Daily Astronomy Fix

Yes, it is a slow market day. What do you expect considering the coming holiday, as traders and PM's flee to their respective summer hang outs for one last time. In the meantime, I using the time to catch on work, some reading, and the news. These two news stories out of the astronomy community peaked my interest over the two days.

 Nasa finds millions of black holes and 1,000's of the brightest galaxies seen.

NASA was teasing some big news about black holes yesterday, and this afternoon, we know what that is. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope has found millions of black holes dotting the universe, as well as more than 1,000 of the brightest galaxies ever observed, which have gone unobserved until now because they are shrouded with dust that has hidden them from view. This despite the galaxies in question being as much as 100 trillion times brighter than our Sun.

Although you probably could not actually stand there..... do you want to go to Tatoonie?

The scientists have now announced the detection of Kepler-47, the first system seen with multiple worlds encircling a pair of stars. The star and its planets, called Kepler-47b and Kepler-47c, dwell about 5,000 light-years away, in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. [Planets of the Tatooine-like Solar System (Gallery)]

"Kepler-47 shows us that binary stars can have close-in planetary systems, just like the ones we see in single stars," study lead author Jerome Orosz at San Diego State University told SPACE.com. "Most of the stars in the galaxy are in binary or higher-order multiple systems, so the fact that planetary systems can exist in these types of systems is important. If we were restricted to looking for planets around single stars, we would be missing most of the stars in the galaxy."

This is pretty cool. Nothing makes you feel like you are part of something larger, and yet makes you feel so small as all things astronomy.