A long, long way to go

After seven years and three billion miles, the Stardust probe successfully returned to Earth and soft-landed a sample of dust from Comet Wild 2 to the Utah desert at 1012Z today.  As well as the first cometary dust samples ever returned to earth and the first samples of anything ever returned to Earth from beyond the Moon, this marks the furthest any probe has ever travelled from Earth and successfully returned to date, and the fastest re-entry of any man-made probe (at around 29,000mph).

Good job, NASA!

Space oddity

Here's an oddity:  A newly-discovered millisecond pulsar in a cluster near the galactic center is puzzling astronomers because it is spinning faster than some theorists say should be possible.  Estimated to be about two solar masses, the neutron star is spinning at 716 revolutions per second, which (according to current models of neutron star structure) imposes an upper limit of 16 kilometers on its diameter before it would be torn apart by its own rotation.  Current theories say there should be an upper limit at about 700 revolutions per second, and that at this speed it should be radiating vast amounts of energy in the form of intense gravitational waves.