Carnival of Space 215

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The Carnival of Space 215 is up at cheapastro

Cheap astro also has a podcast version

Doc Madhattan reports on the Kepler Space Telescope discovery of a planet around a binary star which matches the profile of the fictional Star Wars planet Tatooine.

The Meridiani Journal reported on the discovery by Kepler of six earth sized planets that are in the habitable zone of their stars

Arxiv – Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Low-Mass Kepler Planet-Candidate Host Stars: Effective Temperatures, Metallicities, Masses and Radii (10 pages)

Next Big Future showcased the latest in theoretical space drive technology with a laser-injected fusion engine. The engine works by plasma-ising its Boron-11 fuel producing alpha particles—which are then magnetically accelerated and channeled out the back of spacecraft as thrust. It’s all works much more efficiently than existing ion drives, since the spacecraft’s electrical power is largely generated from the fusion process.

Nextbigfuture also provided an article about an advance in mapping the moons crust by researchers in Hong Kong

Next Big Future reviewed the recent finding of HARPS (the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) which incorporate analyses of over 376 Sun-like stars, finding that around 40% of the these stars have at least one planet smaller than Saturn—and any of these stars with a planet smaller than Neptune always seems to be a multi-planet system.

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