For those of you who were paying attention (my Mom), this is the first Science Roundup in a couple of months. Sorry about that. Quals hit me - like a ton of bricks - or a school bus - or a ton of bricks in a school bus - hit me like a school bus with many bricks and very heavy nuns. Anyway, enjoy and I hope you will enjoy more regularly from now on.
Comet Wild 2 pulls up its shirt to give a sweet, sweet sample of its space dust. And scientists are falling over each other like Japanese tourists at Mardi Gras to get at it.
Comet Wild 2 spent billions of years in the Kuiper belt, a frozen reservoir of icy bodies beyond Neptune. While heat and geological processes have altered the inner planets like Earth beyond recognition, comets like Wild 2 are thought to be pristine samples of the gas and dust that formed the Solar System.Chunks of the Stardust sample will soon be sent to labs around the world. A team in London, UK, hopes to begin work on it in February. “What’s exciting is that we’re near the front of the queue for a sample, so we’ll get the first sniff of what these things are made of,” says team member Phil Bland of Imperial College, London.
The smell guy seems a little odd. I am now visualizing planetary scientists saying, "Mmmmm, the sweet aroma of space. I think this Comet has hazelnut. It's a good thing."
Astronomers Really Seeing the Things From 2001: Space Odyssey
A cosmic jellyfish appears to pulse with light in this multi-wavelength image of the Cartwheel galaxy, compiled from images taken by four space telescopes.The galaxy probably came by its distinctive shape when a small galaxy – possibly one of the objects at bottom-left of the image – collided with it head-on 100 million years ago. The crash set off ripples in the large galaxy's gas that led to concentric rings of star birth.
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