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Here is a video of supersonic streams of hot gas coming out of young stars, as observed by Hubble: And here is the video of NASA's Cassini probe approaching Saturn: These terrific videos remind me of the memorable passage in Battlestar Galactica, where the most intellectual of the different Cylons - robots in form of humans- resents his creators for giving him a human body and human soul: Ellen: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible. John: I DON'T WANT TO BE HUMAN! I want to see gamma rays ! I want to hear X-rays , and I -- I want to -- I want to smell dark matter ! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to -- I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine, and I could know much more, I could experience so...

Somewhere in this picture, there is a pale blue dot. It is your home. It is the home of every living thing that we know and we don't know of. This is a picture taken by the Voyager in 1990 of our planet from 6 billion kilometers away. It is the most humbling picture I have ever seen. It has been said that science does not provide moral values but religion does. I beg to differ. Even though science by itself, which is merely a method, cannot provide a moral framework, the fruits of knowledge it gives us let us define our morals. This picture is a great example. Carl Sagan, touched by this picture wrote a book on this. Here is an excerpt from the introduction, which everyone should listen from time to time to wash away his or hers false ideas of grandeur: "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In...

The revolutionary idea of Newton was not finding out there is a force pulling the apple that fell on his head. It was all to obvious. What he found, and made the thinkers of his time so upset -the science was about to be born, it was called natural philosophy back then- was that the same set of rules govern the celestial bodies such as stars and planets -which were perfect and eternal,- and moral bodies such as an apple or humans. He was able to explain the astronomical laws that Kepler derived based on the painstaking observations by Tycho Brahe, with the laws he derived from everyday objects. The world and the skies were never to be seen as different spheres anymore. This year marks also the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observation of the stars and the planets, and the birth of modern astronomy. Following the path he opened, that is using publicly available observations, we are able to construct a fairly complete model of the history of our universe since -and before- its birth...

400 years ago Galileo Galilei first gazed at the skies through a telescope. He was probably the first human to gaze at the brilliant moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and many unseen stars and galaxies. But more than what he saw anything, how he saw what he saw, and how he used these observations have literally changed the world. Instead of submitting to dogma about how objects -or generally the world- should behave, he relied on observations, and a methodology to understand the behavior of objects. He was probably the most important figure in the development of science as we know it. He was also the first astronomer in the Western civilization. In honor of this great mind, UNESCO named 2009 the World Astronomical Year. I have 2 great sites in the spirit of this year: * Galaxy Zoo : The number of galaxies in the observable universe are thought to be in 100 billion range. Organizing, and classifying them is a galactical task. It turns out that human eye and mind are far better than ...

Don't miss out this collection of heritage pictures from the Hubble telescope. If this is interesting, make sure you visit this site which features a stunning astronomy picture everyday, along with explanations: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

My childhood dream was being an astronomer in the Arecibo Observatory : Unfortunately, I could not follow my dream. I still enjoy reading popular astronomy articles though. NASA has published amazing pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope , celebrating its 18th birthday, of colliding galaxies! It starts innocently like this: Ends brutally like this: Attraction is dangereous...