UPDATE:  SOLVED by Rob at 12:27 CDT

Bonjour, hola, hallo, ciao, powitanie, ahoj, hello.  I hope everybody has had a good week since we last riddled.

In keeping with my never-ending efforts to amaze, amuse, and fuzzle you, I’m introducing astronomy people into the riddle.  The rules remain the same in that it will be someone with whom you are familiar.  It will be an iconic figure; you won’t have to hold a PhD in astrophysics to know of this person.

Okay then!  Grab your favorite caffeine beverage, and let’s get to riddling:

A lovely night shot, found on PhotoBucket, released to public domain

This person’s life was marked by periods of depression and self-destructive tendencies.

Is it a surprise to anyone that this person completed the 3rd and 4th grades in one school year, and skipped half the 8th grade?

A chemistry major in college, your riddle answer graduated summa cum laude in three years.

The person you’re looking for studied in England, also.

It was there your answer got the reputation of being dangerously clumsy in the laboratory.

Because of this infamous clumsiness, your riddle answer had to be tutored in basic lab procedures.

Your answer despised this lab tutor, and tried to poison him by dipping an apple in noxious chemicals.

This led to Our Hero being sent for regular sessions with a psychiatrist.

Image lifted from the website

After such an auspicious beginning, would you be shocked to learn that this icon’s classmates signed a petition threatening to boycott their classes unless Our Hero was made to sit down and shut up?

Despite these (and other) little squabbles, your person earned their PhD at the age of 23, just two short years after completing their Bachelor’s.

Fresh out of school, Our Hero became quite successful in the field of quantum mechanics;  publishing several highly respected papers.

Heard enough?  Try this last group:

After those notorious troubles while in school, this icon became a professor at two universities… simultaneously.

Although nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once, your answer never received the award.

And finally, Our Hero is most associated with one specific thing which, in an instant, changed all of history.

18th-19th Century woven carpet, Smithsonian

There you go.  Remember, the answer is an individual, so if you mean “Dan Brown” don’t say “The Da Vinci Code” (that’s just for example; of COURSE the answer isn’t “Dan Brown”).  I’m in my usual Saturday spot, waiting for your comments, so come on and keep me company.  You know I shouldn’t be left unsupervised…

I've had this cartoon up before, I think it's hilarious

Take a look at THIS:

NASA/Chandra Arp 147, a ring of black holes

I’m seriously impressed.  Here’s what NASA says about it:

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new image of a ring — not of jewels — but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.

A fraction of the neutron stars and black holes will have companion stars, and may become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from their companions. The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely ten to twenty times that of the Sun.

An X-ray source is also detected in the nucleus of the red galaxy on the left and may be powered by a poorly-fed supermassive black hole. This source is not obvious in the composite image but can easily be seen in the X-ray image. Other objects unrelated to Arp 147 are also visible: a foreground star in the lower left of the image and a background quasar as the pink source above and to the left of the red galaxy.

Infrared observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) have allowed estimates of the rate of star formation in the ring. These estimates, combined with the use of models for the evolution of binary stars have allowed the authors to conclude that the most intense star formation may have ended some 15 million years ago, in Earth’s time frame. ??These results were published in the October 1st, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors were Saul Rappaport and Alan Levine from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Pooley from Eureka Scientific and Benjamin Steinhorn, also from MIT.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

More information, including images and other multimedia, can be found at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu

Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/S .Rappaport et al. Optical: NASA/STScI

As you all know, I am a complete, absolute, and total Hubble fan.  I’m hardly alone in this, either.  The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most beloved of NASA ventures, although its beginning was rather inauspicious.  Ah, yes; today I’m yapping on about My Hubble.

NASA - Hubble seen from the space shuttle Atlantis after its fourth servicing mission

Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was already 7 years overdue.  The program had been beset by troubles since its beginning, when it was funded in the 1970′s.  After launch, horror of horrors, its images were blurry.  Hubble’s main mirror had a tiny flaw in grounding, and the entire program looked to be a wash.  In 1993 another NASA mission corrected for the slight error (yes, the Hubble is, in effect, wearing glasses), and Hubble began a 17 year stretch of providing some of the most beautiful, majestic, and important images ever collected.

Excellent diagram of Hubble by Andrew Buck, all rights reserved

The Hubble was designed to be serviced in space, and it has been through five servicing missions.  The last mission, in 2009, made Hubble good to go until at least 2014, when the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch.  The Webb is designed to be Hubble’s successor.

