The last Pluto image before New Horizons went silent and got down to the business of taking close-up fly-by pictures showed the "heart", or as it is being re-imagined, the "dog Pluto":

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Everyone keeps talking about the four dark spots on Pluto. Is it just me, or is it more like a single dark region overlain by lighter stripes?

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With the ESA satellite COROT nearing its first 300 days in orbit, I hear that a truckload of new extrasolar planets are due to be announced to the world soon. These detections will be based on planetary transits, which means this may be the last time my graph of exoplanets detected by doppler spectroscopy (based on data from exoplanet.eu) represent ( Read more... )