Carnival of Space #438

Merry Christmas! With any luck, you are celebrating with family and friends or you are enjoying some solitude this day. If you have a little time, why not take a peek at the articles below? This is the Carnival of Space #438 one of many which, mostly, run once a week hosted by someone in our collaborative and enjoyed by many.

Learn more about that here then come back and read what the fine bloggers below want to share with you this holiday season!

On with the show!

Give a Starry Gift: It’s the Cosmic Thought that Counts
CC Peterson | TheSpacewriter’s Ramblings

Promise The Sun, Moon, and Stars… and Deliver!
Every year, I get emails from folks asking about gift ideas for holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions. I’m a big fan of using gifts to help people learn about the stars and space exploration. It just seems like a great thing to give someone — access to the cosmos. So, in no particular order, here are some gift ideas you can use as a springboard to that really great present for someone (or even yourself).

Welcome to Bagnold: Curiosity Rover Reaches Massive Dark Sand Dunes Near Mount Sharp
Paul Scott Anderson | Planetaria

Since landing in 2012, the Curiosity rover has seen a lot of varied terrain within Gale crater, including ancient riverbed gravel, sandstone and mudstone rock outcrops, sand ripples finely sculpted by the Martian wind, and, of course, Mount Sharp looming above. Now the rover has reached a new type of…

Grandes granos de polvo alrededor de VY Canis Majoris
Fran Sevilla | Vega 0.0

New detailed observations done with VLT telescope of VY Canis Majoris, an hipergiant star, show huge quantities of dust around the object. This new discovery could be key in our understanding of supernovae. The article is written in Spanish.

The Expanse of Time – Galaxies, Evolution, Lifetimes
Ryan Marciniak | The Solstice Blog

A long time to a human being is a few decades, but to the universe this is a blip on the radar. Luckily we have the technology to understand the amazing things in the universe that happen very slowly, and find ways to shift them to the timescales we are used to.

SpaceX Nails Perfect Return to Flight Launch and Historic Vertical Return Landing – Gallery
Ken Kremer | The Universe Today

“There and back again,” said SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk after the amazing successful ‘Return to Flight’ launch of the firms Falcon 9 rocket and history making vertical return landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla, on Monday evening, Dec. 21.

For the first time in history, the first stage of a rocket blazing to orbit with a payload, separated successfully from the upper stage at high speed, turned around and then flew back to…

NASA Receives Significant Budget Boost for Fiscal Year 2016
Ken Kremer | The Universe Today

NASA has just received a significant boost in the agency’s current budget after both chambers of Congress passed the $1.1 Trillion 2016 omnibus spending bill this morning, Friday, Dec. 18, which funds the US government through the remainder of Fiscal Year 2016.

As part of the omnibus bill, NASA’s approved budget amounts to nearly $19.3 Billion – an outstandingly magnificent result and a remarkable turnaround to some long awaited good news from the decidedly negative outlook earlier this year.

The Life Cycle Of The Sun
Matt Williams | The Universe Today

The Sun has always been the center of our cosmological systems. But with the advent of modern astronomy, humans have become aware of the fact that the Sun is merely one of countless stars in our Universe. In essence, it is a perfectly normal example of a G-type main-sequence star (G2V, aka. “yellow dwarf”). And like all stars, it has a lifespan, characterized by a formation, main sequence, and eventual death.

This lifespan began roughly 4.6 billion years ago, and will continue for about another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years, when it will deplete its supply of hydrogen, helium, and collapse into a white dwarf. But this is just the abridged version of the Sun’s lifespan. As always…

That rounds out our current Carnival. I wish you many more blessings this holiday season and a wonderful New Year!