Spider silk is an extremely strong material, a strand thick as a pencil, enough to stop a jet plane in flight!
Yet the frailest of houses is that of the the spider (Ankaboot)!
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Astronomers have located the most distant galaxy ever measured in the universe, and it looks like a bright blue mass of stars some 13.1 billion light-years from Earth.
The galaxy, called EGS-zs8-1, is "one of the brightest and most massive objects in the early universe," according to a statement from Yale University.
Calculating its exact distance from Earth was possible using the MOSFIRE instrument on the W.M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, researchers said.
The galaxy was first spotted in images from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
Astronomers at Yale and the University of California, Santa Cruz say that EGS-zs8-1 is still forming stars rapidly, about 80 times faster than our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Details of the discovery were published Tuesday in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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An amazing video by Russian space agency Roscosmos shows the horizon with some celestial bodies like black holes very much closer to earth than they really are – and it’s wonderful and eerie.
The video is not a scientific simulation – a black hole or a supernova exploding star couldn’t exist in such proximity of the Earth, or rather vice versa – but a splendid illustration of what celestial bodies look like, as documented by telescopes like Hubble.
Among the celestial bodies in the video, are, for instance, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is 30 million light years from Earth, and the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.5 million light years from Earth.
The footage followed another video, showing how our horizon would look like if other Solar System planets were at the distance of the Moon.
A local photographer captures the formation of the saucer-shaped puffs amid a skyline he described as "unbelievable".
Residents of Cape Town may have thought they were seeing UFOs in the sky - but instead they were being treated to a special cloud formation.
The lenticular clouds appeared over the South African city late on Sunday afternoon and photographer Kyle Mijlof was among those capturing the scene, which he described as "unbelievable".
Mr Mijlof told Sky News the clouds started forming over Table Mountain - about five miles from the city - at around 3pm and his picture was taken three hours later as the formation peaked.
He added: "Honestly, the whole skyline that day was unbelievable and a bit of an eerie stillness in the air.
"I was on my scooter at the time, driving along Signal Hill back home to Camps Bay, I stopped to get this quick shot - I still had my helmet on."
Mr Mijlof said he has seen similar clouds during his travels elsewhere in the world but not in Cape Town.
Sky News meteorologist Chris England said: "They are formed at the top of waves in the atmosphere caused by air going over mountains and are quite common, although more often as long bands of simple arcs."
He said the shapes are formed by either variations in humidity within the air or the originating hills being "fairly isolated peaks".
Picturesque Cape Town is framed by peaks, including Table Mountain, which is around 3,500ft high.
England added: "Lenticular clouds don't really signify anything in particular about the weather, apart from fact that the atmosphere is stable at the time and so not much convection likely - and that can change quite rapidly."
Lenticular clouds, which come from a Latin word meaning "lens-like", can form in many places around the world and have been blamed for a number of previous "UFO sightings".
11 November 2015 21:41 GMT
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious dwarf planet that is three times farther away than Pluto and believed to be the most distant object in our solar system.
The discovery of the dwarf planet known as V774104 was announced Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society near the US capital and could indicate the presence of more rogue planets in our celestial neighborhood.
The dwarf planet currently sits 15.4 billion kilometers (9.6 billion miles) from the Sun.
It is believed to be between 310 and 620 miles across.
Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, announced the discovery and said its orbit remains unknown, for now.
"It could end up joining an emerging class of extreme solar system objects whose strange orbits point to the hypothetical influence of rogue planets or nearby stars," said a report in the journal Science.
The discovery was made using Japan's eight-meter (25 feet) Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.
The dwarf planet lies at a distance of about 103 astronomical units (AU) away from the Sun. One AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Previously, the most distant solar system object was announced in 2005 -- a dwarf planet named Eris that was 97 AU from the Sun.
"The discovery of V774104 is more proof that the solar system is bigger than we thought," said Joseph Burns, professor of engineering and astronomy at Cornell University.
"We need a little more time to pin down the orbit and determine the object's exact size, but it must be big to see it at this distance."
A Venus-like planet has been discovered in a solar system relatively close to our own in what some astronomers are describing as arguable the most important “exoplanet” found orbiting a star other than the Sun.
The rocky planet, called GJ 1132b, is slightly larger than the Earth and, like Venus, its surface is too hot to support liquid water – but scientists believe the planet will be invaluable in the search for extraterrestrial life.
At 39 light years away, GJ 1132b is the nearest rocky exoplanet yet discovered. Its relative proximity to Earth and the fact that it orbits its star once every 1.6 days means that astronomers now have an important test-bed to study the atmospheres of other far-away planets with telescopes that could detect the first chemical signatures of life beyond the Solar System – such as atmospheric methane.
Planet GJ 1132b orbits so close to its own star that its temperatures reach a scorching 232C, which although too hot for life – at least as we know it – are still cool enough for the planet to possess an atmosphere, raising hopes that scientists will be able to analyse its chemical composition from Earth to study its winds and even the colours of its sunsets.
“Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth, but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus. We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere too, and if it does we can’t wait to get a whiff,” said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study published in the journal Nature.
Astronomers discovered the planet by monitoring and measuring the small fluctuations of light from the star Gliese 1132 as the planet passed in front of it every 1.6 days. The scientists calculated that the planet is orbiting at a distance of 1.4 million miles from the star, compared to the 36 million miles between the Earth and the Sun.
“If we find this pretty hot planet has managed to hang onto its atmosphere over the billions of years it’s been around, that bodes well for the long-term goal of studying cooler planets that could have life,” said Zachory Berta-Thompson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We finally have a target to point our telescopes at and dig much deeper into the workings of a rocky exoplanet and what makes it tick…. This planet is cool enough that it can retain an atmosphere. So we think this planet probably still has something of a substantial atmosphere in its current state,” Dr Berta-Thompson said.
GJ 1132b is about 16 per cent larger than the Earth and although its solar orbit is much closer than that of our own planet, its sun is a “red dwarf” star far smaller than the Sun . The planet is probably in a locked orbit, meaning that one side of its surface permanently faces its star while the other always points out to space, much like the Moon’s orbit around Earth.
“The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it’s like burnt-cookie hot. It’s too hot to be habitable. There’s no way there’s liquid water on the surface, but it’s cooler than the other rocky planets that we know of,” Dr Berta-Thompson said.
“We think it’s the first opportunity we have to point our telescopes at a rocky exoplanet and get that kind of detail, to be able to measure the colour of its sunset, or the speed of its winds, and really learn how rocky planets work out there in the Universe,” he said.
This cannot be undone and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated.
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