The Wandering World , The Galaxy From Nowhere, and Other Oddities

Statue of Yuri Gagarin erected near Admiralty Arch, London

On the anniversary (12th April 1961) of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space, we had an announcement from Stephen Hawking ,Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg (?) of project  'Breakthrough Starshot ,' an expedition to nearby star system Alpha Centauri, which will use a light sail, a powerful laser, and photons of sunlight to attain incredible speed - 20 % the speed of light, no less - taking a tiny microchip to its destination in a mere 20 years - a long journey to us, but a mere blip in cosmic terms (using conventional fuels would take 30 thousand years).
Momentous news, and just the kind of far - sighted thinking we need right now to escape our own earth-bound political struggles.

Breakthrough Starshot will boldly go...

The media is pushing the angle that it's the biggest attempt to discover aliens, ever.*
Well, I suppose it sells copy .
To be honest, the hyperbole would have you believe that the mere presence of our tiny solar sail would induce aliens to rush to appear on camera, take a selfie, etc.
The assertion that a tiny camera on a tiny sail is our most elaborate attempt to contact extraterrestrials is laughable.
I would point them to the wealth of online information, but it's not my job to educate lazy journos...

Mistakes mean we're only human, after all - for instance - they just discovered  a galaxy next to our own.
Researchers in the University of Cambridge discovered the galaxy , ( known as Crater 2 ) during recent observations.
A galaxy which has been there since forever.
The defence is that it is a very dim galaxy.
And you know how tricky it is to spot something that is quite dark.
Especially in the dark.
So we completely missed it until just now.
Oops

IN OTHER NEWS...

Hybrid star/ worlds...

A university in Canada (Western Ontario) , have discovered an orphan world  - a brown dwarf, no less- with the name 2MASS , for short (possible rapper delusions) , wandering around in our neighbourhood.
It is a relatively youthful world, too, at a mere 200 million years old compared to our own 4 billion.


In a first, the Saturn system explorer Huygens - Cassini has detected cosmic particles from beyond our own solar system,
Cassini also analysed the particles revealing a mixture of minerals, rather than the expected ice.

In other maybe news, it seems the Large Hadron Collider may have discovered a new particle.
Hopeful at best, we must await further testing and won't have final word until this summer - but it would be a first , and could involve further advances in some new fields, so fingers crossed

*A more sober observation regarding potential first contact from Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that initial contact would probably involve a mathematical exchange, perhaps a solution to a simple abstract problem, before we get down to discussing cosmic matters.