When astronomers looked at the night sky long ago, they also wondered about questions just like this one. You know, I was also curious about why the moon looks so different at different times of the month. I visited with my friend Jose Vazquez, an astronomer at WSU Vancouver, to learn more about it. He […]
If you are anything like me, you probably like watching for shooting stars in the night sky. A shooting star, or a meteor, is usually a small rock that falls into Earth’s atmosphere. When I went to visit my friend Michael Allen, a senior instructor of astronomy and physics at WSU, he told me a […]
While the moon is uninhabitable today, there could have been life on its surface in the distant past. In fact, there may have been two early windows of habitability for Earth’s moon, according to a study online in the journal Astrobiology by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University astrobiologist.
WSU professor shows Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest images, details history About 50 people tilted their heads back, gazed up at the Washington State University Planetarium dome and took in images from space Sunday at Sloan Hall on the WSU campus in Pullman. Long before Sunday’s sunset, viewers sat in the dark room looking up at […]
Three billion years ago in a distant galaxy, two massive black holes slammed together, merged into one and sent space–time vibrations, known as gravitational waves, shooting out into the universe. The waves passed through Earth and were detected early this year by an international team of scientists, including WSU physicists Sukanta Bose, Bernard Hall and […]
Parts of Washington state will be treated to an extraordinary show during what NASA is calling the “Great American Eclipse” on Aug. 21, even though the sun won’t completely disappear. As the total eclipse cuts a swath across neighboring Oregon and Idaho, some locations in the state will enjoy a “deep partial eclipse,” said astronomer […]
Mars is not a very welcoming place. It’s cold, there’s hardly any atmosphere, and its bombarded with deep space radiation. Even the soil wants to kill you; as the Phoenix lander confirmed in 2009, the Martian regolith is laced with perchlorates—chlorine-based compounds that, when heated up, can rip apart organic materials, like cells and […]
No matter how still we stand, or if we’re in Scotland, Malaysia, or the United States, we are always spinning. Our Earth spins at a constant, very fast speed as we make a trip around the sun. But it’s not just the Earth that spins, said my friend Guy Worthey, an astronomy professor at Washington […]
Recently published research in astrophysics suggests that some moons of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — are the right size, in the right position and have sufficient water to support life. WSU astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch responded to the research findings, saying: “Everyone right away tends to categorically exclude the possibility of life on […]
You might find Guy Worthey at the WSU Planetarium narrating a show on meteors. Or up at Jewett Observatory playing bass guitar with his band for the Jazz BBQ Star Party.