This weeks carnival of space ranges from commercial space exploration to the Milky Way. TheSpacewriter muses on the end of 2011 and the upcoming 2012. Nextbigfuture comments on Future History that is space related from now to 2050. Original article by Marc Millis at Centauri Dreams. Nextbigfuture suggests other technology that could impact Future Space [...]

Hello and welcome to this weeks carnival of space. If you fancy contributing and have a blog or website to do with space then please follow this  guide on how to participate in the carnival of space which as you can see is well worth it. Even if you have a small blog please contribute. Discovery [...]

Vegaoo posts about the relation between the entropy from the Sun and the life on the Earth [In Spanish] This post by the Lounge of the Lab Lemming estimates the probability of finding a solar system like ours based on the Kepler planetary candidate database. Nuclear fission reactors in space? Think less “building sized” and more “suitcase [...]

A Chinese experimental satellite failed to reach its orbit after it’s rocket malfunctioned. Orbiter SJ-11-04 was propelled by a long March II-C rocket on Thursday. It has been speculated thatChinawas about to use the satellite as part of an operational early warning defence system but this cannot be confirmed. This is believed to be the [...]

China is getting to the forefront of space technology as theUSAbacks down. An experimental orbiter that is to launch on Thursday is another step forward for the Chinese. The orbiter, SJ-11-02 , will be carried into space byChina’s Long March II-C rocket. At the moment the satellite and rocket are waiting for the right conditions [...]

A hot spot on the far side of the Moon has turned out to be a small volcanic area created by the upwelling of magma. Because of the volcanic areas location and the composition of the lava being different to normal it gives clues to the moon’s thermal history. The hotspot is actually a concentration [...]

The farthest and largest Amount of water has been found in a quasar in the form of vapour. The quasar is one of the most powerful objects in the universe with energy output of 1000 trillion suns. The power of the quasar comes from matter that spirals into the centre where there is a supermassive [...]

Neptune  was discovered 165 years ago. In that time it has made one complete orbit of the Sun and is now in exactly the same place as when it was discovered all those years ago. The Hubble space telescope has taken anniversary pictures to celebrate this event. Neptune, as you probably know if you paid [...]

Hubble has used its wide field camera 3 to give the most detailed view of this Galaxy ever. The image shows detail that has never been seen before in the dusty portion of the Galaxy. Centaurus A is also known as NGC 5128 and is a relatively nearby galaxy in astronomical terms. It is close [...]

Here’s this weeks carnival of space with  spaceplanes, dark energy, cosmology and a lot more. Next Big Future posts about how the Skylon space plane got a thumbs up with a 52 page review from the UK space agency,  James Woodward talks about the scientific history of science, gravity and the Mach Effect and a post [...]

Particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole have been captured in an image provided by radio telescopes located in the southern hemisphere. The image shows an area less than 4.2 light years across. This makes this image the highest resolution image of a galactic jet made to date. Jets and Lobes from the Black [...]

The China manned space engineering office has released plans for a 60 ton space station made up of three capsules and a cargo transport for supplies. It looks like it might be public friendly as well as they have asked for suggestions for names for the space station. The space station core module will be [...]

The Suzaku observatory has recently made observations by X ray of Perseus, a nearby cluster of galaxies. They are the clearest to date. Galaxy clusters are millions of light years across. Most of the matter these galaxies are made up of comes in the form of X ray gases that fill up the space between [...]

There are a lot of planetary atmospheres in the solar system. They vary a lot and this can be seen by comparing Earth and Venus which are of the same size and mass roughly, The surface of Venus is extremely hot which is caused by an atmosphere of carbon dioxide that has the weight of [...]

The Carnival of space is where all the different interesting websites and blogs get together and are posted on one particular blog or site. This week as always we have a wide variety of interesting subjects. Apologies for the late posting. Just look at it as an insight into the delays you may experience if [...]

To say that the whole astronomic community was set on fire by the claim that a Jupiter-like planet might be lurking just outside our solar system would be a bit of a stretch, but spirits were indeed high, after this claim was made by John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Lousiana-Lafayette. Tyche, [...]

A revolution in satellite engineering has started. As long as I can remember governments and corporations have been building expensive satellites and they just get more and more expensive with each new design. The cost rises because the satellites take longer to design, new launch facilities are needed, global monitoring stations must be built, mission [...]

Lots of links from astronomy and space blogs including a little science.

What is a pulsar? As its name suggests it is an object that emits regular pulses of different types of radiation. Normally the pulses are detected as radio emissions but can be detected in the visual wavelengths, x-ray wavelengths and gamma ray wavelengths. Pulsars are neutron stars that have different characteristics to a neutron star. [...]

How did the Earth come to possess water? Did some alien ship have too much and dump it or is there some simpler explanation? Through a process that lasted millions of years the Earth was made from a cloud of dust and gas. At the later stages of formation the Earth was an extremely hot [...]