原创 Many great news for us space primates!

Well, many interesting news items came out recently, from new rockets to strange exoplanets to the possibility that some things may go faster than the speed of light...

Do you recall my recent blog in which – amongst other things – I mentioned the discovery of a planet formed from diamond? (Click here to see that blog). Well, the last couple of weeks have seen a flurry of articles with regard to the discovery of a solar system involving a single planet (as far as we know) with two suns.

Most of these articles have Star Wars in the title, such as the one on the Time.com site: Scientists Find a Star Wars World: One Planet, Two Suns. This is prompted by the fact that there's a famous scene of Luke Skywalker's home world, Tatooine, showing two suns low in the sky.

The thing is that although double-star systems are very common, it was not known whether planets could form and survive in such a system. As the article in Time so nicely puts it: "When two elephants are waltzing, it could be very difficult for mice to tiptoe safely under their feet."

I personally find this to be tremendously exciting – every day we find new ways in which the universe is even more amazing and incredible than we ever imagined. (If you are interested in this stuff, you might also want to check out the article 10 Remarkable Exoplanets on the HowStuffWorks.com site.)

I was also absolutely delighted to hear that NASA has plans to develop a new heavy-lift launch vehicle that is planned to be operational by 2017 – it's inconceivable to me that the first (and only) nation to put a man on the moon would devolve to the state of not even being able to put a man in orbit around the Earth (Click here for more details).

I only hope I live to see a base on the moon following the discovery of water ice at the moon's North Pole (Click here for more details). And I would LOVE to see videos of explorations of the underground tunnels they've discovered on the moon (Click here for more details).

And as for things going faster than the speed of light... check out my next blog...