Sounding more like a science fictional creature than a real-life animal, these amazing critters imitate the stars in the sky in order to catch meals.

Disorienting through astronomical imitation, these predators have evolved to use nighttime navigational strategies of other species to their advantage. Many animals, like moths, use starlight and moonlight to find their way and fly straight.

“That works fine when the moon and stars are real,” said Dave Merritt, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, “but when the source is close they end up spiraling into it.'” Many of these worms are found in caves where other species would only go by accident.

Decoys are common among deep-sea fish, where any light might indicate direction, but less common on the surface where so many competing sources of illumination are present.

In this case, “with their glowing lures in place, the worms drop threadlike snares, thin filaments of silk secreted from their mouths and dotted with balls of mucous, to trap confused flyers. Besides being extra-sticky, those mucous balls lend the strands the appearance of mardi gras beads, which magnify the worms’ spectral light like chandeliers.

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Cosmological myths, legends and superstitions of of our ancient ancestors were often tied to astronomical phenomena, and now researchers have found a truly stunning tool they used to make observations of these celestial happenings.

In the absence of modern magnifying glasses and reflective mirrors, the structure discovered in Portugal employed a lower-tech approach: a narrow passage filtered out extraneous light, helping people see stars at times when they would be hard to spot in the open sky.

Part of a prehistoric tomb complex called the Seven-Stone Antas, the astronomical observation device is thought to have been used to view Aldebaran, a red giant in the constellation of Taurus. This star becomes visible in the early morning s of spring, just before sunrise, but would be hard to see outside of a narrow window without a device to block out unwanted night. In turn, its passage was presumably used to mark a change of seasons from spring to summer.

More from the scientists behind the discovery and their next steps: “The team’s idea is to investigate how a simple aperture, for example an opening or doorway, affects the observation of slightly fainter stars. They focus this study on passage graves, which are a type of megalithic tomb composed of a chamber of large interlocking stones and a long narrow entrance. These spaces are thought to have been sacred, and the sites may have been used for rites of passage, where the initiate would spend the night inside the tomb, with no natural light apart from that shining down the narrow entrance lined with the remains of the tribe’s ancestors.”

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Using sections of the International Space Station as stationary points, this incredible photo shoot turns both outer space and our own planet into a series of surreal and otherworldly landscapes.

Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

The results are nothing short of stunning – the Earth’s surface becomes streaked with color and light, punctuated by what appear to be blotches of lightning or blurred cityscapes, but overall looking more linear like (Jupiter or) some other celestial body.

Naturally, only pieces of the ISS itself look static in each shot, creating a stark contrast between a fixed foreground and spiraling set of backgrounds (though, in reality, the station itself is also rotating – it is all relative). Armatures of the station end up open to interpretation, in some cases looking like the needle on a record player hovering above a spinning disk.

The post Star Trails in Space: Timelapse Photos Shot from the ISS first appeared on Gajitz.

Time-lapse videos of the night sky with the stars rushing around the Earth are always fascinating to watch, but filmmaker Lance Page has a new take on filming the night sky. His short film entitled “Ride the Sky” depicts the Earth turning while the stars stand still.

Using a motorized pivot for his camera, he trained the lens on the north star. From our vantage point on Earth we usually see the stars gliding across the sky throughout the night while we appear to stay stationary. Page’s short film shows our planet’s perpetual rotation in contrast with the stars holding their relative positions.

The video is a fascinating new perspective on a familiar sight. Though we know logically that the Earth is not the center of the universe, it’s easy to believe that everything really does revolve around us. “Ride the Sky” is a beautiful reminder that we are simply another piece in the vast puzzle that makes up our cosmic neighborhood.

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Are we getting even closer to finding a new cosmic home away from home? In 2010, an Earth-like planet called Gliese 581g was discovered just 20 light years from our home planet. Scientists postulated that the planet, which exists in the “Goldilocks Zone,” or the area just the right distance from the planet’s sun to support liquid water and, presumably, life, may already be home to some type of life. Since that discovery, the very existence of Gliese 581g has been mired in controversy and the scientific community can’t seem to agree on whether it even exists. That may not matter now anyway, since they’ve found a planet even closer to us and with equally intriguing stats. Gliese 832c is a hop, skip, and jump away from Earth – on the grand scale of space – at just 16 light years away.

Gliese 832c is roughly five times the size of Earth and boasts a short 36-day year. Despite its close proximity to its star, the planet isn’t a fiery mass because its star is a red dwarf which is much cooler and dimmer than our Sun. This means that the newly-found planet receives just about as much energy from its star as our own planet does. Scientists don’t hold much hope for Gliese 832c being humankind’s first extraterrestrial home, however. Due to its mass, it is likely to have a super-thick atmosphere that creates a life-crushing greenhouse effect. Still, the director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo places Gliese 832c as one of the three most Earth-like exoplanets discovered to date, and the lab plans to conduct plenty more observation of the planet.

The post Newly-Discovered Planet Among Most Earth-Like Ever Found first appeared on Gajitz.