Orion Test Launch Coming Soon

The first space flight of the new Orion crew capsule is scheduled for this week. It's about time we got this thing going, we've been without manned space capability for too long. And while the space shuttle was cool and all, we haven't had any sort of capability beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo, and that was 40 years ago. Space flight is no cheaper, we have just as many space stations orbiting the planet, and we are about as close to traveling to other planets now as we were then. Hopefully this doesn't get cancelled, like every other time NASA has tried to move the manned space program along with any kind of ambition. We can only hope. This flight will be unmanned, but if all goes well, astronauts should soon be on their way beyond Earth and out into the solar system.

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The Case of the Missing Stars

It seems that globular clusters in the Fornax galaxy cluster are missing some stars. The population of these globular clusters is split equally between old stars and new stars. This does not fit in with current theories on the formation of those objects. Until now, scientists assumed that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time, and that most, if not all the stars would be old. Any new stars would form from ejected star material, but theories predicted that old stars should outnumber new stars considerably. Observationally, that isn't the case for Fornax.

It's actually not the case for the Milky Way's globular clusters, either. They have a similar star make-up, but scientists assumed that something caused the clusters to lose older stars. They can't make the same assumption for Fornax, because there's nowhere the stars could have gone where we couldn't detect them. They're just not there. So, it may take some serious rethinking to figure out how these globular clusters actually formed.

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