Wednesday, April 15, 2009

oh, PUH-LEEZE!

Our dearly beloved (former) governor Blago wants to go on a reality TV show instead of prison. The TV show is a sort of celebrity "Survivor" where famous people live in the jungle and complete challenges to raise money for charity. He's already got a contract with the network (NBC) and is just waiting for the court to OK it.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Not that you care, but...

The Hubble Space Telescope has been around a long time, taking pictures of the visible universe. One advantage of this is that when something happens, such as a supernova, scientists can go back through archival data and study the star before it exploded. Recently, such an event has happened, and as it turns out, astronomers may have to completely revise their theories of stellar evolution.
Stuff like this makes me somewhat giddy, because it reminds us that theories are often imperfect, and that there's SO SO SO MUCH we still dont know =)

The supernova occurred in a distant galaxy, but there is a similar star in our own Milky Way, called Eta Carinae which could explode in a hypernova.. a million, a thousand, a hundred.. years down the road. At this point it's pretty hard to tell. It would seem that this star is too far away to affect us should it explode, but we would DEFINITELY see it from earth (in the 1800's it was the 2nd brightest star in the sky after Sirius).