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.

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects.

The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance.

European Space Agency/NASA Hubble

via NASA – Hubble Sees the Remains of a Star Gone Supernova.