Blog Profile / The Daily Galaxy

The 'Daily Galaxy' Followers Soar Above 270,000!

Join the 272,000 Daily Galaxy fans around the world who follow us via their Twitter page. Our followers include many of the planet's leading astronomers and scientists, astronauts, space observatories, news organizations, universities and governmental space organizations such as NASA,...

Billion-Pixel View of Mount Sharp --Mar's Curiosity Rover Destination

This full-circle view combined nearly 900 images taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, generating a panorama with 1.3 billion pixels in the full-resolution version. The view is centered toward the south, with north at both ends. It shows Curiosity at...

Image of the Day: Brilliant Supernova 12 hours After it Exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy

August, 2011, saw the dazzling appearance of the closest and brightest Type Ia supernova since Type Ia's were established as "standard candles" for measuring the expansion of the universe. The brilliant visitor, labeled SN 2011fe, was caught by the Palomar...

"Cosmic Evolution Tends to Extinguish Species that Advertise Themselves" --The Dangers of Messaging ET

“Evolutionary selection, acting on a cosmic scale, tends to extinguish species which conspicuously advertise themselves and their habitats,” according to Adrian Kent, Centre for Quantum Computation, University of Cambridge. Science fiction writer and astrophysicist Dr. David Brin echoed Kent's thesis...

A Moment of Zen (!) --Lewis Black on Google Glass, Robots & Immortality

Lewis Black on Comedy Central

A Moment of Zen (!) --Lewis Black on Google Glass, Robots & Immortality

"Planets Billions of Years Older Than Earth May Exist in the Milky Way" (A June Featured Post)

Building a terrestrial planet requires raw materials that weren't available in the early history of the universe. The Big Bang filled space with hydrogen and helium. Chemical elements like silicon and oxygen - key components of rocks - had to...

Galaxy Starbursts Triggered by Dark Matter --A Herschel Space Observatory Discovery

Most of the mass of any galaxy is expected to be "dark matter," the elusive X Factor that has yet to be detected but which astronomers believe must exist to provide sufficient gravity to prevent galaxies ripping themselves apart as....

Outer Space Mystery --"The Missing Oxygen Molecule"

A 2012 search for molecular oxygen in the Orion Nebula came up negative, leading to new ideas on what's wrong in the chemical models. Searches for interstellar molecular oxygen, O2, have a long history, and the motivation for these searches...

"Dark Galaxies" --Were They the Building Blocks of the Galaxies We See Today?

Dark galaxies are essentially devoid of stars, therefore they don’t emit any light that telescopes can catch. This makes them virtually impossible to observe unless they are illuminated by an external light source like a background quasar. The image above...

Long-Standing Black Hole Mystery Solved

The image above highlights the black hole, Sagittarius A, at the Milky Way's galactic center, which lies in the heart of the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance of ~8 kiloparsecs from the Sun. Monitoring of x-ray emissions over the...

"The Great Attractor" --Is Something is Pulling Our Region of the Universe Towards a Colossal Unseen Mass?

A busy patch of space has been captured in the image below from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Scattered with many nearby stars, the field also has numerous galaxies in the background. Located on the border of Triangulum Australe (The...

"Cosmic Flows" --Mapping the Movements of the Galaxies

An international team of researchers has mapped the motions of structures of the nearby universe in greater detail than ever before. The maps are presented as a video, which provides a dynamic three-dimensional representation of the universe through the use...

Alien Planet Discovery a Puzzle --Accepted Theory Says "It Can't Exist"

A team of researchers has discovered evidence that an extrasolar planet may be forming quite far from its star—- about twice the distance Pluto is from our Sun. Planet formation far away from a small parent star is at odds...

26 New Black Holes Found In Andromeda, Our Sister Galaxy

Using more than 150 Chandra X-ray Observatory observations, spread over 13 years, researchers identified 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date, in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way. Many consider Andromeda to...

Galaxy Clusters Reveal Distribution of Dark Matter

“Each bright city light is a galaxy, and the dark areas between the lights that appear to be empty during the night are actually full of dark matter. You can think of the dark matter in a galaxy cluster as...

Ancient Hydrogen Signals --a Key to the Evolution of the Universe

“Hydrogen is the building block of the Universe, it’s what stars form from and what keeps a galaxy ‘alive’,” said Jacinta Delhaize a researcher with theInternational Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). In research published in the Monthly Notices of...

"Earth Calling" --A "YouTube" for Messaging Advanced Alien Life

A new project aclled "Lone Signal" believes that crowd sourcing messaging to intelligent life (METI) is the ideal approach to establishing a stable, cohesive, and well-resourced interstellar beacon on Earth. Anyone with Internet access to compose and transmit messages to...

"Mars is Not a Dead Planet" --Meteorite and Glaciation Evidence Point to Profound Climate Change Cycles

"Mars is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth," says James Head, planetary geologist, Brown University. The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined...

"Saturn Can Vibrate Like a Bell" --Creating Spirals in the Ancient Rings

Saturn can vibrate like a bell within periods of a few hours, and these oscillations cause gravitational tugs that, in turn, create the spiral patterns in the rings. The cause of the vibrations remains unknown. Researchers at Cornell found the...