This week I will be playing host to the carnival of space and telling you about what other people are writing about astronomy and space.  Read on to learn more…

 We begin with Ian O’Neill, who describes how coronal mass ejections are a concern for all space bound vessels, not just those around earth.  Conornal mass ejections are showers of charged particles emitted periodically by the sun.  Our magnetic field shields us from the effects of these ejections on earth, but space based vessels have to fend for themselves.  The curiosity mars rover, currently on route to its destination, is using a built in radiation detector to better understand these solar storms and their effects on spacecraft.

Over at Simostronomy, we find the tale of Rod Stubbings, an Australian Amateur Astronomer who has painstakingly observed and catalogued over 200,000 variable stars (stars whose brightness changes over time).  A remarkable achievement that has taken nearly 20 years of effort!  Also in the world of Amateur astronomy, Astroswanny shows a demonstration of a parallax measurement.  This forms part of an initiative to re-measure the size of the solar system using amateur measurements.

Linksthroughspace describes cool tools that can be used to visualize our solar system in 3D without leaving your chair.  PS1SC blog announced that tweets will be made of near earth objects that have been newly identified by “Pan-STARRS1″.

Moving to x-ray observations now, chandrablog tells us how ANASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has identified the super dense remains of a once massive star.  This dense object, believed to be a Neutron star, was propelled by the explosion of its progenitor at a speed of 3 million miles per hour!

Universe Today is promoting a petition to get a postage stamp approved to commemorate New Horizons’ planned visit to Pluto in 2015.  The detection of planets orbiting other stars is rapidly becoming a matter of routine, but to truly know if a planet is habitable scientists need to be able to see its atmosphere. On the same blog, Ray Sander’s describes how researchers are trying to close in on detecting habitable or “earth-like” planets orbiting other stars using sophisticated computer models.

On we are all in the gutter, Niall tells us how finding nothing can be nearly as interesting as finding something.  Specifically, he describes how the failure to detect any gravitational waves (ripples in spacetime predicted by Einsten’s general relativity) that coincide with a massive burst of radiation from M81, allows astronomers to narrow in on the cause of the radiation, by excluding those things that would have produced observable gravity waves.  On the same sight, Emma talks about the cheesy (and sexist) adventures of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.  A book written in the space race era when it seemed as inevitable that we’d all be living on Mars by now.

On weirdwarp, Chris describes an experiment to test if gravity effects anti-matter in the same way as regular matter.  This is important as understanding anti-matter will help cosmologists understand a long standing mystery.  Why the universe is full of matter and not anti-matter.

Finally, we have five stories from nextbigfuture.com, all revolving around Newt Gingrich’s recent comments about building a moon base [Editorial note: those allergic to uncritical free-market=problem solved reasoning tread with caution...].  A rebuttal of sorts is put forward to Lawrence Krauss’s suggestion that a moon base would be too expensive.  The near and long term advantages of a moon base are discussed.  There is a look at some future technologies that could (with emphasis on the could) make a moon base less expensive. A suggestion to repeat the tragedy of the commons in space and allow for private property on the moon.  To finish off, the idea of using 10% of NASA’s budget for spaceflight prizes is discussed.

That’s it for this week.  I hope you’ve found something of interest.