discoverynews:

Billions of Habitable Worlds in Our Galaxy?

There could be tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way that exist within the habitable zones of their parent red dwarf stars.

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guardian:

Photograph: T. Preibisch/ESO

From our gallery of space images captured this month:

This panorama of the Carina Nebula, a region of massive star formation in the southern skies, was taken in infrared light using the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged

sciencecenter:

Map of the asteroid Vespa show it is worthy of being called a protoplanet

While the colors are indeed appealing, the implications of this image from NASA’s Dawn probe are pretty interesting. The colors represent different frequencies given off by minerals on the asteroid’s surface. Green, for example, may represent pyroxene, an iron-rich mineral. According to scientists, the findings mean this:

This all goes to show that Vesta is a diverse object with different cosmic ingredients and well-separated layers. This bolsters claims that Vesta is a protoplanet — an embryonic world that might have become a major planet if it weren’t trapped in the lethal asteroid belt.

Dawn will continue to study Vespa for a year before moving on to Ceres, the largest protoplanet in the asteroid belt.

skullgrin140:

The Forging 

Love the colors choices in this.