$33 billion: That’s how much the Star Wars franchise made since its debut in 1977, and almost half of that comes from the sale of toys. Now try to imagine how much plastic that translates into.
[Wired]
[Source: Virtual Shackles]
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel space observatory has revealed an incredibly unique feature of Saturn’s interaction with one of its moons, Enceladus. Some of the water that is ejected from its southern poles finds its way to Saturn’s atmosphere – something we have only conclusively observed in July 2011.
The Cassini flight in 2009 took the picture above, showing the jets of water vapour observed on Saturn’s moon, showing us this incredible phenomenon. It has also been known since 1997 that Saturn’s upper atmosphere contains water.
The Herschel observations have revealed that 3-5% of the water that Enceladus ejects actually ends up in a great doughnut-shaped torus around Saturn – providing the explanation for why water is observed in Saturn’s atmosphere.
Lead researcher from the Max-Plank-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, Paul Hartogh commented:
“There is no analogy to this behaviour on Earth. No significant quantities of water enter our atmosphere from space. This is unique to Saturn.”
In other words, other planets may just have some pretty awesome things going on that we don’t even know about yet – our Solar System is pretty damned cool. Now imagine what other wonders await us in the final frontier…
Apparently, even users of the dark side of the force are not impervious to parking tickets.
[Via Blastr]
So geeks, of all the technologies at display in the Star Trek universe, which do you hope we see become a reality in our lifetime?
Share this infographic on your site!
Source: Best Computer Science Degree
