The Sky Tonight

April 09, 2015

Moon formed when young Earth and little sister collided
College Park, Md. (UPI) Apr 8, 2015
It's long been believed that Earth's moon was formed by a significant planetary collision with a Mars-like protoplanet called Theia. Now, a new study suggests the primordial protoplanet that crashed into a young Earth was quite similar in size and composition. "The Earth and the moon are not twins born from the same planet, but they are sisters in the sense that they grew up in the same environment," said Hagai Perets, study co-author and astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in ... read more

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Black holes don't erase information, scientists say Shred a document, and you can piece it back together. Burn a book, and you could theoretically do the same. But send information into a black hole, and it's lost forever. That's what some physicists ... more		Cornell plays key role surfing for gravitational waves A full century after Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity proclaimed that gravitational waves cause ripples in spacetime, humanity may finally have the tools to detect these waves. The Natio ... more		Dusty substructure in a galaxy far far away Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) have combined high-resolution images from the ALMA telescopes with a new scheme for undoing the distorting effects of a powerful gravita ... more
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Human 2 Mars Conference Mat 5-7 2015 - Washington DC

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