Astronomy and Cosmology

The Beagle 2, named after Charles Darwin's sea ship HMS Beagle, will hitch a ride with the Mars Express, a European Space Agency craft that will orbit the red planet. "We hope that when it arrives on Mars at the end of next year, we will finally be able to answer the eternal question: Is there, or was there, life on Mars." said Colin Pillinger, a British scientist involved in the Beagle 2 mission: Read the about the Mars lander, here. To me, this is pretty exciting. People have been trying to create a working Mars lander for over 30 years. Hopefully someone can do something right this time, but if you read down the article, it says NASA plans to be doing…

I was just curious if it would be possible to construct solar sails at the moons equater to increase the moons spin to near the moons escape velocity. It would make mining a lot easier. After all the moon is just one big spaceship up there relative to us. Landing at the poles would be simple and mining ores could be moved to the equater and pushed off the surface to waiting nets for transport. No problems launching bulk ores Not that we'd ever do it. I was just wondering if it was feasable.:scratch: Just aman

I read in last month discover magazine about how scientists can only explain the odd orbit of the planet neptune and pluto, is that there is a very large planet out there that distorts them. Now, for some time I have accepted this theory. But in this months, it describes a galaxy on the collapse 50 billion light years away. Now, it makes me wonder. Pluto is no where near 50 billion light years. It's not even a billion, So, if this theroy was to be true, This planet would have to be big enough to attract them. But, if we can see 50 billion light years away, and we havent found this 10th planet, it would have to be hard to fathom the size of this planet.

Hubble's law states that there is a linear relationship between distance and recessional velocity, correct? Following this line of thought, wouldn't there be very distant galaxies that are traveling faster than light? How is this not a violation of special relativity?

Should we be concentrating more on possible Middle Eastern Terrorism, or Astronomical Terrorism?