*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

Two Earth-sized planets could be hiding in our solar system

At least two planets that could be bigger than Earth might have been hiding at the edge of our solar system, scientists have claimed.

The undiscovered planets are thought to be even further from the Sun than Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto.

Evidence of the two planets comes from watching a belt of space rocks known as “extreme trans-Neptunion objects”.
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Inb4 Nibiru nonsense. Amazing though if its correct
 
Closest approach of Asteroid 2004 BL86 at 16:20 UTC:

http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2004-bl86-to-sweep-close-on-january-26

Watch here:

Slooh will have real time-images and commentary
DATE/TIME: January 26, 2015 beginning at 1600 UTC, or 11 a.m. EST

The Virtual Telescope Project will feature real-time images and commentary.
DATE/TIME: January 26, 2015 at 19:30 UTC, or 2:30 p.m. EST.

Bareket Observatory will have a live broadcast of 2004 BL86.
DATE/TIME: January 27, 2015 starting at 18:30 UTC, or 1:30 p.m. EST.
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Asteroid 2004 BL86 has a moon. This "movie" of the asteroid was generated from radar data collected by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California:

 
Just went outside and saw a giant ring of light around the moon. Ice crystals.

Makes me wish I had a half decent camera.

Still there if you're quick.
 
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.
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http://vimeo.com/117815404


Very cool, take a look :cool:
 
The New Horizons spacecraft returned its first new images of Pluto along with its largest moon, Charon:

lnsBXjt.jpg



magnified four times to make the objects more visible. Over the next several months, the apparent sizes of Pluto and Charon, as well as the separation between them, will continue to expand in the images.
Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI
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The new images, taken with New Horizons’ telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Jan. 25 and Jan. 27, are the first acquired during the spacecraft’s 2015 approach to the Pluto system, which culminates with a close flyby of Pluto and its moons on July 14.
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More:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
 
On to Jupiter...

During a rare triple-moon transit where three of Jupiter’s largest moons were seen parading across the banded face of the gas giant planet. The three moons are Europa, Callisto, and Io.



 
So our Universe could be infinitely old with no beginning and no end...

Watched this week's Big Bang Theory where Sheldon and Leonard come up with a Universe<>Fluid theory to explain the Big Bang and how it probably doesn't apply any more.

Today caught wind of this - http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

Interesting paper. I don't understand a lot of it fully but get the gist of what they're proposing. Seems to be a big hit on r/science currently too.
 
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