Astronomers directly observe one of the youngest planets to date

Astronomers have spotted young planets before, but rarely this young — or with such easy observation. As CBS News says, a University of Hawaii-led team has discovered 2M0437b, one of the youngest planets ever found at ‘just’ several million years old. The baby planet was found in the Taurus Cloud “nursery” and young enough that it’s still emanating lava-like heat from its birth.

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We could move to another planet with a spaceship like this

Proxima b, our nearest neighboring exoplanet, is almost 25 trillion miles away. Even one of our fastest spaceships—the 31,600-​mile-​per-​hour New Horizons—would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Assuming we can’t figure out how to warp space-time (seems unlikely, but fingers crossed), we’re still looking at a couple-hundred-year trip in the best-case scenario, which leads to the real problem: No human crew could survive the entire ride. Science-fiction writers have long floated so-​called generation ships as a solution. Designers would outfit these interplanetary cruise vessels to support a community of adults and their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children…until humanity finally reaches a new celestial shore. Here’s our best guess for what it would take to sow the seeds of an extrasolar species.

JUST HOW FAR AWAY ARE THE EXOPLANETS WE’VE FOUND?

The galaxy brims with billions of planets, but whoa—they’re so far away! Unfortunately for would-be star trekkers, even the closest would take hundreds of lifetimes to reach with current technology. Until someone invents the warp drive, we’ll have to do our exploring with telescopes.

There May Be an Earth-Like Exoplanet Less Than Five Light Years Away

Rumors are flying that astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have discovered an Earth-like exoplanet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star. If confirmed, this is undeniably one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the century.

The 20 Most Earth-Like Exoplanets We’ve Found

Kepler has given us a stash of thousands of exoplanets. Now, researchers have pulled twenty from that stash that they say are the most likely to be habitable.

How Often Does Life Emerge in the Universe?

Since the 1960s, the Drake Equation has been used to predict how many communicative extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the Milky Way galaxy. Along these same lines, a new formula seeks to estimate the frequency at which life emerges on a planet—a calculation that might allow us to figure out the likelihood of life arising elsewhere in the universe.

Astronomers Want to Build A Forty Foot Space Telescope to Find the Next Earth

With Pluto millions of miles behind us and construction of the James Webb Space Telescope moving swiftly along, astronomers are already thinking about the Next Big Mission. At the top of their wish list? A forty foot-wide orbital telescope that’ll search for proof of life beyond Earth.

Lupe Fiasco – AUTOBOTO

Benny The Butcher – Bust A Brick Nick

Tory Lanez – Mucky James

Lupe Fiasco – 100 Chicagos

Sauce Walka – “Mirror Effect”

21 Savage – “No Debate” / “Big Smoke”

Flamingo at the Cincinnati Zoo

Mt. Gang Rinpoche (Tibet)

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