NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place– the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.

These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them. Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observed silicon and only low levels of carbon in the white dwarfs’ atmospheres. Silicon is a major ingredient of the rocky material that constitutes Earth and other solid planets in our solar system. Carbon, which helps determine properties and origin of planetary debris, generally is depleted or absent in rocky, Earth-like material.

“We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets,” said Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge in England. He is lead author of a new study appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance they currently retain some of them. The material we are seeing is evidence of this. The debris is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system.”

via NASA – NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Finds Dead Stars ‘Polluted with Planet Debris.

This artist’s concept illustrates the frenzied activity at the core of our Milky Way galaxy. The galactic center hosts a supermassive black hole in the region known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, with a mass of about four million times that of our sun. Image credit: ESA–C. Carreau › Full image and caption  › Image gallery

The Herschel space observatory has made detailed observations of surprisingly hot gas that may be orbiting or falling towards the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

“The black hole appears to be devouring the gas,” said Paul Goldsmith, the U.S. project scientist for Herschel at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “This will teach us about how supermassive black holes grow.”

Our galaxy’s black hole is located in a region known as Sagittarius A* — or Sgr A* for short — which is a nearby source of radio waves. The black hole has a mass about four million times that of our sun and lies roughly 26,000 light-years away from our solar system.

Even at that distance, it is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it the ideal natural laboratory to study the environment around these enigmatic objects. At Herschel’s far-infrared wavelengths, scientists can peer through the dust in our galaxy and study the turbulent innermost region of the galaxy in great detail.

via NASA – Milky Way Black Hole Snacks on Hot Gas.

Its not Astronomy but what a great article!! Make sure you click on the link at the end to read the full story!!

When the first episode of Mythbusters aired in 2003, I couldn’t drive a car. I couldn’t see a R-rated movie. I was 14-years old and I couldn’t do much of anything. But Mythbusters taught me that I could do science.

Raised on Bill Nye videos, LEGOs, and CD-ROMs of dinosaurs, I was a lump of nerdy clay waiting to be molded. Mythbusters came to me at a critical time, and it transformed me into who I am today. Maybe it’s naïve to think that one television show shaped my entire professional trajectory, but if any TV show did, it was Mythbusters. I jumped into high school chemistry and biology without a second thought, in protest of my dismissive classmates. In my physics class I would interject with tidbits I learned from the show. When learning about circuits I asked, “Is this sort of like a Leyden jar?” My professor responded with, “Yes it is…where did you learn that?” My answer was consistent.

When I got to college, my burgeoning passion for science steered me into engineering. I still watched Mythbusters every week. Once, in my thermodynamics class, my professor explained why what Adam, Jamie, and the gang did wasn’t really science. I defended them.

With enough episodes in the bag to fill 10 straight days with explosions, Mythbusters enters its tenth season this summer, accepting a torch passed on to them by the likes of Sagan and Nye. In popular science communication, they stand alone amidst a cable TV landscape filled with mermaids, “ancient aliens,” and Bigfoot. The show really is a phenomenon like COSMOS or The Big Bang Theory. I’d argue that it has done more for the public understanding of science than almost any medium before it.

via A Decade of Explosions: What Mythbusters Taught Me | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.