Author: Daniel Tom

Wednesday will be an interesting evening for stargazers. The passage of a massive comet through our solar system coincides with a supermoon – the largest and brightest full moon of 2022. The size of the comet designated C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) and dubbed K2, is predicted to be between 18 and 100 miles. NASA astronomers anticipate…

An 11-year-old Iranian school girl has just become the new face of braininess after receiving the highest possible score on the Mensa IQ test. Tara Sharifi, a student from Aylesbury High School in the United Kingdom, recently took the test in Oxford and received an astounding 162 points. Sharifi’s score is significantly over the “genius…

Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers just ten days ago discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System. The orbit of the approximately 1-kilometer-diameter asteroid takes it as close as 20 million kilometers (12 million miles or 0.13 au), from the Sun…

The Magnificent Superfortress You can hear the power of FIFI’s four Wright R-3350 radial engines at idle. We can all thank the CAF and its volunteers for FIFI’s restoration. It took a lot of manpower to get this Superfortress up and running – after all, it wasn’t until the 70s when a CAF pilot discovered…

Resiliency Is Key The resilience shown by Canario and his Thunderbolt is something to be amazed at. It got shot multiple times by Flak, the second time almost being fatal to the warbird. As if that wasn’t enough, he lost control of the plane and hit a factory chimney, losing 128cm off the right wing.…

Looking back 13-billion years into our universe’s past, a group of scientists first discovered the monster COSMOS-AzTEC-1 galaxy using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawai’i and later followed up with observations using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.   Monster galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1 observed with ALMA. ALMA revealed the distribution of molecular…

Astronomers said Thursday that they had found the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1,200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra. They are the two outermost of five worlds circling a yellowish star slightly smaller…

Science fiction is the realm where people traditionally wrestle with the idea of contact with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence). But now, those discussions are migrating from science fiction into more serious realms. Academics are going back and forth, one paper at a time, concerning the response and geopolitical fallout from potential contact with an ETI.…

An ancient grave with a Nestor’s Cup that was believed to contain the remains of a child has now been found to be the burial place of three adults. Ancient Greeks normally buried their loved ones in pithoi, large pottery vases that would hold their bones, or directly in the ground, by themselves. However, new…

The Moon could have formed immediately after a cataclysmic impact that tore off a chunk of Earth and hurled it into space, a new study has suggested. Since the mid-1970s, astronomers have thought that the Moon could have been made by a collision between Earth and an ancient Mars-size protoplanet called Theia; the colossal impact would have created an enormous debris…