Dear Universe;

The Chart of Cosmic Exploration Elegantly Details 56 Years of Human Adventures into Space

If Young Wizards characters had Tumblr Blogs:

Nita: A “hipster blog” of sorts with flawless color coordination and all sorts of cheerful posts: beautiful landscapes, inspiring quotes, book reviews, and so on. The pictures of cats, whales, and birds are tagged like they’re the selfies of her close friends. Because they are.

Kit: The geekiest and most exhaustive space blog you’ll ever see. If Mars were to be blown up, it could be rebuilt with perfect accuracy with nothing but the posts about it on his blog. Also reblogs a lot of Dairine’s science-fiction-related posts, and he and Nita are one of those Cute Couples On Tumblr.

Dairine: A fandom blog devoted to Star Wars, Star Trek, and all other things science fiction. Very passionate and argumentative about everything; strongly held opinions get her into a lot of protracted Tumblr debates. Gets into arguments with Roshaun a lot, especially.

Carmela: A glorious, thoroughly disorganized mess of recipes, fashion, NSFW posts, anime, and life advice. Sends Kit a lot of deliberately weird asks.

S’reee: Friendly reblogs of her friends’ posts, interspersed with long, incomprehensible audio posts like remixed whalesong (which they are). And discussion of conservation issues.

Filif: Primarily devoted to very colorful fashion photosets, with the occasional picture of a flower tagged “nsfw.”

Sker’ret: One of those people who reblogs just about everything he comes across, with great enthusiasm. All of those legs lend themselves well to some truly epic keysmashing when he’s excited about something.

Roshaun: Exhaustingly long rants (never, ever put behind read-mores, either), occasionally interrupted by food porn posts, fashion, and impromptu lectures on stellar dynamics. And failed attempts to comprehend memes (“Imagine how is touch the sky” reduced him to nothing but rows of question marks eventually. It doesn’t translate to the Speech well).

Question about the consequences of the events in Deep Wizardry. Will the Master Shark be replaced by another shark like the Silent Lord is replaced, or on a more permanent basis? Or was his power simply lost, and there will never be a Master Shark again?

This may sound odd, but this is a matter to which I think I’ve given absolutely no thought whatsoever. …Which is unusual for me.

And now that it comes up: Mere replacement of Ed’rashtekaresket – either qua Ed, or as regards his particular unique developmental, historical and spiritual positioning – seems impossible. I rather think that there will be (meaning “almost certainly already is”) a shark now holding the Master-Shark position in lieu of the original office-holder. Except that shark will be holding it, as it were, by vicariate. (And I’m invoking “vicar*” here not in the Home-Counties-C-of-E mode that means “your [cozy] local clergyman who invites you round for tea”, but rather in the sense in which Catholics use the word when they speak of the Pope as “the Vicar of God on Earth”: of someone acting as a stand-in or deputy for someone of much greater inherent power.)

I think that should there be need for the attriibutes we think of as the Master-Shark’s to be exercised, then this vicariate Master would do so, enabled by (and channeling) the power still embodied in the original… who, as we know, appears to be Not All That Dead, Not Really Dead Anyway. (But then that would be somewhat in his nature, and shark-nature generally, so no surprises there.)

That make sense? Hope so. :)

*In passing, I coudn’t not link to the dictionary.com definition of vicar because of the quotes about Obama and soccer riots. Tea, meet keyboard…

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

On Wednesday February 26th, NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified planets orbit 305 stars, many have multiple-planet systems like our own. Interestingly, 95% of these planets are smaller than Neptune in size, which is 24,622 km in radius (15,299 miles). NASA states that this discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified planets.

Since the first discovery of a planet outside our Solar System was made two decades ago, Kepler has been able to speed up the process of confirming planets. These multiple planet systems are important for scientists to study because they are fertile grounds that give us clues on planet formation. Four of these confirmed planets are 2.5 times the size of Earth and they lie within the habitable zone. The possibilities seem endless on what may lie on these planets or what life could exist there.

Without doubling NASA’s budget it’ll take us a lot longer to answer the age-old question, “Are we alone in the Universe?” Let’s take action today and help NASA double their budget. penny4nasa.org/take-action/

"With!"

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

The Powers went ‘Dairine’s kinda annoying, we’ll make her deal with someone annoying so they’ll get on each other’s nerves’ and it worked for about a week before she and Roshaun teamed up so they could get on the nerves of the rest of the known and unknown universe instead.

Parallel universe theory