Introducing a new publication from NASA’s Earth Observatory—EO Kids—bringing engaging   science stories from the Earth Observatory to a younger audience (ages 9-14).

From NASA Goddard, May 23, 2016  --  NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland released the first issue of its new online news magazine NASA Next on Monday, May 23, 2016.

From NASA Earth Observatory  --  It's 2016 and the Earth Observatory's Tournament Earth (link is external) is back. Time to create your bracket and vote!

From Dr. Ethan Siegel  --  For those of us in the northern hemisphere, winter brings long, cold nights, which are often excellent for sky watchers (so long as there's a way to keep warm!) But there's often an added bonus that comes along when conditions are just right: the polar lights, or the Aurora Borealis around the North Pole. Here on our world, a brilliant green light often appears for observers at high northern latitudes, with occasional, dimmer reds and even blues lighting up a clear night.

By Dr. Ethan Siegel  --  As crazy as it once seemed, we once assumed that the Earth was the largest thing in all the universe. 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was ridiculed for suggesting that the Sun might be even larger than the Peloponnesus peninsula, about 16% of modern-day Greece. Today, we know that planets are dwarfed by stars, which themselves are bound together by the billions or even trillions into galaxies.

By Dr. Ethan Siegel  --  When you think of our sun, the nearest star to our world, you think of an isolated entity, with more than four light years separating it from its next nearest neighbor. But it wasn't always so: billions of years ago, when our sun was first created, it very likely formed in concert with thousands of other stars, when a giant molecular cloud containing perhaps a million times the mass of our solar system collapsed.

By Dr. Ethan Siegel  --  You might think that, so long as Earth can successfully dodge the paths of rogue asteroids and comets that hurtle our way, it's going to be smooth, unimpeded sailing in our annual orbit around the sun. But the meteor showers that illuminate the night sky periodically throughout the year not only put on spectacular shows for us, they're direct evidence that interplanetary space isn't so empty after all!

In the upcoming weeks NASA will be printing the first ever 3D printed object aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the 3D Print in Zero-G Technology Demonstration. In general, a 3D printer extrudes streams of heated plastic, metal or other material, building layer on layer to create 3 dimensional objects.

This month, the Space Place is doing something a little bit different for their monthly column—providing you with a beautifully informative and educational poster (attached below) about the mechanics of our sun. This poster accompanies their latest "Space Place in a Snap" animation. This "Snap" series is a set of narrated videos and posters that, together, explain basic scientific concepts in a dynamic new medium. Entertaining in their own right, they also wish to bring this new resource to your attention as an educational tool.

By Dr. Ethan Siegel  --  As bright and steady as they appear, the stars in our sky won't shine forever. The steady brilliance of these sources of light is powered by a tumultuous interior, where nuclear processes fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier ones. Because the heavier nuclei up to iron (Fe), have a greater binding energies-per-nucleon, each reaction results in a slight reduction of the star's mass, converting it into energy via Einstein's famous equation relating changes in mass and energy output, E = mc².