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.
'It's like dropping a stone into a pond, only in this case, the pond is the galaxy and the wave is the compression of gas,' explains Phil Appleton of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US. 'Each wave represents a burst of star formation – the youngest stars are found in the outer ring.'
It could be a jellyfish, or it could just be all the pot.
Climate Change Doesn't Kill Frogs, Bad Metaphors Do
'Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger,' says Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica.
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