Evil carrots... I killz them.
String theory? I gots it.
Pink tongue? I slays U with mah cutitude.
Kittenz, astronomy, science, photography and other four-legged snarky stuff.

The M51 "Whirlpool Galaxy" shines as one of the brightest spiral galaxies in the night sky.
Several NASA space observatories combined to produce this composite image. The Chandra X-ray Observatory shows purple, point-like sources that indicate black holes and neutron stars in binary star systems, and also picks up on the glow of hot gas lighting the space between the stars. The Hubble Space Telescope provides optical data in green, while the Spitzer Space Telescope sees red infrared emissions — both reflect lanes of stars, gas, and dust in the galaxy's spiral arms. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer completes the image with views of hot, young stars giving off ultraviolet energy in blue.
The spiral shape may be a result of a galactic encounter when NGC 5195 passed through M51's main disk about 500 million years ago. That gravitational tug-of-war likely triggered a new round of starbirth, as gravitational forces condensed gas and jump-started the process of star formation.

LOS ANGELES - Saturn's shimmering rings may be as old as the solar system, scientists said Wednesday, debunking earlier theories that the rings were formed during the dinosaur age.And they recycle! excellent.
Astronomers had thought Saturn's rings were cosmically young, likely born some 100 million years ago from leftovers of a meteoric collision with a moon, based on data by NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s.
However, new data from the orbiting international Cassini spacecraft suggest the rings existed as far back as 4.5 billion years ago, roughly the same time the sun and planets formed. The probe also found evidence that ring particles are constantly shattering and regrouping to form new rings.
"Recycling allows the rings to be as old as the solar system although continually changing," said Larry Esposito, a Cassini scientist from the University of Colorado.

This handout photo released in Seoul by the Ministry of Science and Technology shows a combo of cloned cats that have a fluorescence protein gene and glowing under ultraviolet beams. The technology could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, the developers said.Hat tip to Darryl Pearce.

The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.From the Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 9th.