General Articles

Moon is coldest known place in the solar system

Permanently shadowed craters near the moon's south pole stay at a constant -240 °C - 10 °C colder than Pluto (Image: NASA) 18 September 2009 by MacGregor Campbell Poor Pluto. First it gets kicked out of the planet club, now it’s not even the coldest place in the solar system. Dark craters near the moon’s …

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Mercury looms large as probe closes in for final flyby

Messenger snapped these images over a span of four days as it approached Mercury for its third and last flyby on Tuesday. The image on the far right was captured on Monday, when Messenger was about 542,000 kilometres away from the planet's surface (Images: NASA/JHU/APL/CIW) 29 September 2009 by Rachel Courtland NASA’s Messenger spacecraft is …

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Mammoth black holes push universe to its doom – New Scientist

30 September 2009 by Rachel Courtland THE mammoth black holes at the centre of most galaxies may be pushing the universe closer to its final fade-out. And it is all down to the raging disorder within those dark powerhouses. Disorder is measured by a quantity called entropy, something which has been on the rise ever …

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Late light reveals what space is made of

12 August 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy Located on a mountain top on the Canary island of La Palma, the Major Atmospheric Gamma-Ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope (MAGIC) is a system of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, or IACTs. ON THE night of 30 June 2005, the sky high above La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands crackled with …

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