Time scales for astrophysical phenomena are sometimes thought to be overwhelmingly large and to exceed by far human life. While this is true for many cases, there are others which take the blink of an eye. Halfway between them, some interesting facts seem to happen in historical time scales and therefore have been analyzed by […]
Much attention has been payed lately to the novice comet C/2012 S1, more widely known as comet ISON. At the crest of the wave, it was even said that the integrated brightness of the comet after the perihelion could exceed that of the full moon. It was nicknamed “the comet of the century” and everybody […]
Even though the Kepler mission stopped working in May 2013, the data provided by this extremely prolific mission still wonders the scientific community. The mission discovered some 150 planets and proposed more than 3,500 candidates, supplying the basis for a realistic estimation of the number of planets in our Galaxy, whether Earth-like or not. Now […]
Todays story seems fairly simple: a magnetar has been seen spinning down. Impressive, isn’t it? You might be wondering what the hell is magnetar and why we should care about its spin. As it happens many times in science, we find nature behaving just the opposite to what we supposed it should. For scientists, this […]
We needed a Big Bang to create lithium, now it seems that it is much easier to destroy. This light element is the center piece of one of the most intriguing astronomical controversies. Can we use the lithium to look for planet-hosting stars? Why is it depleted in older stars? Anyway, Lithium seems to be […]
Last February I was giving a 101 Astronomy class early in the morning. It was Friday, the 15th. Just by chance, I was talking about the minor bodies of the Solar System when we started speaking about impacts on Earth. I showed some slides of the Tunguska event and how the devastated area was similar […]
The greenhouse effect is possibly one of the scientific topics most frequently covered by the mass media. When reading the news, it is very often difficult to separate ideology from the purely scientific content. However, the greenhouse effect has a profound and direct impact on the planet where we live and, also, in other potentially […]
Go to a dark place and look to the night sky. How many stars you can count? This is an ancient question which can be traced back at least to the classic Greek philosophers. However, no matter how dark your sky is, the stars you are seeing are all related to our home, the Milky […]
TW Hydrae is a peculiar star. Although it is not bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, it is relatively close to us, just 180 light-years away, and this makes it the closest T Tauri star in the sky. A T Tauri star is a solar system being born, they are still to […]
Saturn is truly a weird place. Apart from having quite a peculiar thermal history and one of the most interesting satellites in the Solar System, this planet displays arguably the most fascinating meteorological phenomenon ever seen. Suppose for a moment that next spring a storm raises in your hometown. Nothing unusual to care about, probably […]