Interstellar Medium

Open Clusters Like Orion Have Low Fertility Rate (SpaceDaily)

9 Jul 2008

by Robert Sanders for Berkeley News Berkeley CA (SPX) Jul 09, 2008 A detailed survey of stars in the Orion Nebula has found that fewer than 10 percent have enough surrounding dust to make Jupiter-sized planets, according to a report by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

How Long Would it Take to Travel to the Nearest Star? (Universe Today)

9 Jul 2008

We've all asked this question at some point: How long would it take to travel to the stars? And could I do it in my lifetime? There are many answers to this possibility, some very simple, others in the realms of science fiction. To make this easier to answer, we'll address how long it would [...]

MIT instrument studies edge of sun's bubble (PhysOrg)

8 Jul 2008

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have traveled beyond the edges of the bubble in space where the sun's constant outward wind of particles and radiation slams into the interstellar medium that pervades our galaxy. The first scientific reports on what the Voyagers found there appears this week in the journal Nature.