In a major announcement this week, researchers with the Kepler Space Telescope science team have confirmed the existence of 1,284 new planets that had originally been found by Kepler. This is a huge leap in the number of confirmed planets, bringing the total to over 2,300. The previous science data collection done by Kepler was completed in 2013, so why is this new news? Well the exciting part is that these are confirmed planets. Usually when Kepler detects a signal indicating a potential planet, it needs to be verified by using some of the larger ground-based telescopes. Kepler is not immune...
Every time we see amazing photos of galaxies or planetary disks, we can see most of the detail since we see them face on. But since the orientation of spiral galaxies in the universe is random, there are a plethora of galaxies ignored by image processors since we just can’t see much of the detail. We can still learn from edge-on spiral galaxies, just not as much as we can from those that are face on. We can see some fascinating dust lanes in the image above, and a ton of detail considering the view, but we don’t know what...
The finale of the Rubik’s cube challenge was on Sunday, and yielded some interesting results. To confirm, I did not look at an actual cube or picture of one between the start of the challenge last Wednesday, and the finale on Sunday. All I did was read the book on the cube solution. Before I reveal the results let me give you a rundown of what I had to do. To make it work required memorizing a lot of steps, and learning the notation used by the book. In the above picture, the top side (T) is yellow, the Front...
