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The study of planets found outside our solar system has been booming over the past few decades, with over two-thousand of these fascinating exoplanets having been cataloged. One of the next obvious steps for researchers is to attempt to detect signs of life on them, although the technology to directly determine if anything is living that far away has yet to be developed. In the meantime, studies are underway to help determine the best candidates to focus on, using what we know about life on Earth, and what information we can currently gather from the exoplanets themselves.
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Continuing it’s role as our solar system’s cosmic vacuum cleaner, the planet Jupiter swallowed up an object that was estimated to be similar in size to the meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013 — an incident that reportedly caused property damage and injuries to approximately 1,500 people. But, despite being 674.5 million km (419.1 million miles) away, the spectacular explosion the impact caused was recorded by modest-sized telescopes here on Earth.
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Some of our smallest astronomical neighbors just keep getting odder and odder: recent observations of the bright spots found on dwarf planet Ceres have shown them to be brightening and dimming over the course of it’s 9-hour day.

The spots, made of a briny mixture containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite, appears to be upwelling in certain spots from below the former asteroid’s surface. The spots have been found to emit a haze, indicating that the water in the material is evaporating into space, leaving the pale minerals deposited on Ceres’ dark surface.
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One of the major roadblocks our culture has in regards to space travel is that in order to travel at speeds that could make a trip to a distant planet or star in a reasonable time frame is the application of energy: currently, we’re stuck burning chemical fuel to propel our vehicles, of which means also lugging that fuel along with the vehicle, meaning the vehicle weighs more because of the extra fuel, meaning the vehicle has to carry more fuel to offset that weight — it unfortunately becomes a cycle of inefficiency, making for a very slow vehicle.
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