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