NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. The system, known as a circumbinary planetary system, is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.


This artist’s concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system — multiple planets orbiting two suns – 4,900 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus. The system was …

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Just heard from Amazon that they’ve dropped the price of the From The Earth To The Moon DVD set to $24.99. Most people will have seen this or own it by now but in case you’re not familiar with it, it was the Tom Hanks/HBO series, made in 1998, that depicted how NASA and its various personalities, especially the astronauts, …

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I got the news that Neil Armstrong had died late on Saturday night (around midnight) [Aug. 25th, 2012]. I didn’t see much coverage of his death on the TV news though I might have missed it. I was told that Sky News in the UK did a 10-minute segment on Armstrong looking at his life and achievements.


Astronaut Neil Young …

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Back in 1980, Carl Sagan created his seminal Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series for PBS (I reviewed the DVD release here). It has stood the test of time, especially considering the discoveries that have been made in the intervening decades. In this clip from the series, Sagan looks at the 4th dimension and the Tesseract – a 3-dimensional …

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NASA’s Mars Curiosity has debuted the first recorded human voice that traveled from Earth to another planet and back.


Layers at the Base of Mount Sharp: A chapter of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this postcard from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image shows the base of Mount Sharp, the rover’s eventual science destination. This image …

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AAVSO AAVSO Alert Notice 469:
Observations of TT Ari requested in support of MOST observations
August 27, 2012

Dr. Nikolaus Vogt (Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile) has requested photometry and spectroscopy of the novalike (VY Scl subtype) cataclysmic variable TT Ari in support of upcoming observations with the Canadian Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars (MOST) satellite.

The observations are being carried out …

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By now you’ve probably seen the sad news that Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, died yesterday from complications due to heart surgery carried out earlier this month to relieve four blocked coronary arteries.

The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden regarding the death of former test pilot and NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong. …

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John Ellis, theoretical physicist, answered the question “What is the Higgs boson?” in preparation for the press conference following the seminar on Large Hadron Collider 2012 results on the Higgs boson search, which was released on July 4 2012 at CERN. The Press Release is here.

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Using the fundamentals of set theory, explore the mind-bending concept of the “infinity of infinities” — and how it led mathematicians to conclude that math itself contains unanswerable questions.

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What would you do if you had access to Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-100 space telescopes?

Dr. Vlada Stamenkovic, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT who works on exoplanets – distant alien worlds beyond our solar system – has a great answer in this video:

It’s inspiring to think that the Arkyd can help researchers like Vlada discover Earth-like planets, and perhaps, …

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