We are significant in our own way

Watch the Asteroid’s near miss on this Doodle

 

It is animated so you have to wait for it to go into action!

‘annular’ eclipse on Sunday

Millions of people in the western United States and Asia will watch the sun turn into a ‘ring of fire’ this weekend.

Shadows on the ground will also turn into crescents and ‘rings’ of light as moon covers as much as 94% of the sun this Sunday.

‘Because some of the sun is always exposed during the eclipse, ambient daylight won’t seem much different than usual. Instead, the event will reveal itself in the shadows. Look on the ground beneath leafy trees for crescent-shaped sunbeams and rings of light,’ says Nasa.

Birth

New Born Stars after Birth 100 million years ago.

Sideview’s Challenge – Birth

Pleiades

Photograph courtesy NASA

An infrared image reveals clouds of dust swaddling the stars of the Seven Sisters cluster, also known as the Pleiades. The cluster, located some 400 light-years away, formed about 100 million years ago. It contains thousands of stars but gets its name from seven of its brightest members.

The End of the World

The shattered remains of planets that bear a striking resemblance to our own Earth have been found around white dwarf stars – offering a vision of what will one day happen to our planet.

University of Warwick astrophysicists found four white dwarves surrounded by the dust of shattered planets.

White dwarfs are the final stage of life of stars like our Sun – once the thermonuclear furnace inside a star ‘burns out’.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to carry out the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars, the researchers found that the most frequently occurring elements in the dust around these four white dwarfs were oxygen, magnesium, iron and silicon — the four elements that make up roughly 93 percent of the Earth.

It’s evidence that the small, dense stars are surrounded by the ‘corpses’ of worlds they’ve ‘eaten’.

At least one of the stars is in the process of sucking in the planet’s core – rich in iron, nickel and sulphur – at a rate of around a million kilos a second.

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Supermoon Saturday: The biggest, brightest moon of 2012

Get ready for the moon’s most prominent, spectacular appearance of the year. On Saturday night at 11:34 p.m. eastern, the moon becomes full on its closest approach to Earth. This coincidence makes this moon a “Supermoon.”

The moon is reaching what’s known as its “perigee”, the closest approach to earth in its orbit – a mere 221,802 miles away. It will appear 16 percent brighter than the average full moon.

Compared to when it’s on the “apogee” side of its orbit, farthest away from earth, it will be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter.

Read more here