Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.

Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.

Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.

If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.

Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”

“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

Color astronomers surprised.

See also: crash blossoms.

Solar eclipse, seen from Kalfeng, China.

(Here)

Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It’s the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.

Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-like planet that is larger than our own and may be more than half covered with water, according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

The so-called “super Earth” is about 42 light years away in another solar system and has a radius nearly 2.7 times larger than that of our planet, according to the study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

But:

Its temperature is estimated at between 280 and 120 degrees Celsius (536 and 248 degrees Fahrenheit) with its host star about one-fifth the size of the Sun, according to the scientists.

Dr Tandberg said: “I agree with everyone in the science community that this light was the weirdest thing. I have never seen anything like this ever.

“It may have been anything from an exploding missile whose launch went wrong – to a comet or other celestial object that for some reason has been behaving strangely.

Hat tip Andrea

Astronomers say they have taken the first direct image of a planet-like object orbiting a star much like our own sun.

The object called GJ 758 B orbits a parent star that is comparable in mass and temperature to our own sun, said study team member Michael McElwain of Princeton University. The star lies 300 trillion miles (480 trillion km), or about 50 light-years, from Earth.

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