Saturn is hands down the
superstar celebrity of our solar system. But astronomers have found evidence for another ringed giant hundreds of light-years away that would put
it to shame:
The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings,” says [Leiden Observatory's Matthew] Kenworthy. ... “This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today,” said co-author [Eric] Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.”
Indeed, if that planet sat where Saturn does in our solar system, the rings would stretch across our night sky several times wider than the full moon.
- Finally, an easy to read webpage for the layperson explaining how vaccines cause autism.
- Snakes have been around a lot longer than we thought:
The finds rewrite what scientists know about the creatures, showing that they were slithering alongside pterodactyls and other dinosaurs as early 167 million years ago. "We've nearly doubled the geological range for a group," said Michael Caldwell, a professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta, and lead author of a new study in Nature Communications.
- We have many talented writers at Daily Kos and when the new site features come online later this year, I hope some of those tools will help you organize and make your mark in self publishing. I really think this is the future and there's no reason why the first self-published best-selling authors shouldn't include some of you folks. Until then, here's Akadjian's latest story on the topic of self-published books.
- Zombie Lie—a glaring untruth that persists and grows, often in a sub-community of conspiracy minded people, and thus will not die despite repeated falsification with independent lines of empirical evidence. I may write more about this later, but for now and as an example, take it away Dr. Ben Carson!
For me, the plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin's assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man—including all of the intermediate species.