A map of distant galaxies? This puts it in perspective!

Whoa, and I remember when the "little blue dot" used to refer to EARTH.  Nope, here the blue dot is the entire MILKY WAY GALAXY. But this really puts all the quadrant rivalries into perspective!

(Though I hope you still find this little reference to be of help…)



By Ken Croswell at ScienceMag.org ...

How to find your way home from deep space

If aliens ever abduct you to a galaxy far, far away, this map might help you find your way back home. Presented online today in Nature, the map spans more than 1.5 billion light-years, coloring the densest concentrations of observed galaxies red and areas with the fewest galaxies blue. 

Your home galaxy, the Milky Way, is the blue dot at the center. The red region above the Milky Way includes Virgo, the closest galaxy cluster, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The orange curve illustrates the key finding of the new work: It encircles galaxies that would fall toward one another along the curved white lines if space weren't expanding; the astronomers have named this huge assemblage Laniakea, after Hawaiian words for "spacious heaven." It is 100 quadrillion times as massive as the sun—equivalent to 100,000 Milky Ways—and stretches across more than half a billion light-years of space. 

… more...

Big Bend fans: Meet us at Sun City SciFi in El Paso!

Hey, all you fan-folks  through the Rio Grande region of West Texas and southern New Mexico—

Let me remind you about a new sci-fi con in El Paso next weekend—where I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of new fan-buds myself ... and playing Mad Science to boot, for the first time since 2003!

Well, maybe more Fun than Mad... because Sun City SciFi is the latest start-up convention in El Paso—the birthplace of Gene Roddenberry— and has been nice enough to have me back out. Marina, Tony Amendola, Robin Cruz,  and a host of comics, anime and other sci-fi guests are there too ...

I'll be in El Paso a day early for Thursday, the night of the nationwide TNG "Best of Both Worlds" High-Def Movie Night from CBS and Fathom Events, so come out and we'll see the show together, after a con PRE-preview at 5 p.m. at the theater.

The entire convention is at the El Paso Airport Marriott, so fans and events are all on one site for maximum fan logistical awesomeness ... and the hotel lounge has been good enough to host our next version of the "Con of Wrath" meetup/fundraiser party.

... Plus, with the Gene Roddenberry Planetarium in his birthplace town, we will stage a return of a "Trek Stars/Real Stars" astro-smackdown on Sunday!

So here's my scoop:

THURSDAY:

—TNG MOVIE NIGHT: 5 p.m. Meet/greet Trekland table, convention giveaways...7 p.m. "Best of Both Worlds" movie: Tinseltown Cinemark, 11855 Gateway West, 79936

FRIDAY:

—PREVIEW NIGHT, 6-9 p.m., Exhibitor Room: A laid-back night for weekend passholders to come by and check out all that is TREKLAND and "The Con of Wrath."


SATURDAY:

—TREKLAND'S "BETWEEEN THE CRACKS" SHOW, 12 noon, Main Stage:  Our trademark "slideshow" of Trek in-jokes, news, behind the scenes...from all 47 years of Trek. Plus our traditional audience poll start-up: do you know you own Trek profile?

—WAK-A-BLOOPER: 5 p.m., Main Stage: Can you get your snark on? Here's a new one—be in the crowd and help decide the best shout-out caption for some very offbeat Trek clips across all the series. And yes, for prizes ....courtesy Sun City Scifi!

—CON OF WRATH Meetup, El Paso Edition!: 9-11 p.m., right in the Marriott lounge: our patented BONUS off-grid road show of prize trivia, rare Trek video, and exclusive raw celeb clips from our own doc about this infamous event from heroic Trek pop culture meltdown history!

SUNDAY:

—TREK STARS/ REAL STARS, 12 noon, Main Stage: With co-guest Cory Stone, director of the Gene Roddenberry Planetarium, in which we lovingly "debate" just how many of Star Trek's real-life star homes really do work out for harboring native life—blue, furry, or otherwise. No really—we have a list and everything. The same panel I've only done twice before: at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, AL in 2003 and at Muenster Planetarium in Germany in 1998!

 —RAPID-FIRE TREK TRIVIA, 1:30 p.m., Game Room: Better not be late! This is a half-hour of unfancy Q/As, just you (and the rest of the crowd) and me for a cool prize. If you've ever seen me do this at the Vegas Khaaann!, this is how we roll! With prizes courtesy of Sun City SCifi!


And the rest of the time... come visit at my table where I'll have the latest in Trekland goodies and gossip.

Just another week from now—I hope the Borderlands do us proud. I'll be sending EP's own pics for Thursday's TNG movie night from our trivia ticket winners and everyone else in for our Trekland photo roundup the next day, too!

Ah—it's really Class M, after all?

(And no, this image is NOT an HD framegrab from the early seconds of the opening title of the newly remastered The Next Generation:)

In the second follow-up after its discovery in September 2010:

"Gliese 581g Exoplanet May Be 'Potentially Habitable' Alien World After All"

By: Mike Wall
Published: 07/23/2012 04:08 PM EDT on SPACE.com

... The ... planet was said to orbit in the middle of its star's "habitable zone" — that just-right range of distances where liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, could exist.

Just a few weeks later, however, another prominent research team began casting doubt on the find, saying the alien planet didn't show up in their observations. ...

But in a new study that will be published Aug. 1, 581g's discoverers examine the Swiss team's since-expanded data set and take issue with their conclusions, saying that the evidence supports the planet's existence after all. ...

...

"The take-away message is, regardless of who eventually gets bragging rights to the discovery of the first truly confirmed habitable Earth-sized planet, we are starting to find them in unexpected numbers, and unexpectedly nearby," Vogt said. "That means there are many, many out there, at least tens of billions or more, in our own galaxy alone."

First "hardtop" exo-planet!: I'm guesing Class B or E, maybe N?

Love it when our infant science keeps taking its baby steps toward the optimistic, expansive worldview of Gene's Trekland science ...

So here comes word today of the next baby step in our extra-solar planetary science: we've had planets confirmed before, but until this week they were all known to to be Jupiter-like gas giants. So now--meet one you can take a "giant leap for mankind" on: CoRoT 7b, our first known hardshell planet beyond Sol's own four. (Cue: "Rocky" theme ... if you get it ...)

For the big-picture terminologists, its star is currently named TYC 4799-1733-1, about 500 LYs distant; the "CoRot" comes from the CoRoT French/ESA surveying satellite that made the discovery, "CoRoT 7" being its own mission name for the star and "b" being the system's second planet ID'd.... and "TYC 4799-1733-1 I" being just a bit on the clunky side.

(The art, BTW, is an artists's official rendition of "CoRoT 7b").

Where No Blob Has Gone Before

Fascinating, to coin a phrase:

Giant mystery blob found near dawn of time.

... Ouchi and Ellis said one possibility is that by chance, astronomers captured the moment a galaxy was forming in the early universe — something that never has been seen before. ... What Ouchi found was from 12.9 billion years ago. Only three other objects have been seen that are from deeper in time and space. ...

The lowest-rez space anomaly ever? Or just some ancient subspace seaweed "snagged" by our cameras?

Fifty-five thousand lightyears across is no foam-core model...