Astronomers thankfully are a cautious bunch, and not given to "a study" and "new research suggests" type headlines about planet 9. It is one of several theories.

I've heard a couple of people wondering aloud about why we have not already discovered for definite this new and huge Planet 9 if it exists when it is in our comic backyard compared to those galaxies we can spot that are over 10 billion light years distant. To be honest and as much as I take an interest and knowledge in the subject I really do not have a decent answer to that question.

The issue of why no aliens and that it's because they are all dead or nothing more than microbial fossils around the universe that cannot manage to develop further, posted in the links earlier up thread was interesting. I'm not sure I buy into that explanation myself. I prefer that it's just a matter of the incredibly huge timescales involved and that even long lived advanced civilisations will flick into and out of existence at entirely different times and never overlap, certainly within any meaningful noticeable range of each other.

A very beautiful new animation of a flight over Ceres.

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-animati...ght-ceres.html

Wow, why doesn't NASA just go ahead and make movies? Then finally we wouldn't have to spend so much continuously rescuing Matt Damon.

Well hello there good looking.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/14/tech/g...ver/index.html

Interesting article on Ars about a hypothetical rescue mission to Columbia.
If they had realised how seriously the heat shield was damaged on launch.
Lengthy, but beautifully written.

Link

One for the late, great David Bowie.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...ife-180957981/

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-pictor-...le-galaxy.html

http://www.universetoday.com/127123/...tion-at-ceres/

That animation's so good, it's almost like being in orbit around Ceres!

And now for some space news:

The Moon or Mars? NASA Must Pick 1 Goal for Astronauts, Experts Tell Congress. NASA can't afford to put humans on Mars while also pursuing missions to put astronauts back on the moon, according to a panel of experts who testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space yesterday (Feb. 3).

Meanwhile, back at Elon's place:

Are you ready to go to Mars? SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he's hoping to send people to Mars by "around 2025."

That timescale is a bit on the optimistic side...unless one of these is developed too: http://www.inquisitr.com/2541109/nas...ws-of-physics/

The design for Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket has been settled and development will now move on apace, say officials. The launcher is due to be introduced in 2020 and long-term will replace the Ariane 5 and Soyuz vehicles that currently operate out of French Guiana.

Not only is it intended to replace Soyuz (and reduce dependency on Russia) but it also looks a bit like Soyuz too.

The bullying presence of a big, undiscovered "Planet Nine" isn't necessary to explain the strange orbits of a handful of objects in the outer reaches of the solar system, new research suggests. But Madigan and her co-author Michael McCourt of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics say there's another possible explanation.

Earth is made up of two planets fused together, new research suggests. Astronomers investigating how the Moon formed have found evidence that it was produced after a small planet smashed headfirst into Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

The floatings hills of Pluto and more on the mysterious phenomena of the flickering star (first attributed to a possible alien 'mega-structure').

http://www.livescience.com/53620-plu...om-livescience

http://www.livescience.com/53634-ali...continues.html

What are the odds of you being struck by a meteorite?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...bability-odds/

Gravitational waves confirmed, as predicted by Einstein.

Congratulations to everyone involved. It's an amazing achievement. A Nobel prize must be inevitable.

Live feed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7293kAiPZw

Brilliant !

fantastic discovery.........further confirmation of Einstein's theory

Remarkable how much they can tell from a few milliseconds blip.........that the distortion comes from the merger of two black holes about 1.2 billion light years away in the direction of the Magellanic Cloud.......oh and we know their approximate solar masses as well

It's hard to overstate both the difficulty and sheer complexity of the achievement and its significance for astronomy and our understanding of the Universe.

It always amazes me that bipedal mammals should've evolved to the point where our brains are capable of such vast accomplishments. It's almost beyond belief when you stop to think of it.

Remarkable achievement, even Einstein didn't think we'd ever be able to actually detect them, now he's been proved right about their existence.
He was a rather clever bloke that Einstein.

Definitely a Nobel prize for the team... fabulous to finally get experimental evidence for this and now the door will be open to even more research.

It's a shame Nobel prizes can't be awarded posthumously. It seems rather odd to think that Einstein got his for his work on the photoelectric effect. He ought to have racked up at least one more for General Relativity.

Incredible to read about this - amazing achievement by the team.

This must be one of the longest running search ever. I first heard of this back in 1969 when someone was building giant aluminium cylinders in order to detect gravity waves. It has taken a long time.

Well, he has rather entered a realm of his own in terms of science so a Nobel wouldn't really add any actual enhancement. Besides, most people probably think he has half a dozen Nobels anyway!

Joseph Webber? I think there was a Horizon programme that covered his work, probably in the 1970's. He spent many years on it.

Just googled him: Joseph Weber. And although his own claims to have detected gravitational waves were discredited, he did lay the experimental foundations for subsequent work.

Indeed. But just imagine the awesome potential capable of a tripedal mammal. Or does it work the other way - like a unipedal mammal?

But seriously. I am not sure why this is a big deal in terms of "our" understanding of the universe. There is no new physics involved just an additional confirmation of Einsteins theory - which has been confirmed many times before ... Mercury's orbit, light deflection, gravitational redshifts ...

In terms of practicality it does seem to have given a few physicists / astronomers an emotional boost that their methods for detecting gravity waves works - which is giving them confidence that they will receive more state funding with the hope they can detect more black holes colliding with each other and other objects presumably.

With so many supernovas occurring in the universe one wonders why they haven't detected gravity waves from them - presumably because those gravity waves are smaller??

I wouldn't have thought a supernova would produce gravitational waves......it's the interaction of two bodies that produce waves or ripples

I stand to be corrected though as obviously it's pretty complicated.......

It's really great news. As I work with lots of people who did physics at uni, we decided it was a good excuse to go down the pub. As I only have an O level, I decided it was only fair I act as driver and stick to diet cokes.

It will, provided the explosion isn't perfectly symmetrical. But the ripples in spacetime will be much smaller than those from the binary black hole system.

A couple of nice snippets about the precision of the Advanced LIGO detectors: they can detect a change in length equal to one thousandth of the radius of a proton (itself 100 thousand times smaller than an atom). This is like being able to detect a change in the distance from our solar system to the nearest star equal to the width of a human hair.