earthandscience:

The fossilised skull of a colossal whale with a killer bite has been uncovered by a team who reckon the monster shared the Miocene oceans with a giant shark.

The bones, dated to 12 to 13 million years ago, were spotted by Klaas Post of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in Peru’s Ica desert. In homage to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the beast has been named Leviathan melvillei.

The skull is a huge 3 metres long, says team member Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The team estimates the whale would have been between 13 and 18 metres long, like a modern sperm whale.

What really surprised the researchers was the size of the whale’s teeth. “Some of the biggest ones are 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres wide, and are probably the biggest predatory teeth ever discovered,” Lambert says.

Read More @ Ancient monster whale more fearsome than Moby Dick

super cool!

earthandscience:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2012) — More than 50% of the world’s plant species have been discovered by 2% of plant collectors, scientists have found.

With an estimated 15-30% of the world’s flowering plants yet to be discovered, finding and recording new plant species is vital to our understanding of global biodiversity.

(via Half of species found by ‘great plant hunters’)

itsfullofstars:

Astronomers Find Saturn’s Possible Cosmic Doppelgänger

By analyzing the silhouette of an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star some 420 light years from Earth, a team of astrophysicists has discovered an exoplanet that just might turn out to be Saturn’s cosmicdoppelgänger.  

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester University Eric Mamajek and graduate student Mark Pecaut studied data from the international SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) project.

They were looking at the star’s light pattern; periodic dimming is a telltale sign that a planet is passing in front of it. A spherical planet will dim a star’s light regularly. As seen from Earth, the star’s light will dim as the planet starts to cross it, getting darker until it reaches a point of maximum dimness – the point when the planet is directly between the Earth and the star. Then, the light will get brighter at the same pace as it previously dimmed.

But in December 2010, they noticed something odd. As they analyzed data gathered over a 54 day period in early 2007, the star 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 dimmed irregularly. The object passing in front of it couldn’t be a spherical planet, so what was it?

Keep reading.

itsfullofstars:

Weird Spiral Star Discovered —14-Billion-Miles Wide

Two spiral arms emerge from the gas-rich disk around SAO 206462, a young star in the constellation Lupus. This image, acquired by the Subaru Telescope and its HiCIAO instrument, is the first to show spiral arms in a circumstellar disk. The disk itself is some 14 billion miles across, or about twice the size of Pluto’s orbit in our own solar system. 

This recent discovery of a star with spiral arms startled researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. SAO 206462 is more than four hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf. 

Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto. But when they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms.  Astronomers have seen spiral arms before: they’re commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of millions of stars spiral together around a common core.  Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an individual star, however, is unprecedented.

The arms might be a sign that planets are forming within the disk.

Keep reading.

planetsci:

Apollo 17 Landing Site, as seen from space!

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped pictures of the Apollo Landing Sites from low orbit. This picture and others were released on September 6th.

The parallel lines on the right? Moon Buggy tracks. The dark lines on the left? ASTRONAUT FOOTPRINTS! So clear!

Noah Petro, NASA lunar geophysicist, tells us that “we can retrace the astronauts’ steps with greater clarity to see where they took lunar samples.” Pretty awesome!

(via just-breezy)

itsfullofstars:

 Asteroid spotter Hannah hopes for her name in the stars

A sixth-former who went on work experience to study astronomy and discovered two new asteroids is hoping to have one named after her.

Hannah Blyth was using a remote-controlled telescope to stare into the night sky when she helped spot 22 new asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

Fellow stargazers hope one will be named “Hannahblyth” after scientists in America confirm the discoveries.

The 18-year-old from Castleton, near Newport, was “totally amazed”.

“It’s an honour that there’s a rock out there which may one day have my name on it,” she said.

“I felt elated when I realised what I was looking at it - it was beyond my wildest dreams.

Summer placement

“It’s totally mind blowing.”

Miss Blyth was on a summer placement with the Faulkes Telescope Project, based at the University of Glamorgan, when she made the discoveries using robotic telescopes in Australia and on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

She was given coordinates to study the sky between Jupiter and Mars which would then direct the telescopes to take photographs of them.

Other astronomers working on the project looked at her images and realised her discoveries.

Read more.

I need a telescope.

unknownskywalker:

Shadowed Discovery

The International Space Station casts a shadow on Discovery during STS-133 rendezvous and docking operations on Feb. 26, 2011 at 2:14 p.m. EST. Watch STS-133 Day 3 video recap.

(via itsfullofstars)