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Every now and then a word just catches your ear, and several times in a day it jumps out at you and you’re tempted to say: “There it is again!”Yesterday it was the word “consider”, an ordinary, daily word. Or is it? Why did it strike me so? With my knowledge of Latin, it occurred to me that “consider” has something to do with the stars, for the Latin word sidera means “stars” or “heavenly bodies.” How interesting, I have use the word for the better part of 50 years and that had never crossed my mind. But as sometimes...

Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky WayA few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science. The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that...

University of Warwick astrophysicists have pinpointed four white dwarf stars surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies which once bore striking similarities to the composition of the Earth. The scientists publish their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. White dwarfs are the final stage of life of stars like our Sun, the residual cores of material left behind after their available fuel for nuclear reactions has been exhausted. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to carry out the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars,...

Most stars are born in clusters rather than singly, and there’s plenty of evidence that the Sun was too. For one thing, the material of the infant solar system (as preserved in the earliest meteorites) was enriched by fresh supernova debris from at least one very young, massive star (having 15 to 25 solar masses) that exploded less than 5 light-years away, no more than 2 million years after the Sun's formation. Today no such massive star exists within 300 light-years of the Sun. Clearly, the early solar system had stars close around it. But that was 4.57 billion years...

Scientists are beginning to sort out the stellar ingredients that produce a type 1a supernova, a type of cosmic explosion that has been used to measure the universe’s accelerating expansion. Two teams of researchers presented new data about these supernovas at the American Astronomical Society meeting on January 11. One team confirmed a long-held suspicion about the kind of star that explodes, and the second provided new evidence for what feeds that star until it bursts. “This is a confirmation of a decades-old belief, namely that a type 1a supernova comes from the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf,” said...

Former White House aide and Duke Blue Devils forward Reggie Love stars in a new Obama campaign video aimed at courting the president’s African-American supporters. “Since 2006, I’ve spent a lot of time with our president,” says Love, who left the administration last year to attend business school. “I got to work in the West Wing, I traveled to 33 countries, I’ve done everything from tracking down newspapers, figuring out what he wants to eat, who he’s going to eat with, and played endless amounts of basketball games.” “The president has always had our back,” he adds, encouraging viewers to...

Chaz Bono braved controversy to be the first transgender contestant on Dancing with the Stars, but he revealed in an interview today that it was jibes over his weight that troubled him the most. But it wasn't from ignorant, faceless haters that the 42-year-old faced these attacks, but rather from the show's judges, whom Bono has blasted as 'disrespectful.' The only child of Cher, 65 , and the late Sonny Bono, told Good Morning America: 'I was called a basketball, a penguin, an Ewok, and I just didn't appreciate it.' -snip- 'I took so much away from this. This was...

DALLAS -- After 21 seasons in the NHL, Mike Modano made it official Friday, announcing his retirement as a player. It was fitting that his farewell press conference was in Dallas -- since that's where he spent the bulk of his playing career. During his more than two decades as a player, he was an eight-time NHL All-Star who finished as the career leader among American-born with 561 goals and 1,374 points. He was a major contributor to the Stars' 1999 Stanley Cup championship, and he served as Dallas' captain from 2003-06. Modano, the first pick of the 1988 Entry...

The alien planet with two suns, as in the "Star Wars" films, will be visible Scientists have spotted a real-life Tatooine — a world with two suns, like Luke Skywalker's home planet in the "Star Wars" films — and you should be able to see this alien star system, too, using a good pair of binoculars. Astronomers announced the discovery of the alien planet, called Kepler-16b, Thursday. The Saturn-mass planet orbits a pair of stars known as Kepler-16A and Kepler-16B. Someone on Kepler-16b would see two suns hanging near each other in the sky, just as Luke did on Tatooine.

Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicistsInside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty. That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole. Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better. These...

White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.The two white dwarfs are circling...

