For his gigadollar earning movie “Avatar” James Cameron wanted as plausible a design as possible for the interstellar vehicle featured, the ISV “Venture Star”. Advised by his good friend Charles Pellegrino, Cameron has given us, in film, a starship design that could really work – or close to. Check-out Winchell Chung’s detailed description and discussion
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The Solar System centered on Gliese 581 (Zarmina’s Sun) is very compact. All the currently known planets almost fit inside the orbit of our Venus and four are closer together than Mercury is to the Sun. Of course Gliese 581 is much dimmer than our Sun, so even though Zarmina orbits a mere 0.146 AU
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It’s all over the news! Earth-like Planet Found (for real)! Of course we don’t know much about Zarmina (Gliese 581 g) other than some very bare basics, but her discoverer, Steve Vogt, has expressed his near 100% certainty there’ll be Life on Zarmina of some kind. While I agree with his sentiment I think we
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What’s eating the stars out of our galaxy’s heart? – 15 September 2010 – New Scientist. The Galactic Centre is home to a massive black-hole, estimated at ~4 million solar masses, meaning it’s event horizon is 12 million kilometres in radius. Not the biggest – there are multi-billion solar mass black-holes in the cores of
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xkcd: Exoplanets Just how many exoplanets are now known? Oodles. Topping 500 this week with 400 more odd promised over the next year from “Kepler” and who knows how many being watched prior to the discoverers going public… Exoplanet Encyclopedia
Cassini Equinox Mission: Chasma Crescent. Tethys sports this gorgeous chasm… …awesome. Such strange new worlds out there.
Found in nature’s freezer, the secret of living to 140 | Mail Online. Certain bacteria and/or their by-products when injected into mice & flies (standard lab-animal models for such studies) extend their healthy life-spans by almost double. Thus the headline about humans heading to 100-140 years of age as normal. Rapid advancements in reprogramming the
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New Horizons, the fastest launched probe, is shooting towards a close encounter with Pluto and its three moons on July 14, 2015. As NH will get ~50 metre resolution we can work out the baseline for an interferometer to achieve the same. In visible light, say 0.5 micrometers, the limit of distinguishable detail 50 metres
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Random Reality § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. Marcus Chown discusses the information content of the Universe – what has pumped “information” into what began as a very simple world? Chown points out that ‘random’ sequences require more information to describe than ‘ordered’ & ‘repetitive’ sequences – think of vortices in swirling smoke versus the cubic perfection of salt-crystals.
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