Hubble is not the first space telescope, nor is it now the only space telescope, but it is without a doubt the most beloved.  Its image is iconic; school kids draw pictures of Hubble and send them to NASA… and NASA proudly displays the drawings like parents posting them on the refrigerator.  NASA is now collecting messages to Hubble, to be stored with the Hubble archives, and thousands have already written in to tell NASA how Hubble has effected their lives.  As I said, I’m hardly alone in my unwavering love of Hubble.

NASA/ESA - Hubble in orbit

Hubble is in a low Earth orbit, and if conditions are right, you can see Hubble track across the sky every 96 minutes (I think that’s right).  The HubbleSite will show you at all times exactly where Hubble is over the Earth.  I tell you, when I see the glint of light high in the sky that I know is Hubble, I get absolutely goofy; jumping up and down, grabbing my kids (and unlucky passersby), pointing and yelling, “There’s Hubble!  Look!  Go, Hubble!” like I’ve just seen a rock star.

Funny thing is, when I do that, I’m immediately joined by a throng of people looking up in expectant awe.  When I look at those faces, the faces of strangers united for a brief moment, I know the greatest gift Hubble has given to us.  We all stand united, as a species, as never before, in humble awe at the vision of the Cosmos Hubble has given us.

Hubble; it is indeed out of the ordinary, out of this world.

Here’s a link to Hubble’s website.

We’ve been spending some time talking about dwarf planets, featuring Eris and Pluto, so I thought I’d spare a moment for a truly interesting (but often overlooked) member of the dwarf category; Haumea.  Remember, Sedna is a planetoid, and we have five known dwarf planets in the solar system:  Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, and Haumea.  Orcus, Quaoar, and 2007 OR(10) are dwarf planet candidates, by the way, sure to eventually be admitted to the club.

NASA/A. Feild - Artist's impression of Haumea and her two tiny moons

136108 Haumea was discovered in 2004 by a CalTech team headed by Mike Brown at the Palomar Observatory.  Haumea is the matron goddess of the island of Hawaii.  Boasting two tiny moons (Hi’iaka and Namaka) and an amazing ellipsoid shape, Haumea will certainly capture your attention.  Add a rotation period of about 3.9 hours and an orbital inclination of 28 degrees, and you see why Haumea gets talked about.

Thought to have formed in a collisional event in the scattered disc, Haumea is giving scientists plenty of food for thought.  For one thing, her collisional group has diffused to the point where scientist say the event must have occurred early in the formation of the solar system, say at least a billion years ago.  The problem is that the surface of Haumea and her family “group” is too bright for that length of time to have elapsed.  It appears as if the group was resurfaced within the last 100 million years.  That’s quite a puzzle, one for which no plausible explanation has been found.

Excellent grouping using NASA images, found on English WikiPedia by Lexicon

Haumea’s ellipsoid shape is a product of her blazing rotational speed -vs- her size.  She is in equilibrium in this shape.  With an average diameter of 1,400 km, she is the third or fourth largest of the dwarf planets and dwarf planet candidates, coming in behind Pluto, Eris, and maybe Makemake (we don’t know for sure yet).

Haumea’s tiny moons are believed to be fragments of Haumea herself, probably remnants of the collision which formed her.

All in all, and interesting member of our solar system, and well worth a few moments pause for thought.  Besides, she’s sure to show up in a future riddle!

NASA/JPL CalTech

This is from NASA, ain’t it great?

This oddly colorful nebula is the supernova remnant IC 443 as seen by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Also known as the Jellyfish Nebula, IC 443 is particularly interesting because it provides a look into how stellar explosions interact with their environment.

Like other living creatures, stars have a life cycle — they are born, mature and eventually die. The manner in which stars die depends on their mass. Stars with mass similar to the sun typically become planetary nebulae at the end of their lives, whereas stars with many times the sun’s mass explode as supernovae. IC 443 is the remains of a star that went supernova between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. The blast from the supernova sent out shock waves that traveled through space, sweeping up and heating the surrounding gas and dust in the interstellar medium, and creating the supernova remnant seen in this image.

What is unusual about the IC 443 is that its shell-like form has two halves that have different radii, structures and emissions. The larger northeastern shell, seen here as the violet-colored semi-circle on the top left of the supernova remnant, is composed of sheet-like filaments that are emitting light from iron, neon, silicon and oxygen gas atoms, in addition to dust particles, all heated by the blast from the supernova. The smaller southern shell, seen here in a bright cyan color on the bottom half of the image, is constructed of denser clumps and knots primarily emitting light from hydrogen gas and heated dust. These clumps are part of a molecular cloud, which can be seen in this image as the greenish cloud cutting across IC 443 from the northwest to southeast. The color differences seen in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared emission.

