astroENGINE.com hosts the 51st Carnival of Space, a lengthy compilation indeed, from which I'll draw Ian Musgrave's interesting post on a possible transit at 83 Leonis as the feature of the week. If you want to find out what it's like to get your hands dirty juggling the data, trying to sift out signal from noise and working with all the imponderables that go into spotting the signature of a transiting world, have a look. Ian finds a noisy 83 Leonis but one that just might show a transit. A self-described 'mathematically challenged biologist,' this is a writer whose work is always worth watching. In this case, what he's doing reflects the broadening participation of amateurs in exoplanet projects, an idea Greg Laughlin has championed, so it's no surprise to see that Ian has drawn from Laughlin's expertise in his current work.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that Stephen Hawking is only sixty-six. Not just because of his indomitable fight against Lou Gehrig's disease, which is a story in its own right, but because his position at the summit of modern physics has kept him in the public eye for an exceedingly long time. Now, in a speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of NASA, Hawking has taken aim at the question of why space matters. And it's not surprising that this Star Trek fan quoted his favorite show. "If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before ... It will not solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and... Hopefully, it will unite us to face a common challenge." But of course, that question of solving our immediate problems on Earth is what is often subject to debate. Although the space budget is usually overestimated (a recent conversation illustrated this, a friend...

The Kentucky space program may get back to the Moon before NASA or the Chinese. If that sounds cryptic, do visit the latest Carnival of Space, held on Wayne Hall's KySat Online site, which supports this innovative and student-led program to get the educational system into the business of designing, building, and operating small satellites. Wayne writes: The very first project of this ambitious enterprise is a cooperative, student-led effort to design, build and fly a CubeSat that kids from the eastern mountains to the western Mississippi river shore can figuratively reach out and touch from classrooms all over the state. The first of many planned efforts, it will rocket to orbit sometime late this year or early next. Good fortune accompany the attempt! I hope many states are watching what Kentucky is doing, an educational activity that spreads interest and enthusiasm for space projects to the next generation of scientists. As to the Carnival itself, I normally choose one post of...

Is observation critical to existence? Niels Bohr believed that it was the collapse of the wave function that gave particles like electrons their distinct reality. John Wheeler, who knew and worked with the great figures of quantum mechanics, summarized the gap between that point of view and Einstein's by quoting three baseball umpires: Number 1: I calls 'em like I see 'em. Number 2: I calls 'em the way they are. Number 3: They ain't nothing till I calls 'em. Michio Kaku reports this story in his book Parallel Worlds, noting this: "To Wheeler, the second umpire is Einstein,who believed there was an absolute reality outside human experience. Einstein called this 'objective reality,' the idea that objects can exist in definite states without human intervention. The third umpire is Bohr, who argued that reality existed only after an observation was made." Image: Albert Einstein, Hideki Yukawa and John A. Wheeler. Credit: Johns Hopkins University. Out of such conundrums John Wheeler made...

The 49th Carnival of Space is up at Will Gater's site, and this week I'll point you in particular to Alan Boyle's entry on black hole simulations. The mathematics of black hole collisions are not for the faint of heart, but the Rochester Institute of Technology's supercomputer cluster seems up to the task, even if the work demanded a week to complete. Interesting stuff, as an actual triple black hole collision as simulated here should generate gravity waves of the sort being sought by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). But LIGO scientists need to know what to look for amidst the incoming tsunami of data, which is where supercomputer modeling comes into play. Boyle's presentation of this work is thorough and, as always, admirably clear. There are actually not one but two space carnivals at play this week, the other being Fraser Cain's at Universe Today. But rather than drawing on already written weblog entries, Fraser solicited comments from bloggers on a...