Carnival of Space 190

This image of the brown dwarf binary CFBDSIR 1458+10 was obtained using the Laser Guide Star (LGS) Adaptive Optics system on the Keck II Telescope in Hawaii. Adaptive optics cancels out much of Earth’s atmospheric interference, improving the image sharpness by a factor of ten and enabling the very small separation binary to be resolved. This is the coolest pair of brown dwarfs found so far—the colder and dimmer of the two components is a candidate for the brown dwarf with the lowest temperature ever found. This color picture was created from images taken through four different filters at near-infrared wavelengths. Credit: Michael Liu, University of Hawaii.

The Carnival of Space 188 is up at Centauri Dreams

Centauri Dreams looked at Brown Dwarfs and Planets: A Blurry Boundary

Nextbigfuture also looked at the recent brown dwarf discoveries.

We also contributed the article that the US Navy was creating an anti-ballastic missile system with enhancement to Aegis ship anti-missile systems.

We also contributed an update on new hypersonic rocket tests

Kepler transit candidates represented by black points in the phase space of scaled semimajor axis vs. planet radius.

The Meridiani Journal notes that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, indicates that 1.4 to 2.7 percent, or one out of every 37 to 70, of sun-like stars are expected to have planets similar in size to the Earth that orbit within the habitable zone of those stars, where temperatures could allow liquid water. That’s about 2 billion in just our galaxy. Also of note is that red dwarf stars can also have such planets, although harder to detect, and those stars are much more numerous than sun-like stars.

The Occurrence Rate of Earth Analog Planets Orbiting Sunlike Stars (13 pages)

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks