A 9th Planet?

I don't know if you've been following science news or not, but in the last week or so, astronomers at Caltech have said there's evidence suggesting there's a large ice giant orbiting our sun as the 10th 9th planet. (Sorry, I still think of Pluto as a planet. The ironic thing is that one of these astronomers is the guy who killed Pluto.)

How cool is this? Now granted, it hasn't been spotted yet, and until it's in the cross hairs of someone's telescope, it's theoretical only, but still...

A 10,000 year orbit? That boggles the mind!

And it makes me think of Zechariah Sitchin's work, The 12th Planet. I'm not a big Sitchin fan--I think he got too much wrong to take him seriously--but he did talk about this planet that has this huge orbit around the sun and about the anunnaki who live there. Hearing that there's possibly this planet out there that at least generally fits the information Sitchin gave in his book has me going OMG, what if he was right despite the mis-translations of Sumerian?

Sorry, the part of me that loves to write (and read) SF romance is all excited about the possibilities here. Um, anyway, I'm seriously looking forward to astronomers studying the sky, trying to get their telescopes on this planet and prove it really does exist. How cool would that be? We might have lost Pluto, but we might gain a new, larger planet in his place.

The Science of Lying

Dark Matter

The stuff we can see is only 5% of the universe. The rest is dark matter or dark energy.

Absolute Zero

More science. I am a major science geek.

Genome Surprises

More science, this time it's about three things that surprised the scientists who worked on the Human Genome Project and not in an excited, hurrah kind of way.

Well, Let's Go Find Out!

I know I've shared a lot of space-related videos lately--what can I say? I'm a space geek--but I hope you'll bear with me for another. This one is a little long, but it talks about Kepler 22B, the planet that was found around a star very similar to our sun and orbiting at a distance that makes it possible for there to be life here. There's a lot, though, that astronomers don't know yet about the planet. This video talks about what they do know.

Large Hadron Collider Rap

Y'all know I'm a major geek--I make no secret of that. For a while now, I've been riveted by physics, particularly M Theory. To test some of their hypotheses, tests have been done at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. Want to learn a little more about it? There's a rap song for that.

Atlantis

Today, we all went into the conference room at work and watched the final space shuttle launch. It was an awesome experience to watch with a roomful of people, many of whom were engineers. For a minute, when they held countdown, we were concerned there'd be a long delay, but there wasn't.

Our group gathering had some funny moments. When one of the engineers tried to increase the volume, she knocked us off the NASA channel and onto a Jewelry Shopping Network. So then when the space shuttle launch was put on hold, another engineer joked that someone at NASA had tried to find the volume button.

We also had one of our engineers down to watch the launch and everyone kept suggesting we call him. Have him jump up and down, one of the guys said when the camera was on the crowd.

Watching the shuttle go up was an awe-inspiring moment--something I forget with the frequency of launches. If I missed one, it was no big deal, there'd always be another. And yet there will be no more.

And as the big fuel tank separated from the shuttle and Atlantis pulled away, it was sad. There will be no more shuttle launches and America has no new era of space exploration in the wings. This is it. The final hurrah and every time I think of that, my heart feels heavy.

I love the possibilities of space exploration. My first books were science fiction romances set in the future. A future where Earth, specifically the Western Alliance, had begun to colonize other planets. Jarved Nine was the third one. In my future, space is important and moving out into it vital.

Possibilities. I love the possibilities. Maybe that's why I love SF Romance so much--anything is possible.

Dear America, please reinvest in our space program. It's worth the costs associated with it because it allows everyone to dream...at least a little. And it allows us to believe that--indeed--anything is possible.

Moon Walking

Some of the video podcasts I downloaded this week involved NASA and the space program. Specifically, the Apollo missions and how we landed on the moon. It was fascinating viewing.

I guess I take landing on the moon for granted since I don't remember a time when we hadn't been there. These short podcasts interviewed some of the astronauts, engineers, and specialists who played a part in getting us to the moon. Incredible stuff and I was glued to each of these podcasts.

One of my favorites--and I loved all of them--was an interview with astronaut Alan Bean. He was the 4th man to walk on the moon on the Apollo 12 mission. The part that really grabbed my attention, though, was that he resigned from NASA, deciding to let others fly the space shuttle, so that he could paint his experiences in space. He says something in the interview like if he didn't do it, no one else would. From what I saw, he was an accomplished artist and the paintings were cool!

Another podcast interviewed the mission leader and a third one of the engineers that helped get Apollo 13 down. Another podcast was with a woman who became one of the first female astronauts and there were many more.

These were ALL available on iTunes for free! I love free. :-) I think the Discovery Channel also has podcasts available on their website, but I wasn't able to find the space ones, so I'm not linking there.

You know, switching from a plain old MP3 player to an iPod was such a good investment! Now I can watch video podcasts, something I couldn't on my old player, I've discovered a ton of information on a wide variety of things on iTunes--from podcasts to video podcasts, to college classes--and I'm educating myself with something different every day. How cool is that?