Post March Break

Advertisements for Other Exoplanets

As Mars One whittles down to its finals to sending humans on a one way mission to Mars, NASA has already started advertising for other exoplanets outside of our solar system but seem to have habitable environments.  Here is my favourite.  Which one is yours? 

Extent of Human Broadcasts

You know, sometimes I wonder if aliens will come and visit our Earth because of the recording on Voyager 1 that is "rolling out the red carpet" by giving the directions to our Earth blindly to any extra-terrestrial life out there.  Then, I remember, even though our radio broadcasts are moving at the speed of light, our first radio broadcast in the early 1900s has only reached this far in our milky way galaxy:

There are 100 billion galaxies out there, and our radio broadcasts haven't even reached the edge of our one galaxy yet.  

4/9 Boundaries Crossed...Until Planetary Destruction

So, apparently, we're almost halfway to human destruction.  The speed with which the diversity of living beings is decreasing (biodiversity loss) and the amount of nitrogen we are taking out of atmosphere have also been passed.  It's like we're slowly checking off things to our own extinction...check...check...

Well - I'm doing my best to reduce my carbon footprint after my wife and I purchased a hybrid.  

I like Earth.  "If you like it, put a ring on it".  The closest ring I can put on Earth is:

                                                        (from reddit...of course)

We are creating minerals and identifying minerals this week.  I can't wait to see who wins the crystal growing competition!  

Ginormous Black Hole 

A couple of weeks ago, the largest black hole with an ultraluminous quasar has been found.  You can see how many times bigger it is than anything else that we've found by looking at the graph below.  Props to the international team lead by Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University.  Check out more here!  

Creating a Different Kind of Life

A team of Cornell University researchers has successfully modeled a methane based, oxygen free life form that can metabolize and reproduce.  This points to the possibility of life on other places that are really cold with methane, like Saturn's moon Titan.   

Emotional about Space

I hope you guys get professors like this who absolutely love their job in the next few years.  This professor Tom Burns really gets emotional talking about space.  Couple that with an Inception soundtrack, and then maybe some goosebumps may rise.    

Mars and Water

Using the riverbeds of Mars mapped out by the rovers, artists have created an image of Mars when it was covered in water.  

Gravitational Lensing

Whoa, those presentations were quite impressive last week. We had tremendous discussions involving gravitational lensing; its effect has also given us a rerun of a supernova.  Check it out!