January 30th 2014 will also be a 'Supermoon', the moon has it's closest approach to Earth, and it will be a full moon - the second full moon this calendar month!

you sure it will be a full moon? Looks like it's due to be a new moon to me.

so, it`s not a super blue noon......damn there goes those prophecies. Guess I have to return the robes, dagger and crystals too

Do you turn into a were-cat on the full moon?

Oh maybe! That would explain a few things.

Like the scratches on your head board?

Black hole birth witnessed

Scientists have found what appears to be a black hole formed during a supernova observed 30 years ago.

"If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed," said Daniel Patnaude, the astrophysicist who led the team that found the black hole, in a statement Monday.

Patnaude, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his team are publishing their results in the New Astronomy journal, said a NASA news release.

The new black hole is believed to be a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979. A supernova is the bright explosion of a massive star at the end of its lifetime — in this case, the star was about 20 times more massive than the sun and located in a galaxy called M100, about 50 million light years from Earth.

A star's collapse under the weight of its own gravity after the explosion may generate a black hole. X-rays are emitted by gas falling into the black hole.

The new apparent black hole was discovered from the X-rays it emitted between 1995 and 2007. They were detected using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory and the German ROSAT observatory.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/black ... d-1.927542

First Weather Map of Brown Dwarf
ESO’s VLT charts surface of nearest brown dwarf

ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to create the first ever map of the weather on the surface of the nearest brown dwarf to Earth. An international team has made a chart of the dark and light features on WISE J104915.57-531906.1B, which is informally known as Luhman 16B and is one of two recently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The new results are being published in the 30 January 2014 issue of the journal Nature.

Brown dwarfs fill the gap between giant gas planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, and faint cool stars. They do not contain enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion in their cores and can only glow feebly at infrared wavelengths of light. The first confirmed brown dwarf was only found twenty years ago and only a few hundred of these elusive objects are known.

The closest brown dwarfs to the Solar System form a pair called Luhman 16AB [1] that lies just six light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail). This pair is the third closest system to the Earth, after Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star, but it was only discovered in early 2013. The fainter component, Luhman 16B, had already been found to be changing slightly in brightness every few hours as it rotated — a clue that it might have marked surface features.

Now astronomers have used the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) not just to image these brown dwarfs, but to map out dark and light features on the surface of Luhman 16B.



http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1404/

Supernova to be Visible to Naked Eyes from Earth in Coming Weeks

A supernova will be visible with the naked eye from anywhere in the world in the coming weeks. The supernova, located 11.4 million light years from earth, is the stellar explosion known as SN 2014J. To tell you the precise location of the supernova, it is in the Messier-82 (M82) galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. M82 is also termed as the Cigar Galaxy.



http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/1421702 ... ming-weeks

OMG!! Official trailer for "Cosmos" with Neil DeGrass Tyson.