Some surprising facts about the potentially dangerous effects of a large solar eruption. And we’re going into a solar maximum, where the possibility of “the big one” exists. http://www.blottr.com/world/breaking-news/earth-wins-game-chicken-sun

Interesting article from Michio Kaku, http://bigthink.com/ideas/41222

WASHINGTON — The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth.      

RAS recognized two winners at the 2011 Metro Richmond Science Fair on Saturday, March 19. Terry Barker made the presentation of two $50 checks to Vijay Govindarajan of Godwin High School, for his project “Developing an Alternative Earth-Based Lunar Regolith Simulant for Future Space Exploration,” and to Ashley Hedberg, also from Godwin High, for her [...]

Dark matter is our best explanation for why galaxies stay together when they don’t seem massive enough to keep up gravitational attraction. But now a largely-dismissed alternative theory has some actual proof backing it up. This could get complicated.

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs [...]

Image of the GIANT solar eclipse, with a special present included!

The singularity is here–run http://ow.ly/37PC8 Scientists have said that these temperatures are actually 1 million times hotter than the surface of the sun. http://ow.ly/37PxO #astronomy

RAS had three telescopes at the latest skywatch for the Petersburg National Battlefield Park Service at City Point in Hopewell. And it’s a good thing we had as many scopes as we did, because we were surprised by a sizable group of scouts that had come for a rocket and astronomy activity earlier in the [...]

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