Is there such a thing as a killer meteor season for the Earth? Scientists believe so. One theory says that the killer meteor that killed the dinos came during this kind of season. Scientists now believe we are close to another such season. More details in the full article.

With the vast size of our galaxies, it's easy to get lost in such a massive space, it seems that mini-galaxies have gone missing. Scientists are now wondering where all the mini-galaxies have gone. Have they just disappeared completely? Or have they merged with other galaxies? Details in the full article.

In just about every galaxy known to man, the most common feature in them is that they all have a monstrous centerpiece: a massive black hole. For some reason, Milky Way's own Sagittarius A* seems dormant, but Japanese observers say it wasn't always this way. The full story follows after the jump.

Though black holes are often characterized as humongous gravity sinks, scientists believe there's a minimum mass requirement for any black hole in existence. They've got the requirements down pat by way of theoretical prediction only, but two able researchers from NASA finally pinpointed the smallest black hole to date. It could help them judge whether their estimates are accurate enough. More details at the full story.

A recent study has confirmed that there are hundreds of other planets which carry conditions similar to Earth in the outskirts of the Solar System and even across the Milky Way Galaxy.

The scientists hope to know more about this in the continued search for life and possible future colonies. Know more after the jump!

A star nine times the size of our own Sun has been observed speeding away from our Milky Way at 1.6 million miles per hour. While this may not be an unusual event in and of itself (stranger stuff have happened in the universe - game delays for instance), scientists have been puzzled by the star's origins since it didn't come from our own galaxy. Now they believe that the star came from another galaxy, catapulted away by a black hole 1,000 times the mass of the Sun. Details in the full article.

With no more than three weeks after being claimed the largest black hole in history, the Messier 33 black hole (M33 X-7) and its accompanying star is belittled by a much larger contender. The new black hole is at least 24 times the mass of the Sun (compared with M33 X-7's 16-fold mass) and resides in galaxy IC 10, 1.8 million light years away from Earth.

Discovered by a team led by Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the "stellar-mass" black hole (stellar-mass meaning the black hole comes in sizes of stars) may even have as much as 33 times a typical solar mass. That usually equates to impressive (and powerful) gravitational pull.

Galaxy IC 10 was observed as far as a year ago, and it was found that the black hole took in much of its accompanying star's gases. The material would be lost to this universe, but before it did, the gases heated up and emitted X-rays that were observable from Earth.

"We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized," said Prestwich. She later added that there's a possibility that even more stellar-mass black holes exist in other galaxies which formed during the Milky Way's early days. This new find will be published in an unnamed paper on November 1.

While a lot of people worry about their weight, Australian scientists have had more perplexing things in mind. In order to find out more about the known universe, they must find out how much the Milky Way weighs.

With the help of some theories and the 1.2-meter Schmidt Telescope, they were able to do the seemingly impossible. They just estimated the total amount of matter in our galaxy at 42 zeroes following the number three. Strangely enough, the number coincides with the answer to the same question in the sci-fi novel " Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.

They came up with the figure by measuring the escape velocities of each star possible. The escape velocity is the speed by which celestial bodies travel in order not to get drawn to the immense pull of other bodies. Once this was done, factoring in "dark matter" was the next scientific task.

Dark matter is a theoretical form of matter unseen and unconfirmed yet detectable by current means. Astronomers believe that like regular matter, this type of essence holds weight and must be factored in. Measuring the amount of dark matter characterized by their dark energy signatures, the final calculations were made.

The results were presented to an interested Australian Astronomical Society in Sydney. Also stated in the talk was the possibility of tracking the weight of the universe, though it would take considerably more effort because distant galaxies have to be studied more carefully.

  

Galaxy Messier 81 is a spiral galaxy, much like our very own Milky Way, located 11.6 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope of NASA recently took high resolution image captures of M81. And through a series of collaborating space observatories around the globe, they were able to collect new information regarding the mysterious galaxy not very dissimilar from our own.

"The view we have of M81 is similar to what an astronomer in Andromeda would see if they looked at the Milky Way," explained Andreas Zezas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It's also surprising that the Hubble, named after Edwin Hubble who first discerned that the stars in Andromeda marked the galaxy distinct from our own, repeated such a feat 80 years after, with a galaxy five times farther away.

 

If fact, NASA pegs M81 as one of the brightest galaxies that can be viewed from Earth. With a penchant for discerning colors and lights, star gazers could find the Milky Way look-alike high up in the northern sky close to the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It's obliquely angled to the Milky Way, so much of the galaxy is viewable.

Click on Full Article to get a more detailed image of the galaxy and find out more of M81.

Eta Carinae is considered to be one of the largest single stars in the whole Milky Way galaxy. Its mass is estimated to be 100 to 150 times larger than our own sun and its luminosity is about four million times brighter, and astronomers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have just located its potential rival.

According to scientists, two massive stars labelled LH54-425 are currently orbiting so close to each other in a galaxy outside Milky Way. Now, these two have the potential to merge and create a "super sun." George Sonneborn of NASA commented:

The merger of two massive stars to make a single super star of over 80 suns could lead to an object like Eta Carinae, which might have looked like LH54-425 one million years ago. Finding stars this massive so early in their life is very rare. These results expand our understanding of the nature of very massive binaries.

Sonneborn added that the system will eventually produce a very energetic supernova. However, that event is still very distant as the stars are just less than three million years old. LH54-425 contain about 62 and 37 times the mass of our sun respectively and are about 165,000 light years from Earth.

On a related matter, NASA astronomers mentioned earlier this month that Eta Carinae may be nearing extinction. Their prediction was based on the recent discovery of a supernova known as SN 2006gy. According to them, the star that produced that supernova expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding.

Likewise, Eta Carinae is currently losing a lot of mass.