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2011 – Bronze campaign stars are now authorized for service members who have served in Iraq since Sept. 1, 2010, or in Afghanistan since Dec. 1, 2009, Defense Department officials announced today. The new campaign stars, worn on the Iraq and Afghanistan campaign medals, recognize service during Operation New Dawn in Iraq and the Consolidation III campaign phase in Afghanistan. Operation New Dawn began Sept. 1, 2010, marking the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and U.S. combat operations in Iraq and a new focus on advising, assisting and training Iraqi security forces. The Consolidation III campaign...

‘Blue Stragglers’ in the Galactic Bulge by Paul Gilster on May 30, 2011 I’m fascinated by how much the exoplanet hunt is telling us about celestial objects other than planets. The other day we looked at some of the stellar spinoffs from the Kepler mission, including the unusual pulsations of the star HD 187091, now known to be not one star but two. But the examples run well beyond Kepler. Back in 2006, a survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) used Hubble data to study 180,000 stars in the galaxy’s central bulge, the object being...

That's scientists' latest estimate for our galaxy alone, based on Kepler data Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or...

Superfluids are strange states of matter, typically forming at very low and very high temperatures, exhibiting gonzo properties like a seemingly gravity-defying tendency to climb up the walls of containers and friction-free superconductivity. That is, they are perfect conductors that don't lose energy during transmission. And the fact that they appear to exist at the center of neutron stars tells scientists a lot about nuclear interactions in high-density matter and the life-cycles of neutron stars. The pressure within neutron stars is so intense that in the stars' cores, charged particles merge, resulting in a star mostly consisting of neutrons (hence...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wormholes are one of the stranger objects that arise in general relativity. Although no experimental evidence for wormholes exists, scientists predict that they would appear to serve as shortcuts between one point of spacetime and another. Scientists usually imagine wormholes connecting regions of empty space, but now a new study suggests that wormholes might exist between distant stars. Instead of being empty tunnels, these wormholes would contain a perfect fluid that flows back and forth between the two stars, possibly giving them a detectable signature. The scientists, Vladimir Dzhunushaliev at the Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and coauthors,...

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — The appearance of a Star of David on new national identity cards has alarmed opponents of President Evo Morales, who recall how the symbol was used to brand Jews in Nazi Germany. Tiny six-pointed stars within a tight circle are printed on the back side of some, but not all, recently issued picture IDs in the Santa Cruz region. The mark was present on three cards seen by The Washington Times. "It raises suspicions that the government is identifying individuals or segments of the population along racial, religious or ideological lines" said Carlos Klinsky, a member...

Take a moment and consider your place in the bigger scheme of things~ And while that's indeed illuminating (sorry)....  it's a  big universe with plenty of other stars out there: Jupiter only one pixel on that scale. But this behemoth Arcturus -25x the Sun's size and 110x as bright-is just 5th largest here...our own sun down to a single pixel: The monster above -Anteres- is the 15th brightest star in the sky, and is over 1000 light-years away. Feeling your place yet? Now try to wrap your mind around this: the photo below was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and ultra-deep-field infrared shot of...

An international team of astronomers led by Mary Williams from the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) has discovered a new stream of stars in our Milky Way: the "Aquarius Stream," named after the constellation of Aquarius. The stream of stars is a remnant of a smaller galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood, which has been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way about 700 million years ago. The discovery is a result of the measurement of the velocities of 250,000 stars with the RAVE Survey based at the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW,...

Best Art in the Universe? Hubble Space Telescope's Amazing Pics From 2010 (Dec. 15) -- You might think that taking highly detailed photographs of the darkest corners of the universe would be a purely scientific job. Turns out, there's an art to it. For the past 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the planet and wowing earthlings with breathtaking images of outer space, from jaw-dropping pictures of clusters of newborn stars to fantastic photos of colliding galaxies. But it's not just Hubble's cutting-edge optics that are responsible for these stunning photographs. Behind each image is the hard...