North Korea’s new space agency logo says a lot – NADA

It’s one year old and to celebrate the milestone, North Korea has rolled out a new logo for their space program called, and we’re not kidding here – NADA (as in Spanish for “nothing”). Not surprisingly, the logo is almost a direct copy of NASA’s iconic emblem (see below).

Like Jupiter, Saturn is a large, gaseous planet composed mostly of the gases hydrogen and helium. Saturn has a magnetic field 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s but not as strong as Jupiter’s. Due to its gaseous nature, Saturn’s density is so low that it could float in an ocean of water. It probably has a…

Our Sun is an ordinary star although it is quite large compared to other stars. In terms of “mass”, most stars have less than half the mass of our Sun. You could fit 109 Earths across the Sun. The Romans called the Sun “sol” (as in SOlar).

If a private spaceflight doesn’t fit your travel budget, NASA’s new interactive lunar atlas may be the next best thing. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team has stitched together 10,581 images into a gorgeous, detailed online map of the moon’s north pole.

NASA published this stunning photograph today featuring the road that connects the Northern Cross and Southern Cross – the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Taken from Laguna Cejar in Northern Chile by Nicholas Buer, the photo was shot in October, just after sunset. Included in the photo are the Moon, Venus (above/left of…

Three days ago, a white dwarf exploded in the nearby M82 galaxy (aka Messier 82, Starburst Galaxy, or the Cigar Galaxy), the closest galaxy to our own. The explosion created the closest, and brightest, supernova seen by man in over a quarter of a century. In fact, the explosion is so bright, backyard astronomers are…

Seemingly impossible, the idea of a nested star has been proposed before – it’s just nobody has ever found an example of the cosmic oddity. That may be about to change though. Scientists are keeping the name of the star a secret right now – at least until their peers can validate their findings –…

NGC 6946 (also known as the Fireworks Galaxy, Arp 29, and Caldwell 12) is a medium-sized, face-on spiral galaxy about 22.5 million light years away from Earth located in the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus. At about 20,000 light years wide, it’s one of about a dozen nearby neighbors to the Milky Way. Since its discovery…

The bright star at the center of this nebula, the object responsible for the nebula’s distorted form, is Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in the galaxy. Eta Carinae is around 100 times the mass of our sun and 1 million times brighter. Scientists think it could explode as a supernova at any…

How sad. Here is NASA’s primary home page after the United States government shutdown on October 1, 2013. It reads: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.”