GOLDILOCKS minus the bears:-)

The Goldilocks Zone is the habitable zone around a star. Remember the constant preoccupation with food temperature in the fairy tale, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"? Goldilocks planets are not too hot (Mercury, Venus), nor too cold (Mars and the Jovian system), but just right to sustain life.
Habitability was correlated to distance from a star, but since the discovery of water, oxygen and possibly life on a number of Jovian moons, this theory ...is changing. Important to note, that although Mars is the first planet humans will soon visit, it is on the outer edges of the habitable zone, thus I personally am dubious whether human habitation would ever be possible with present day and near future techologies. As Dr.Tyson put it, if we had the technology to terraform Mars, we might as well save our precious Earth first.

 

WHAT IS A NEBULA?

The beautiful dance of death: Crab Nebula, the remnant of a star

It is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. In these massive regions the size of hundreds of light years in diameter, gas, dust, and other materials form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become massive enough to form stars and planets.

Last, but not the least nebulae (cloud in Latin) are beautiful. Here's a link to some of the most beautiful nebulae:

Beautiful Nebulae

SCOTT KELLY AND GENNADY PADALKA LEAVE TODAY TO SPEND A YEAR ON ISS!

SCOTT KELLY AND GENNADY PADALKA LEAVE TODAY TO SPEND A YEAR ON ISS!

Astronaut Kelly's identical twin stays behind; we'll see the phisiological differences when the twins are reunited in a year. The results will be crucial data in preparing astronauts and cosmonauts for the first actual human space flight (non-low orbit service mission).

This is a huge stepping stone in preparation for a long distance human spaceflight, first destination: Mars.

A Year in Space

 

LET'S TURN TO THE DARK SIDE-no, not like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars :-)

The Dark Side of Physics

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse, Supermoon and Spring Equinox all at the same time, next up in 2034.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1893679/12-amazing-photos-of-fridays-solar-eclipse/

FUN SUN FACTS

BBC Reporter mistakenly says, "the Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon". Correctly, the Sun's diameter is 400 times bigger than the Moon's. In reality, the Sun is humongously bigger than the Earth's teeny moon! 

Here's a few fun facts about the Sun, the star of our solar system:

64.3 million Moons inside the Sun.

The Sun is 1,392,000 kilometers across. 

The Sun weighs 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg 

More on the NASA Sun Fact Sheet:

Sun Facts

HIGGS BOSON

THE HIGGS BOSONWhat is a boson?Named after the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, it's a subatomic particle in quantum mechanics, that adds mass. According to the Standard Model, other bosons are the gauge bosons: the photon, the gluon, the z and the w particle, and the force carrier scalar boson: the Higgs. Based on the theoretical discovery of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert (for which they received a Nobel prize in 2013), it was eventually confirmed at CERN on July 4, 2012 by the ATLAS (headed by professor Brian Cox) and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. This milestone discovery helped solidify the multiverse theory and the birth of the universe via the Big Bang.           

                                                          CERN outside Geneva Airport

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN

Professor Brian Cox heading the ATLAS experiement

ROBOTICS 2015

Similar, but fictional quadrupedal houndbots in Jake Paltrow's post-apocalyptic Young Ones:

THE SCIENCE OF THE AURORA

Aurora Borealis-the different hues correspond with different quantum transitions in excited atoms of oxygen and nitrogen.

THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE LIVE IN THE STATES!

Proc Brian Cox promoting The Infinite Monkey Cage Live in the US

Experimental Physicist Prof Brian Cox on Joe Rogan-very funny and enlightening exchange

SCIENCE AND ART

Sunshine special screening with physicist and advisor on set Prof Cox and director Danny Boyle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpw47dwrBK8

ON DARK ENERGY, MULTIVERSE&STRING THEORY

String theorist Brian Greene on NOVA about dark energy, multiverse and string theory. I must add that the 2013 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN strongly points towards the multiverse hypothesis.

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Science&Pi

Click to see article: Dr. Tyson on Science&Pi.

On the History of Pi

Click to learn about the history of Pi.

What is Pi?

What is Pi?

Happy Ultimate Pi Day!

RED SHIFT

When an object moves away from us, its light waves are stretched into lower frequencies or longer wavelengths, and we say that the light is redshifted.

Some redshifts are an example of the Doppler effect, familiar in the change in the apparent pitches of sirens and frequency of the sound waves emitted by speeding vehicles.

Another kind of redshift is cosmological redshift, which is due to the expansion of the universe, and sufficiently distant light sources (generally more than a few million light years away) show redshift corresponding to the rate of increase in their distance from Earth.

Finally, gravitational redshift is a relativistic effect observed in electromagnetic radiation moving out of gravitational fields.
The Red Shift supports the big bang theory, which states that the universe began from a very small initial point and then expanded from that point to give us the universe we see today. 

Red Shift also supports the theory that the universe in expanding and it does so in an escalating manner.

The light from distant galaxies is red shifted (this tells us the galaxies are moving away from us) and the further away the galaxy, the greater the red shift (this tells us that the more distant the galaxy the faster it is moving).

physics.co.uk

Pictures: The visible spectra and Red Shift in cosmology.

WHEN GALAXIES COLLIDE

We live in the Milky Way Galaxy, a spiral galaxy home to about 300 million stars. Since we live in it, we cannot see it from the outside; what we see looking up the clear night sky is the galactic centre.

Andromeda, the nearest major galaxy some 2.5 million light years away, is also a spiral galaxy and is expected to collide with the galaxy we live in, in about 3.75 billion years to perform the beautiful death dance of galaxies.

The pictures: The Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, when galaxies collide.

THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION&the WMAP

THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION

WHAT IS IT?
It is radiation left over from the Big Bang; by studying this afterglow of our birth, we can find important answers to questions regarding the age and make up of our universe.

HOW CAN WE STUDY THIS COSMIC AFTERGLOW?
The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), a spacecraft launched by NASA in 2001.

WMAP AND ITS ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

1. Determined the universe to be 13.77 billion years old to within a half percent.

2. Nailed down the curvature of space to within 0.4% of "flat" Euclidean.

3. Determined that ordinary atoms (also called baryons) make up only 4.6% of the universe.

4. Completed a census of the universe and finds that dark matter (matter not made up of atoms) is 24.0%

5. Determined that dark energy, in the form of a cosmological constant, makes up 71.4% of the universe, causing the expansion rate of the universe to speed up. 

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov

Awesomeness wink emoticon...

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Let's point the narrow scope of our space telescope to an uninteresting spot under the constellation of Orion and see what happens. Every image in this picture is a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars each of which have their solar systems with their own Goldilocks zones.

Rains on Different Worlds

DIAMONDS IN THE SKY-no, not a pop song, but reality, and here's why:

Uranus and Neptune's cores are theorized to contain diamond. Both ice/gas giants have a silicate/nickel (and iron in Neptune) core surrounded by an icy mantle; the intense pressure of the planets' huge size on the core leads to diamond formation. As for the diamond rain on Neptune, the conditions are such in the methane-rich envelope that in the supersonic water, methane decomposes creating a diamond hail storm.