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The more we study it, the universe continues to become curiouser and curiouser, and the last few weeks have been no exception: X marks the center of the galaxy; one of Saturn’s rings was broken; and NASA plans to destroy Juno space probe — to protect aliens?

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Toronto have verified the existence of an extremely large X-shaped arrangement of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a structure that was hinted at by previous observations of other galaxies and computer models. From Earth’s point of view, the galaxy’s central bulge of millions of stars looks like a peanut shape, with the X-structure being an integral part of this.
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An exoplanet 320 light-years from Earth has been found in a trinary star system, photographed by the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. Aside from having the distinction of being one of mere handful of exoplanets that have been directly imaged, the planet, labeled as HD 131399Ab, has a year that lasts 550 Earth years, as it orbits the large central star.
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In The Martian, fictional astronaut and consummate wiseacre Mark Watney survives being stranded on the red planet by growing potatoes in the Martian soil, extending his usual rations well past their expected usefulness. But in the real world, there have been concerns over using Mars’s soil to grow food, due to there being a great deal more heavy elements found in it, as compared to what’s found in typical Earth dirt. However, a new study from the Netherlands appears to show that Watney may have been on to something.
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One of the major problems faced by science today is that our current model of physics is woefully incomplete, most infamously so in regards to the inability of physicists to make the theory of relativity and quantum theory work together. This problem becomes extremely apparent when it comes to figuring out how black holes work: relativity tells us that nothing would be able to escape a black hole, causing a fundamental loss of the quantum information that that made up the material that falls into it, but quantum mechanics tells us that that information is indestructible, meaning that that loss can’t happen to begin with.
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