Our solar system has a tail.

Our solar system has a tail. The tail is a stream of solar wind plasma — charged particles — and magnetic field, trailing off behind the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system, as well as the solar wind and our sun’s magnetic field. This bubble doesn’t stop at the planets — it extends at least 8 billion miles beyond them.

Everything is so amazing and sometimes so impossible to imagine!

Water!

Wow!

As little as five years ago, no one had detected water in the samples returned from the Moon. The advancement of instrumentation, such as secondary ion mass spectrometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, has made it possible to detect tiny, but measurable, amounts of water in the mineral grains from Apollo samples.

In a new paper, researchers show that they have detected significant amounts of water in the samples of the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions. The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a mostly molten early Moon that is called the lunar magma ocean.

According to Hejiu Hui, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame<, "The presence of water in the early Moon needs to be reconciled with the favored formation scenario that had been supported by the volatile elements and isotopes in the samples, such as Zinc. "It's not 'liquid' water that was measured during these studies but hydroxyl groups [developed from water that did exist in the lunar magma ocean] that was distributed within mineral grain. We are able to detect those hydroxyl groups in the crystalline structure of the Apollo samples." The hydroxyl groups the team detected are evidence that the lunar interior contained significant water during the Moon's early molten state, before the crust solidified, and that they may have played a key role in the development of lunar basalts. "The presence of water," says Hui, "could imply a more prolonged solidification of the lunar magma ocean than the once popular anhydrous moon scenario suggests."

Now, I can close my eyes and see the moon crowded with people. People from the moon flying space shuttles to Earth to visit their grand parents. It will not happen in my life time. But I feel great when I think that someday it will happen.

February 15

So many things are happening these days. If you ask me about the last week , I would tell you the stories of an asteroid and a meteorite. One fell to Earth, another didn’t.

1. ‘An asteroid passed safely by Earth on Feb. 15, 2013. Its closest approach, about 17, 150 miles above the Indian Ocean.

2. Meteorite crash in Russia causing explosions that injured more than a thousand people.

We are almost nothing or too small in the universe but we are lucky because we can now at least say what things are flying by and what falling to Earth. Not only that, we can see them flying or falling. And unlike our ancestors we know very well that they are not messages from god.