His pick for #1 is excellent, as it shoves the long-standing We Never Went to the Moon conspiracy theory right into the face of gullible idiots. Why? It reveals the actual equipment Apollo astronauts left behind on the surface of the moon:

The discovery of a rocky planet outside of our solar system may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s the first time such an object has been detected. While most astronomers instinctively knew such planets must exist in the universe, one must always have proof before an idea becomes fact. Such proof has emerged.

While it is highly doubtful the planet, called Corot-7b, can sustain life thanks to the blistering 3,600 degree Fahrenheit temperature, it does validate that rocky planets exist in the universe and, more importantly, exist in great numbers. With great numbers comes the ever-increasing odds that life is out there in great numbers.

Google News:

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It’s in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

In addition, the planet is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth’s and it has a mass about five times the Earth’s.

Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they’ll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.

“The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe,” Boss said.

Astronomers are scracthing their collective heads at the discovery of a gigantic blob that existed when the universe was only 800-million years old.

From Discovery News:

“The puzzle is — what is it?” said California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis, who wasn’t on the research team but praised the find. “Often a puzzle leads to a breakthrough. My nose tells me that this object is rather special.”

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.

As astronomers gaze deeper into space, they are looking farther back in time. 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.

It’s pretty obvious this blob is the granddaddy of all B-movie blobs that attacked movie characters in the 1960s. The fact that it emits radiation is all the evidence you need.

NASA has an important launch tonight that could ultimately be a game-changer for the human race. It’s called Kepler, named after Johannes Kepler in honor of his Laws of Planetary Motion. Kepler is an impressive telescope with one objective: find earth-like planets orbiting around distant stars.

As of now, we have yet to see any Earth-type planets, though we have discovered hundreds of larger planets over the past 10 years. Kepler hopes to change all that, thanks to an array of 42 CCD cameras, each with a resolution of 1024 x 2200, which translates in an impressive 95  megapixels. Kepler is powerful enough to detect a small, earth-sized planet pass in front of its host star. While it lacks the ability to detect life, simply finding earth-like planets would seriously alter our perspective of the universe.

If it is determined, as I’m confident it will be, that there are millions of stars in our single galaxy that host earth-sized planets orbiting at approximately the same distance as Earth orbits the Sun, then we will have serious reason to believe that life is abundant. If Kepler doesn’t find anything, then we will assume we’re extremely rare and possibly alone, which is quite depressing indeed.

Keep your fingers crossed for a successful launch, which should be happening around 7pm pacific time.

Follow the launch and mission by heading here.

Saturn has poised a long-standing mystery that has had astronomers scratching their heads for quite some time: its outer-most ring is comprised almost entirely of dust. What created the dust? Why hasn’t the dust dissipated? Where did all this dust come from? The answer always indicated that there must be a moon involved, though we could never find it. Well, until now. The culprit has been located and it lives right in the dust ring, solving the mystery once and for all. More importantly, it once again validates science: we expected to find it…and we found it.

This is Saturn’s 61st moon, if you can believe that. At only one-third of a mile in diameter, it’s quite small, though still large enough to produce the dust we see.

More details can be found here.

30,000 light-years from Earth there exists a star called SGR J1550-5418, which has recently began producing gamma-ray bursts of impressive violence.

“At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than a hundred flares in as little as 20 minutes,” said Loredana Vetere, who is coordinating the Swift observations at Pennsylvania State University. “The most intense flares emitted more total energy than the sun does in 20 years.”

Scientists think the source of the flares is a spinning neutron star–the superdense, city-sized remains of a supernova. Although only about 12 miles across, a neutron star contains more mass than the sun. This particular neutron star is believed to be a “magnetar,” a neutron star with an incredibly intense magnetic field.

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