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At about 8:20 pm Tuesday January 16, 2018 Did any of you Detroit freepers see that flash of light followed about two minutes later with a window rattling shockwave?

The search for meteorites continues all over metro Detroit.  NASA experts point toward Livingston County to find them. Bill Cooke is the Meteoroid Environment Program Manager with NASA and he said the Doppler radar images show the meteorites from the meteor spotted on January 16 in Livingston County. “The meteorites should be just south of M-36 between Hamburg and Lakeland,” said Cooke. Cooke said Doppler is best way to track where they might be found. "Doppler weather radar is a very good indicator because, when it picks up meteorites, the meteorites are fairly close to the ground, they're only a couple...

On February 4, an asteroid called 2002 AJ129 is due to slip past Earth. It is between 1600 and 4000 feet across, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, but there's no chance it will make impact—NASA has calculated it will remain 2.6 million miles away. That still makes it what astronomers call a "potentially hazardous asteroid," thanks to its size being more than about 500 feet across and an orbital path that carries it within about 4,650,000 miles of Earth. But while they're confident we won't all go the way of the dinosaurs, scientists do want to keep an eye on the...

Call it whatever you like — a blue red moon, a purple moon, a blood moon — but the moon will be a special sight on Jan. 31. Three separate celestial events will occur simultaneously that night, resulting in what some are calling a super blue blood moon eclipse. The astronomical rarity hasn’t happened for more than 150 years, according to Space.com. A super moon, like the one visible on New Year’s Day, is the term for when a full moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit, appearing bigger and brighter than normal. Supermoon rises over Reno, Nevada...

When they weren’t calling the purple, ribbon-like light Steve, the Facebook group referred to it as a “proton arc,” notes ABC News. But when a Canadian physicist and astronomer who studies aurorae looked at the photos, he suspected something more was afoot—especially since proton aurorae, which happen when protons from solar winds hit Earth's magnetic field, are usually too dark to be visible.

Ever since Voyager 2 beamed home spectacular images of the planets in the 1980s, planet-lovers have been hooked on auroras on other planets. Auroras are caused by streams of charged particles like electrons that come from various origins such as solar winds, the planetary ionosphere, and moon volcanism. They become caught in powerful magnetic fields and are channeled into the upper atmosphere, where their interactions with gas particles, such as oxygen or nitrogen, set off spectacular bursts of light.

In the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho, 1,416 square miles (3,668 square kilometers) of land has been named the country's first International Dark Sky Reserve by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), the leading organization that fights against the light pollution that slowly swallows our view of the universe.

By modeling the reactions of water with the crusts of early Earth and Mars, they found that the Martian crust can hold more than twice the amount of water as Earth, effectively drying out the surface of Mars. The team’s findings suggest that almost 1,000 feet (300 m) of Martian surface water could have been absorbed into the planet’s crust and is now locked-up in microscopic mineral structures. “It would be very difficult to sustain life as we know it on Mars even if surface water existed on the planet for a couple million years,” the researchers said. .. “Our...

================================================================================================================ Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus. Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings. Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus,...

Astronomers will soon get another look at the big, ghoulishly weird space rock that buzzed Earth on Halloween three years ago. The roughly 2,100-foot-wide (640 meters) Halloween asteroid 2015 TB145 gave Earth a close shave on Oct. 31, 2015, coming within just 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of our planet. (For perspective, the moon orbits at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, or 384,600 km.) A Halloween flyby was quite appropriate, it turned out: Observations made at the time by a variety of instruments revealed that 2015 TB145 looks like an enormous skull, at least from some angles. ... The asteroid may...

“We’ve got a startup idea. We want $90 million to invest in projection technology for high tech billboards. On the moon.”At least, that is how we assume the pitch went from Japanese space startup iSpace Technologies Inc., which just announced the conclusion of its Series A round of venture funding. Its goal? To launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit by 2019, land on the moon the year after that, and then set up the necessary infrastructure for a moon-based advertising business. Heck, you can’t fault the company’s ambition!iSpace’s $90 million will cover two space flights in 2019 and 2020....

A MASSIVE asteroid that could have destroyed New York City skimmed past Earth – and NASA had no clue. The large space rock – dubbed 2017 VL2 – passed the planet on November 9 at an astonishing distance of just 73,000 miles, which is considered tiny in space terms. Space boffins think that if the rock measuring between 16 and 32 metres had hit, it could’ve wiped a major city such as New York off the map. The rock belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids and was first seen at ATLAS-MLO observatory in Hawaii a day later. It was...

Living bacteria were found on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS), and they might have extraterrestrial origins, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov said. The microorganisms will be studied further on Earth. Shkaplerov, an ISS expedition flight engineer who will take his third trip to the ISS in December as part of the Expedition 54 crew, said that scientists found living bacteria while they were taking samples from the surface of the station. Speaking to TASS, he said that the microorganisms might have come from outer space. ... However, traces of bacteria originating on Earth – from Madagascar – and...

A top Vatican astronomer has said that a number of public scientists claim to be atheists in order to appear credible, noting that a surprising number of scientists attend church. Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, who has spoken on a number of topics concerning science and faith, told Vancouver Sun in an interview earlier this week that many "public scientists" are insecure about their rank. "The scientists that you see on TV who are proclaimed atheists because they think it gives them credibility in science — which it doesn't — are turning off the nine-tenths of the...

Jupiter and Venus will pair up in the sky on Monday morning, shining brightly together shortly before sunrise. The two planets will appear so close together that they may look like they are just one bright star rather than two planets. This is the closest these two planets will appear all year, an astronomical event known as a conjunction. Venus and Jupiter may appear very close to each other in the morning sky, but they are actually more than 400 million miles away from each other. Venus and Jupiter will rise together about one hour before sunrise in the eastern...

Recently, scientists reported in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the discovery of a theory-shattering exoplanet — one of countless such discoveries in the last two decades. As reported on phys.org on October 31, the hot Jupiter “should not exist according to planet formation theory.” In this episode, we outline the fundamental differences between the standard model of planet and star formation versus that of the Electric Universe.

The study, titled “Powering prolonged hydrothermal activity inside Enceladus“, recently appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy. The study was led by Gaël Choblet, a researcher with the Planetary and Geodynamic Laboratory at the University of Nantes, and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Charles University, and the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Geo- and Cosmochemistry Laboratory at the University of Heidelberg. ... Based on the way Enceladus orbits Saturn with a certain wobble (aka. libration), scientists have been able to make estimates of the ocean’s depth, which they place at 26 to 31 km (16 to 19 mi)....

David Coulter was in Copenhagen when he got an email that catapulted him into the stars. Coulter, 36, is a self-taught programmer. He spent 10 years in industry jobs, then left for graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, which operates Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. “I just wanted to learn about outer space,” he said. He picked the right place. The second-year grad student found himself on a team that was the first to take images of neutron stars merging, beating a group from Harvard, perhaps explaining the origin of metals such as gold and uranium....

To date, every comet humanity has seen inside the Solar System has come from the Solar System, whether it's the Kuiper Belt or the billions of comets believed to make up the Oort Cloud. Now, however, it looks like astronomers might have found a comet of interstellar origin. They've used Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope to track C/2017 U1, an object with a very eccentric, hyperbolic orbit (that is, moving quickly enough to escape gravitational pull) that wasn't connected to the Sun. The trajectory suggests that it's a comet which escaped from a nearby star, rather than something knocked out a...

All jokes aside, tonight is the night if you want to see Uranus.