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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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On September 8, 1966, the first episode in a television series that would come to revolutionize television aired: simply called ‘Star Trek’, this science-fiction show would change the way stories were told, the way we would view the world, and influence our concept of technology. One of the radical departures that Star Trek made was it’s use of "warp drive" as their starship’s method of propulsion: where previous series would simply use old-fashioned rockets, the U.S.S. Enterprise would warp the very fabric of spacetime itself, enabling faster-than-light travel, and simultaneously negating the unwanted time-dilatation and mass increase as predicted by the Theory of Relativity.
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