December 5th show...

... is finally online, now that I have a nice friendly place to put it, and is available here. This was also an all-news-and-views show, and on this program I covered:

• News: JPL announces new version of PlanetQuest, a database with information on extra-solar planets; new NASA competition for high school and college students on aeronautics (good luck!); European Space Agency (ESA) announces a new program for recently graduated students interested in a career in the space industry, extension of Integral and XMM missions until 12/31/2012.
• Solar System: Solar flares possible accelerate electrons in "magnetic islands"; first results from the Venus Explorer mission are released, including detection of lightning and evidence that the solar wind is at least partially responsible for deficiency of water in its atmosphere; Mars Express marks 5000 orbits around Mars; Cassini detects complex hydrocarbons in atmospher of Titan, Saturn's largest moon; Voyager 2 expected to reach the "termination shock" where the Solar Wind collides with the interstellar medium soon.
• Milky Way: "Santa-shaped" cloud of very hot gas detected in Orion Nebula; giant jets (very fast, narrow, columns of outflowing material) detected around forming star L1157; evidence for planets forming around very young star UX Tau A; discovery of young, fast moving white dwarfs in globular star cluster NGC 6397 - origin of these velocities still a mystery; discovery that neutron star RX J0822-4300 is moving with a velocity >3 million miles an hour - extremely fast and extremely puzzling.
• Calendar of Astronomy events in the greater New York Area
• Cosmology: Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to do this news item the justice it deserves, but simulations suggest that the interaction between massive stars and their environment can smooth out the density of dark matter in the center of dwarf galaxies, which could explain why the observed density of matter in these galaxies is a lot smoother than previously predicted by Cold Dark Matter models, which are the currently favored model for solving the "missing mass" problem (that when one uses the velocity of stars/galaxies to estimate the mass of a galaxy/galaxy cluster, the required mass is much higher than can be explained by the mass of all the observed stars/galaxies).

As always, if you have any questions or comments please email me or leave them below. Thanks a lot, and hope you enjoyed -- Yosi