I love how fluid the concept of time is.

Hubble eyes new phase of supernova explosion

Astronomers first saw the star explode -- an event called a supernova -- in 1987. It shone as bright as 100 million suns for several months.

Robert Kirshner of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the latest observations. He explained what's going on around the star named 1987A. When the star first exploded, ultraviolet light raced outward and lit up a previously unknown ring of gaseous debris that the star had presumably spat out about 20,000 years prior.

"Then there's a blast wave going out from the supernova to the ring," Kirshner said in a telephone interview. "We all knew it was going to hit in a decade or so."

In 1996, that shock wave began to plow into the debris ring.

[...] The last supernova to shine so brightly in Earth's skies was spotted by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.

1987A was generated by a star 20 times more massive than the Sun. It resides in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of the time it takes light from the event to reach Hubble, the explosion actually occurred 160,000 years ago, in the time frame of its origin.

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N.Y. driver nabbed while watching porn

preach on

Primary Miniseason Won't Serve Party Well

John Kerry has been considered the presumptive Democratic nominee ever since his comeback wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the primaries in the states that followed have been treated like formalities.

The media, constitutionally incapable of coping with complexity, has created a curious electoral tautology; Kerry wins because he is the front-runner.

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[...] This drive toward an early coronation belies the entire point of the primary process, which is to pick the man who would be both the best nominee and the best president. Instead, we have picked the man who ran the best race in Iowa, which is hardly the same thing.

For [those] who believe that our economy, civil rights and national security depend on the ouster of George W. Bush and his extraordinarily radical administration, all we can do is hope that John Edwards can keep the fight alive, or that the voters of Iowa really knew what they were doing.