Hi, everybody. Welcome to your weekly space hangout for Thursday, October 25th, 2012.

This week we got a pile of stories for you. We're going to be talking about how I've lost

my notes. They're there. We're going to be talking about the discovery of a planet around

Alpha Centauri, a flash coming out of the Milky Way Supermass of Black Hole, a huge very

long afterburner coming out of A Galaxy. It's a very black hole show actually, a small

supermassive black hole. The possibility that an exploded rocket is going to make space

completely inaccessible surrounding the planet with a shrieking sphere of shredded metal.

And whether or not you can actually scream in space. And if we have time, we'll talk about

the recent Soyuz docking. So joining me this week, yay, we got the band back together.

We got Amy Shuretidal from Vintage Space. We've got Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today.

We've got Nicole Galucci from CosmoQuest. And we've got Jason Major, who should pay attention

to the show that he's on from My Lights in the Dark.

Let's get started with the big story that we should have covered last week. And so

I apologize. You've probably heard this about 800,000 times already. And that is the discovery

of a planet, an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. But it comes with a bit of

a cap. So Jason, you wrote on this. So what's the story?

I did. I mean, this is big news. This is huge news. This is galactic-sized news. I mean,

this is the closest that we've come get to really kind of like a holy grail of exoplanet

discoveries. What researchers with the European Southern Observatory have identified

is an Earth-mass Earth-sized terrestrial planet orbiting a star within the nearest

star system to Earth, the Alpha Centauri system. Actually, the planet orbits the second

star in the system, which is Alpha Centauri B. And it's, well, it's Earth-sized, but

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