Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein made black holes hot, my latest work shows just how cool they really are.   I have derived a formula for the temperature of a black hole which has the same basic shape as that derived by Bekenstein and Hawking, but which differs in slope, and has what would be observably different behavior for black  holes of about 10 to 12 percent the mass of Sagittarius A* the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.  In short according to my fully quantum fully relativistic calculations black holes are just a tiny bit cooler than is generally thought. 

Why does the new space craft look like a capsule?  The simple fact is that between a capsule and a space plane like the shuttle, a capsule is the better vehicle for a direct return trip from interplanetary space to Earths surface. 
People my age, early-mid 30's, and younger look at a space capsule as being an artifact from a past era.  The 1960's and 1970's were the age of the capsule.  Then in the 1980's and 1990's we had the Space Shuttle Program in full swing.  The shuttle was so much more than a spacecraft.  As president Reagan put it the Shuttle was a symbol of our aspirations for freedom. 

In the below it can be said that he dedicated a Shuttle launch to people who 20 years latter would become the Taliban. 

I have been given the privilege of publishing during the Beta test period in the Open Access journal The Winnower for no cost but my time and care.  I was also given assistance by the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics to publish my work on massive star formation there.  A work unrelated to the first two, on the LCDM model is in press at ScienceOpen Research.  All of these are Open Access Journals.  Two have open peer review and all have post publication commenting.

The formation of stars of mass greater than 8 times that of the Sun occurs in distant and very obscured areas of the sky.  To form a massive star requires a massive and dense interstellar cloud.  To see what is going on there requires more than an optical telescope.  We rely on intense and compact sources of radio emission, masers. Inquiry into the formation of massive stars is a very active area of astronomy. Do they form based on a beefed up version of the disk-outflow model which works for less massive stars, or do they form by accretion and collision of smaller protostars?  There is evidence for both.

Cambridge University Press website mislabels and Astronomy text as an Astrology text. 
I was looking for open access open source freely downloadable and good textbooks to use in my future Astronomy classes.  The City Colleges require a very good text, but the supply of it to students in a timely manner hasn't been reliable as of late.  Over half of students in the City Colleges did not get books they ordered until the midterm.  

So I saw a page about books printed by Cambridge and the Open University.  Links on that website were broken so I went to search for them and found this.

If the distribution of dark matter in the region near Earth is lower than it is usually assumed then the interpretation of null results of direct detection efforts must be reconsidered. Astrophysicists have been searching for hard evidence of dark matter for decades.  The most favored model has been that dark matter consist  weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPS.  The basic assumption has been that dark matter is more or less evenly spread through the galaxy with no large scale variations.  The work of C. Moni Bidin, R. Smith, G. Carraro, R. A. Méndez, and M.