Complex Insight - Understanding our world

The number of observed exoplanets - worlds circling distant stars - has passed 1,000. Of these, 12 could be potentially habitable - orbiting at a distance where it is neither "too hot" nor "too cold" for water to be liquid on the surface. The planets are given away by tiny dips in light as they pass in front of their stars or through gravitational "tugs" on the star from an orbiting world.These new worlds are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia The tally now stands at 1,010 new exoplanets, bolstered by 11 new finds from the UK's Wide Angle Search for Planets (Wasp). Abel Mendez of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, said that although the number has rapidly increased in recent years, due to a lack of funding this figure is much lower than it could be. In January 2013, astronomers used Kepler's data to estimate that there could be at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. They said that one in six stars could host an Earth-sized planet in close orbit.

... figuring out the universe is tough. There’s all these weird things — dark matter, quasars, cosmological expansion — that are genuinely difficult to get a good handle on. So anything that helps come to terms with how the cosmos works is commendable, and for that reason I really like this new 3-D map assembled by scientists working with the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan using data from the Subaru Telescope. 

Author Lily Koppel tells the BBC about the Astronaut Wives Club, the women behind the first American men in space.

the world’s third-fastest supercomputer --known as Mira--will complete tests of its new upgraded software and begin running the largest cosmological simulations ever performed at Argonne National Laboratory. One point of interest is the HACC (for Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code) the underpinning code base is modular and reconfigurable for different compute architectures including hybrid CPU and GPU architectures. Links for further information in the article sidebar. Click on the image or the title to learn more.