The final frontier

Stamp out mediocrity ;-)2016 being the 50th anniversary year for Star Trek, you can guess what inspired today's subject line. But this post is about the actual frontier, about astronomy news, not fiction.

Based upon data collected by the Dawn space probe, NASA scientists have a new understanding of the dwarf planet, aka the largest asteroid, Ceres: "Ceres interior structure gives hints of early life." (That's "life" as in active geological processes, not as in protoplasm wiggling about.) Ceres...