Would you say it's time for us to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside? Yes, I would.

I caught myself skimming the wikipedia article, and suddenly realized the irony.

12 million light years is ~ 120 times the diameter of the Milky Way which is indeed "local" to our own galaxy. By comparison 120 times the Earth's diameter is roughly 1.5 million kilometers (~ 1 million miles) which is indeed "local" to Earth: Only 4 times the distance to the moon and only 1% of the distance to the Sun.

About 20 years ago my high school chemistry teacher claimed that if you showed up at the emergency room and said you had been drinking methanol, they would actually give you a shot of ethanol ("normal" alcohol) as a treatment. Apparantly the body breaks down ethanol before methanol allowing the methanol to pass through without causing damage.

Let's hope the Universe doesn't give us a BSoD one day if we poke too much in the "code" :-)

13.8 billion years?!? Wow you wear it well. I would have sworn you were not a day older than 13.7 billion years.

"Brown dwarfs are faint, low mass objects 13 — 75 times the mass of Jupiter" I remember learning in the first year astronomy that Jupiter is *almost* big enough to be a star, only a factor of 80 of. If that is close then I'm almost rich, almost famous and almost good looking.

Actually they are a lot less likely to be prime than any random odd number, only 48 are now known and all have been tested up to above 13 million digits. But yes they are very easy to prove prime compared to "random" numbers of no special form, I *think* it was proven mathematically that there is no faster proof possible, but don't hold me to that. The highest "random" number proven to be prime is only 26,642 digits vs 17 million for this new mersenne prime. There are numbers of other special forms that are also "easy" but not as easy to prove, highest one proven is 3.9 million digits. They don't look for primes 2^n+1 because they are always divisible by 3 so they are never prime. They are looking for primes (2^n+1)/3 however, they are called Wagstaff primes, but again they are harder to prove than mersenne numbers.

Since this is an "infrared survey of the Milky Way" it must be 10^9 stars since there is not 10^12 stars in The Milky Way. I think it's about 10^11 to 2*10^11 stars in the Milky Way?

0,000000312 km/hour is 2,733 m/year or like 50-100 times faster than tectonic plates drifting or moon receiding from earth which is on the order of centimeters/year.

It hit either the Indian Ocean or in China / Myanmar: http://www.spaceflight101.com/rosat-re-entry-information.html

It re-entered sunday 23rd between 1:45 and 2:15 am UTC (22nd 9:45 - 10:15 pm EDT): http://www.spaceflight101.com/rosat-re-entry-information.html