This came from a series of supplements in California textbooks in the 1960s – the peak of the Space Race.

This is an image of promise. There is a better tomorrow out there in the void. That’s what it’s promising. A better tomorrow, a broader horizon… and some trippy lightshows.

[via So Much Science, though they found it [...]

Time is dibsing front-row seats to the (potentially) big show when a black hole slurps down a gas cloud this fall:

Back in 2011, astronomers spotted an interstellar gas cloud plunging more or less toward the Milky Way’s own supermassive black hole, which is about the mass of four million Suns. And by the scientists’ calculations, the cloud will [...]

Miami-raised poet and engineer Richard Blanco was selected to write a poem for today’s presidential inauguration.

It begins and ends with the sky.

Here’s what he read:

One Today
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One [...]

SONG: “Is There A Light?” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “New Planet Is Closest Yet: Earth-Size Lava World a Space ‘Landmark’”, National Geographic, 17 October 2012, as used in the post “We’ve got a neighbor (in Alpha Centauri).”

ABSTRACT: I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to make [...]

Click to embiggen.

Hi, neighbors.

Map found on Wikimedia Commons. It’s part of a larger series showing where we are relative to everything.

Everything.

The nearest solar system to ours, National Geographic confirms, actually has a planet in it:

The planet orbits very close to Alpha Centauri B—the smaller of two paired stars—and likely has a lavalike consistency to show for it, scientists said. As such, the new world would be way too hot to support life as we know it.

Life or no [...]

BBC has one for the planet hunters – or, indeed, for Planethunters.org, which has just discovered a truly bizarre solar system using a pretty offbeat method:

The planet, located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters site.

It is thought to be a “gas giant” slightly larger than Neptune but more than six times [...]

Watch the skies next year, warns Scientific American, or you’ll miss something you’ll never see again:

As it flares out of the distant Oort Cloud, the newly discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) appears to be heading on a trajectory that could make for one of the most spectacular night-sky events in living memory.

…

After it loops around the [...]

AsiaOne has more on the new planet made of hot, compressed carbon:

The rocky planet, called ‘55 Cancri e’, orbits a sun-like star 40 light years away in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18 hours.

Discovered by a U.S.-Franco research team, its radius is twice that of Earth’s but [...]