For my science Wednesday, I return to outer space.  It is more and more appearing that just about every star out there has a surrounding solar system, meaning planets, or, relative to us, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets.  In fact,  Forbes , speculated that for every star, there are from 100 to 100,000 planets.  Most of these are rogue planets in the spaces between stars.  The ones astrobiologists  are interested in for possible life must, of course, have a close-by star to provide energy. Any photos of them?   Actually one was announced  in April of this year, using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, together with the Hubble Telescope.  Well, maybe not quite, as this a globe about 9 times the mass of Jupiter at an early stage of planet formation.  It was located circling star AB Aurigae located 508 light years away. If that counts as one, then now two, as the  James Webb Space Telescope  just reported imaging another. Exoplanet 65426 b has no chance for life, as it is a gas giant nin

Yesterday I announced my intent to spend future Tuesdays featuring the best of my 14 years of posting this blog.  As Wednesday is my sci-tech day, I will provide a similar alert indicating what science topics I will focus on over next few days and weeks: What is a star?  Part 2 will feature dwarf stars, which are relatively small, and rest somewhere between stars and large planets, from a fascinating  Scientific American  article. Chemistry's quantum future.  Many products developed by industry were pure accidents, like teflon.  Chemistry is nearing a phase of being able to bypass this thing called serendipity. A possible solution to global warming:  the answer might be within our mantle, as seen in a remote desert of Oman. Virus scoreboard:  what can we expect in the future. A new understanding of Alzheimer's:  is microglia the real target? While only 1% of us stutter, as I once did, we getting closer to better understanding and curing this problem. Are hypersonic weapons over