The differences in color are also the result of differences in the energies of the shock waves hitting the interstellar medium. The northeastern shell was probably created by a fast shock wave (223,700 miles per hour), whereas the southern shell was probably created by a slow shock wave (67,100 miles per hour).

Planetary rings are flat, disc-shaped rings of dust and other small particles in orbit around a planet.  The most well-known planetary rings are those around Saturn, but Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings.

NASA Voyager 2 - Rings of Uranus

There are three known ways that planetary rings are formed:  First, it is believed to be left-over matter from the original protoplanetary planetary disc which couldn’t coalesce into moons; from the debris of a moon that was destroyed by an impact; or the debris from a moon that was (or is in the process of being) disrupted by the tidal stresses of its parent planet.

NASA/JPL Cornell University - Jupiter's rings

As we know from Saturn’s rings, many contain shepherd moons and tiny moonlets which contribute to the stable composition of the rings.  While rings are believed to be a fairly short-term phenomenon, Saturn’s rings are believed to be quite ancient.

NASA/ESA Hubble - The star of the show, Saturn in natural colors

While Saturn’s rings have been known since the 1600′s, the rings around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are modern discoveries.  Scientists will be watching New Horizons on its pass of Pluto for the presence of a ring system.  None of the inner planets are known to have a ring system.  It is believed that the force of the solar wind makes it impossible for a ring system to form that close to the Sun.  While there may have been debris in orbit around the inner planets, the force of the solar wind pushed the particles away.

NASA/JPL Cassini - Saturn ring mosaic... the enlargement on this one is incredible

Saturn’s rings have awed and delighted us for centuries.  The beauty and mystery of the rings have kept us looking up, and because of the rings Saturn is often times described as the most beautiful planet in the solar system.  The rings around Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have increased our awe of these giants, too.

Studying planetary rings has given us a deeper understanding of the development of our solar system.  However they are formed, they are a wondrous sight.  Mysterious, beautiful, and magnificent; an awesome spectacle that continues to delight.

I know you’ve probably all seen this, but I stumbled across it the other day, and it captured me once again.  It does us all good to stop and reflect a moment on how vast this universe truly is.  I think the images are lovely.  Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I hear that a lot.  Now, I’m not going to climb up on a soap-box here, but let’s get one thing straight; Pluto was NOT named for the Disney character, the Disney character was named after the planet Pluto.

NASA/ESA Hubble, highest current resolution of Pluto

Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on February 18, 1930, and announced March 13, 1930 (you know this, right?).  Its name was announced May 1, 1930.  Pluto the Pup was “Rover” until May 8, 1931, when the name was used in a cartoon called The Moose Hunt. That was the first time the name “Pluto” appeared for the cartoon animal.  The planet is actually named for the Roman god of the underworld, which also explains the names of its moons.

I don’t want to get fussy here, but while I’m on the subject of Pluto, it wasn’t demoted to a dwarf planet because of its size.  It was assigned the status because it hadn’t cleared its orbital path.  The three criteria which must be met for an object to be categorized as a “planet” are:

1. The object must be in orbit around the Sun.
2. The object must be massive enough to be a sphere by its own gravitational force. More specifically, its own gravity should pull it into a shape of hydrostatic equilibrium. 
   
3. It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto is certainly in orbit around the Sun; it has a fascinating orbit, and it’s definitely round.  The problem was that there was too much clutter, or debris, within its orbital path.  The thinking is that a planet would have accreted all the bits and pieces.  Of course, we may be watching the process of accretion with Pluto, which we’ll only know over time.

Of course, there’s a HUGE argument about that whole “clearing the orbital path” issue, considering how many asteroids are in Jupiter’s orbit… and Saturn’s orbit…

NASA/ESA Hubble, the Pluto system

Something else that’s cool about Pluto is that it could actually be a binary system with Charon, with Nix and Hydra it’s only moons.  I’m hoping to see some studies relating to that as New Horizons approaches.

One urban legend about Pluto that is absolutely true is that a small portion of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes are aboard the New Horizons spaceship.

Now, everybody repeat after me:  Pluto was NOT named after the dog, the dog was named after Pluto.  Pluto was NOT named after the dog, the dog was named after Pluto.  Pluto was NOT…