Paintball... For Science!

It's getting closer to that apocolyptic date of 12/21/2012, and what have we done to prepare? Nothing! Well, unless your an MIT graduate student, who studies asteroids. He (among others) proposed that asteroids with a collision course with Earth, should be redirected -not with nukes or rockets- but with paintballs! Simulations who that if you were to fire two pellets (5 tonnes) of white paint at the asteroid, which would cover most of the surface of the rock.

This doesn't seem like it would do much, but it isnt the initial paint blast that is meant to move it. The photons (light) from the sun will have more of a surface to bounce off of, which would slowly but surely redirect the asteroid, in this case, Apophis.

What could be better than an astronomical game of paintball? How about an astronomical game of paintball IN SPACE!?

                 (99942 Apophis, a Near-Earth Object.

                                 creative, I know.)

The Milky Way is hungry?

How does it feel to know that our galaxy is a cannibal? According to researchers at Yale University, The Milky Way has been constantly gobbling up star clusters and small galaxies. I won't judge though, since I for sure can't go millions of years without food... especially that tasty tortellini... Anyway, this is a pretty important discovery for everyone, since it goes to show how little we know about the things around us. For example, we have only explored roughly 5% of the ocean, and we've already come across things like that insane looking deep sea cucumber (right). We have also recently found out that in around 4 billion years, our galaxy and our closest neighbour Andromeda (M31) will collide, in a uneventful event. Since there are such vast distances between stars, it is highly unlikely that it will affect us in any way, since the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri at around 40 trillion km away. If the sun were a Ping-Pong ball in Paris, then Proxima Centauri would be a pea-sized ball in Berlin. However, stars are a lot more dense towards the center of the galaxies, but even then it would represent one Ping-Pong ball every 3.2 km. 

Basically, it's cool to know of these space and science things, but they really don't matter to us, since they'll either happen so far in the future we can't even comprehend, or they just won't affect anything at all! On another note, my tortellini is finished cooking, and I am mighty starved.

(Watch this if you want to see a long-drawn out, probably inaccurate simulation of the collision!)