Just to get me rolling again

And for the sake of completeness, really, I am expected to use the Harvard Referencing System. Now, what I put down the other day really is incomplete - let's see what I can do about that.

Fear not! Come Monday I must give my presentation and my degree lives or dies so either way the future of my astronomical mentionings will be more hobby than work. There may be a bombardment of other subjects though. ^_~

Microbe Rises From Death

Cheating DNA Death: How an Extremophile Repairs Shattered Chromosomes. That is the title of an article up at Scientific American right now, about a microbe that can piece together its DNA after it has been fragmented by doses of radiation as much as 500 times what a human can withstand. There is a proper report at Nature but I cannot read that one without paying, so I will just have to let the ideas from that news blurb bubble about on their own.

More from SciAm

It is a problem explaining the formation of planets around stars more massive than our Sun. Well, it is a problem not yet solved how they form around any star, but especially the more massive ones. The standard model of planetary formation (Not the Standard Model!*) involves a disk of gas and dust surrounding the star as it forms, and from which the planets form. But during the formation of a massive star it is expected to give off much more, and more energetic radiation than our Sun and less massive stars ever did (the very most massive of stars are not actually the brightest in the visible spectrum - their luminosity peaks in the ultraviolet [!] [I really must write up something about blackbody spectrums, etc.]) and it is thought this might blast away the disk before there is time for planets to form. But now what appears to be such a protoplanetary disk has been found around a massive young star. Alas the main article is also behind a subscription wall (this time at Science) so I cannot get at this one either.

Also, apparently massive stars form in the expected way and not via collisions. Or at least this one appears to be. Well, I was not aware of the alternative idea so, um, good?

*Yes, I think that is funny