Added 1 new A* page:Today's first news item comes from Twitter, where I was linked to a slashdotted article describing the findings of a new research paper, which says that a protoplanetary disk has been discovered around a red dwarf star that is being sucked rapidly toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*. While even the ESO's Very Large Telescope can't directly image the star's disk, its presence has been inferred from "a telltale 100 billion-mile diameter cloud of glowing gas created by the disintegration of the disk" as it is torn apart by A*'s gravitational pull.
The dwarf star has been calculated to hail from a "3 million-year-old ring of young stars" orbiting A*; a close encounter with another star or stars in the ring could have thrown this star into the pull of the supermassive black hole. It is projected to avoid being sucked in, though: calculations show that in 2013 it will make its closest approach to the hole, within 270 billion miles miles--that's about 100 times as far as Pluto is from the Sun--in the middle distance of Pluto's elliptical orbit, anyway. The star may survive that revolution, but it looks likely that its planetary nursery won't.
The article also points out that the Hubble Space Telescope found a ring of stars orbiting the black hole center of our neighboring Andromeda galaxy in the 1990s, and goes on to get excited about the suggestion this troubled red dwarf in our galaxy presents: if it was forming planets, then could life evolve on a star orbiting a supermassive black hole? I guess anything's possible, but I'll take our position in this nice peaceful galactic backwater over that precarious position any day, thanks!
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I also noticed an article saying that NASA is tracking two pieces of space debris that may get into the 30-mile-wide, one-mile-high "safety zone" around the International Space Station Thursday and Friday, which would mean that the station would have to fire its thrusters as a "debris avoidance maneuver" to get back in the clear--they don't actually think the pieces will hit the station anyway, but they like to be on the safe side. The pieces are "the remains of a Russian Cosmos satellite and a leftover chunk of an old Indian rocket."
The Kosmos satellites, as they're spelled in their home country I guess, aren't a single satellite program, but more of a blanket term for all Soviet and Russian government satellites, counting all the way back to Kosmos 1 in 1962--they were up to 2,468 Kosmos-designated craft as of 2010. Hopefully most of them will behave themselves.
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In fighting with today's page--which gradually got darker and darker as I found it just looked too hm bright and plain I guess in the airlock's before-seen super-white state :?P--I came across something that actually worked pretty well. I finally decided I had to make the background of the airlock, behind the spacemen, very dark, but I didn't want to do full black, because I wanted the full black on them to stand out from it a bit, so I filled it with a very dark gray wash. That wasn't quite spooky enough, though, so I took my big brush and drybrushed some pure black ink into the middles of those dark gray areas, and it actually made a pretty nice effect I think: a very dark area that could pass for black, but has dark auras and other magical things that seem to be living in it. An easy and lively alternative to a flat black fill, perhaps!
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