Spiralling towards destruction, the gas cloud heading to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way at five million miles an hour in 2013.

Next year will see one of the biggest collisions ever observed by man.
A giant gas cloud will hit the massive black hole – known as Sagittarius A – which lies at the centre of our galaxy in 2013.
Actually, the cloud will miss by quite a distance – 24,000,000,000 miles to be semi-exact – and while this is quite a distance (indeed it takes light 36 hours to travel that far), [...]

Massive ‘vampire’ star systems fill the cosmos

A surprising number of massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy are part of close stellar duos, a new study finds, but most of these companion stars have turbulent relationships — with one “vampire star” sucking gas from the other, or the two stars violently merging to form a single star.

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile studied massive O-type stars, which are very hot and incredibly [...]

AWESOME! Astronomers discovered four impossible binary systems!

About half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy are, unlike our Sun, part of a binary system in which two stars orbit each other. Most likely, the stars in these systems were formed close together and have been in orbit around each other from birth onwards. It was always thought that if binary stars form too close to each other, they would quickly merge into one single, bigger [...]

DISCOVERED: Planet Orbiting 2 Suns, Just Like Star Wars

An illustration of the planet called Kepler-16b (foreground) which orbits two stars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 

MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF) – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Kepler spacecraft has found a planet that orbits two stars just as Luke Skywalker’s home world does in the Star Wars movies, NASA announced Thursday.

An orange sun and a red sun that actually orbit each other define daytime on Kepler 16b, the 21st planet outside [...]

HANKS/ROBERTS IN HOLIDAY FLOP… DEVELOPING…

FRIDAY 2 PM, 9TH UPDATE: There look to be no fireworks for Hollywood movies this Fourth Of July long weekend. Sources tell me that early numbers show that not even the pairing of veteran Hollywood stars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts could open Larry Crowne which also was directed and co-written and co-produced by Hanks. Even though the two stars did any and all publicity for it, the [...]