Well, it is no surprise, but Chris Hadfield is now King of Space.



ALL of it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ ... _of_space/

He made it home safe. He's earned it.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013 ... earth.html

In a farewell video posted Sunday night, he thanked all who had followed his journey. “Who’d have thought that five months away from the planet would make you feel closer to people?” he mused.

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Here is a pretty cool article about different ways to find alien planets:

http://www.space.com/20941-alien-planet ... tdown.html
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Here, let's let Gany explain #6:

Gravitational Lensing - a crash course.

The possibility of gravitational lensing was predicted by Einstein, but he thought that it would be impossible to ever directly observe the phenomenon. Well, suck it Einstein!! We have totally observed the shit out of gravitational lensing, and I'm going to explain a little bit about it now.




So, we know, thanks to Einstein, that intense gravity can bend and distort space-time. We also know that intense gravitational forces can bend light, which is why a black hole is black, the light can't escape the gravity at the event horizon. With the super powerful telescopes we have now, we can see further and further into space, until we get an image in which all the little dots aren't even stars or galaxies, but huge clusters of galaxies. When it happens that two galaxy clusters are aligned, one in front of the other, the light from the more distant cluster is bent and distorted by the immense gravity from the cluster in front and appears to us as an arc or ring around the nearer cluster.




Sometimes the clusters are perfectly aligned and we see what is known as the "Einstein ring configuration".




Lensing can occur with galaxy clusters, galaxies, quasars, and even stars -though the occurrence of star lenses is much rarer.
This image is taken of two stars in a binary system, with the central more massive star distorting the light from its companion.




Sometimes multiple images of the background object appear around the lensing object. With quasars, four images of the lensed quasar can be seen to form a cluster around the lensing object. This is called the "Einstein cross configuration".




In the case of this distant blue ring galaxy, the huge yellowish cluster of galaxies in front is acting like a massive lens, and we can see many images of the same blue galaxy scattered around the cluster.




We can learn a lot about really distant objects using gravitational lensing. We can determine the lensed object's mass, distance, composition and redshift, and it also tells us a huge amount about the amount of dark matter present in the object in front. It has been used to detect exoplanets, with a method called microlensing, and it has even been used to construct a "map" of the distribution of dark matter throughout the observable universe.
Also, they are very pretty.




So that's gravitational lensing! If you want to try classifying some gravitational lenses yourself, get your ass over to http://spacewarps.org and give it a go! It is fun, I promise. Would I ever lie to you guys? Never!

And if you'd like to read more:
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jcohn/lens.html
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect ... nsing.html
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Here is a pretty sweet infograph, more about planet hunting:

http://www.space.com/17383-kepler-plane ... aphic.html

Need to even out? Too jazzed? This should do it.

Its broken!

http://www.space.com/21167-alien-planet ... ppled.html

Sorry. Here is a duckling.


http://www.dailyducking.blogspot.com


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That should keep you people busy! Facebook! IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA