Exploding Aardvark

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HEADLINE OF THE DAY

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion

HEY, I’LL BE AWAKE ANYWAY

Boffo.

Total Lunar Eclipse: August 28, 2007 (NASA)

THE SUN IS SINGING

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun’s atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.
These “coronal loops” carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.
Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.
“The effect is much like plucking a […]

SPLENDID SUPERNOVA

Star Explosion Highlights “Purple Rose of Virgo” (National Geographic News, via TDG)

SATURNIAN HEX

A deep, hexagon-shaped feature lies above Saturn’s north pole, newly released images from the Cassini spacecraft reveal. The strange structure appears to be nearly stationary and may be a wave that stretches deep into the giant planet’s atmosphere.
[…]
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” […]

LOOK AT THE BLOODY MOON

Tonight at sunset in North America:

Lunar Eclipse (NASA, via Robot Wisdom Auxiliary)

WHERE IS HEAVEN?

Assumption 1: The Pope’s soul must go to Heaven.
Next, we place the Pope in the vicinity of a black hole. When he’s looking the other way, we playfully nudge him beyond the event horizon. Thus ensnared, the pontiff will be squeezed by gravitational forces as he begins his inexorable spiral towards the singularity. His death […]

SEEING STARS

Astronomers, like stars, burn out. Unlike stars they grow beards too. They wear monocles. They play the xylophone. They work the word “spectrograph” into every sentence and describe the comings and goings of fellow astronomers as red or blue shifting. Nobody’s quite sure when it is that the last professional astronomer actually discovered anything of […]

TITANIC OIL GLUT

Ten years from now, Titian red thunderheads will let loose a barrage of propane hailstones and torrents of LNG will fall, filling Titan’s great lakes with enough unleaded High Test to float a supertanker. If all the methane in Titan’s atmosphere condensed, the feckless moon would be thirteen feet deep in gas, not counting sea […]

HOW TO BECOME VERY SMALL

Feeling huge and bloated? Watch this video and be transformed in less than a minute and a half.

Some stars and planets in scale (Google Video, via Posthuman Blues)