Kipping says. “As I went on with this, I realized that it wasn’t just a crazy idea.” He and his colleagues calculated that if large moons are common in the galaxy, Kepler might be sensitive enough to find them.

Since 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has trailed Earth in orbit around the sun, doggedly pursuing a deceptively simple mission. With a giant digital camera, Kepler keeps watch on a field of more than 150,000 stars near the constellation Cygnus. It watches those stars for so-called transits—instances where a planet passes in front of its host star, which slightly and temporarily diminishes the star’s apparent brightness. So far, the mission has been incredibly productive; Kepler scientists have discovered more than 60 new exoplanets and have identified more than 2,000 likely candidates that await confirmation.

Some 50 of those candidates fall in the so-called habitable zone, the region around a star where temperatures would allow for the presence of liquid water and perhaps the emergence of life. A gas-giant planet in the habitable zone, akin to a warmer Jupiter or Saturn, would lack a solid surface and hence would not be an ideal habitat for life—but its moons might be. “There could be a lot of habitable moons out there, and we want to know about them,” Kipping says.

Read full article..

Simply Josh.

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oliphillips: Hey World by Marc Johns

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mydarkenedeyes: The Early Morning by Steven Rhodes

beautiful-guys: Francisco Lachowski

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oxane: Ghost bear by Karin Hagen Study for a painting

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oliphillips: The Barrage Lifts by Thomas Doyle

justforyoufranciscolachowski: polaroid!

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oliphillips: A Dinosaur on a Skateboard. Available on Society6

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ikenbot: Astronomers Use Kepler Spacecraft to Search for...