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Planets circle the stars that dot the heavens. Before 1995, we couldn’t have said that with any certainty. Now we know of more than 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and we have a fleet of telescopes looking for them. The ultimate goal is to find another Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, but the quest on the way to that Holy Grail has yielded some strange benchmarks. CoRoT-exo3b, a dense planet orbiting another star COROT-exo-3b compared to Jupiter Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an...

Britons should be subjected to random carbon spotchecks and intensive surveillance of their diets, transport and waste disposal habits, says the Government's architecture and design quango in a new report today. The word "monitoring" occurs 19 times in the 32-page publication by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). If the proposals in the report What Makes An Eco Town?are implemented few aspects of life will go unrecorded. CABE says the strict monitoring is needed to ensure the carbon footprint of the eco-town dwellers remains at one-third of the British average, which is the requirement for what's called...

Astronomers believe they have taken the first amazing photo of a planet around another star like the Sun. The alien world shows up as a tiny orange disk in the image captured by Canadian scientists with a giant telescope in Hawaii. Previous pictures of so-called extrasolar planets orbiting other stars have been painted by artists. The new world was spotted 500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius, the scorpion. Astronomers were puzzled by its distance from its parent star which is 330 times further than we are from the sun. But they carried out detective work with...

NATIONAL MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT OFFICE OF PUBLIC INFORMATION Washington 25, D. C. MEMORANDUM TO THE PRESS NO. M 26 - 49 IMMEDIATE RELEASE APRIL 27, 1949 RE 6700 Ext. 3201 The following report is a digest of preliminary studies made by the Air Material Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, on "Flying Saucers." PROJECT "SAUCER" On Tuesday, June 24, 1947, a Boise, Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold looked from his private plane and spotted a chain of nine saucer-like objects playing tag with the jagged peaks of Washington's Mt. Ranier at what he described as a "fantastic speed." Arnold's report set off...

Orbit of solar system object SQ372 (blue) compared with the orbits of Neptune Pluto and Sedna (white, green, red). Credit: N. Kaib. Astronomers announced today that a new "minor planet" with an unusual orbit has been found just two billion miles from Earth, closer than Neptune. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers detected a small, comet-like object called 2006 SQ372, which is likely made of rock and ice. However, its orbit never brings it close enough to the sun for it to develop a tail. Its unusual orbit is an ellipse that is four times longer than it...

Image credit: compiled from NASA public images At times, people still express bemusement, or confusion, that Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet", after having been considered a full-fledged planet for the better part of a century. One thing I always point out to them is that we're discovering more and more roughly Pluto-sized bodies. If we call them all planets, the list of planets would rapidly grow unmanageable! (Do you want to memorize the names of 20 planets? How about 80?) Today the list just got bumped up by one. Meet Makemake, the first body in our solar...

Save the Planet! Tax Newspapers!June 24, 2008 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Audio sound bite time, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, was on KTVA channel 11 last night responding to Democrats drilling in ANWR. PALIN: I want to make sure that we're not just talking about the need to develop, to ramp up development, offshore and in ANWR, but we're asking them now, "What's your plan? If not domestic supplies being tapped into with offshore and with ANWR, then, Congress, what is your plan?" RUSH: Amen! Here is a female Republican who is willing to gut it up. She sent Dingy...

AN ABC website has been accused of portraying farmers and forestry workers as evil and telling kids how much carbon they can produce before they die.

Warmer planet may mean fewer Atlantic hurricanes NewScientist.com news service Mason Inman Contrary to the widespread view that a warming world will bring more hurricanes, a controversial new study suggests the number of cyclones could actually drop in the North Atlantic. Hurricanes have become a lightning rod for arguments over what global warming might have in store. Most researchers agree that, since 1950, the number of hurricanes forming over the Atlantic has increased, and that since at least since 1980, they have become fiercer. Many studies have blamed the increase in Atlantic hurricanes on increasing sea-surface temperatures, which fuel the...

Hollywood—In what could only be referred to as a historic event, Hollywood is shutting down its doors to save “Mother Earth.” The move comes after years of trying to reach an unsympathetic Bush administration, and decades of attempts at inculcating the American populous. The historic decision—based largely on the overwhelming evidence of the plight of polar bears, spotted owls and tropical insects—has forced the inevitable activist outcome, an outcome designed to promote a greener planet. Over the last year, article after article has emerged, detailing the destruction to the planet via one species or another. The evidence has only fallen...

Earth Day TipsTuesday, Apr 22, 2008 @05:45pm CST Experts say Earth Day should be more than a once-a-year observance. Anne Reichman with Earth911 says it's a good time to examine your lifestyle and find ways to conserve. She says the average American generates about 4.3 pounds of garbage every day. Reichman says this number can be reduced drastically if everyone makes an effort to cut back. She says bringing your own coffee cup or water bottle to reuse at work and starting a recycling program at home or at the office are good places to start. Reichman also recommends having...

MADRID (AFP) - Spanish astronomers Wednesday announced the discovery of the smallest planet discovered to date outside the solar system, located 30 light years from earth. The planet, "GJ 436T", was detected through a new technique which "will allow us to discover in less than 10 years the first planet resembling earth in terms of mass and orbit," said Ignasi Ribas of Spain's CSIC scientific research institute. It was discovered by a team led by Ribas through its gravitational pull on other planets already discovered around the same star in the constellation of Leo. "GJ 436T" has a mass five...

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASAGISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. A compiled list of all the sources can be seen...The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years.

It may sound like science fiction, but it’s only a matter of time before the world’s militaries learn to wield the planet itself as a weapon. Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes. Such innovations remain critical, and yet disruptions to the Earth’s climate could overwhelm these relatively slow, incremental changes in how we live. As reports of faster-than-expected climate changes mount, a growing number of experts worry that we might ultimately be forced to try something quite radical: geoengineering. Geoengineering involves humans...

WASHINGTON - The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet with scars from volcanic eruptions and a birthmark shaped like a spider. Some of the 1,213 photos taken by NASA's Messenger probe and unveiled Wednesday help support the case that ancient volcanoes dot Mercury and that it is shrinking as it gets older, forming wrinkle-like ridges. But other images are surprising and puzzling. The spidery shape captured in a photo is "unlike anything we've seen anywhere in the solar system," said mission chief scientist Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of...

Deadly Ozone From Drive-Thru ManiaBy Kellie Hastings Edmonton's drive-thrus contribute 750 tons of Green House Gases into the atmosphere in one month alone. In one year that's 9000 tons from one city! Is it possible that the time has come for us to re-evaluate the importance of what we're actually breathing in here? Should we re-consider the consequences of this unnecessary convenience just to eliminate that simple walk? This alarming discovery was given immediate attention by CTV news and revealing these startling estimated statistics May 30 2007 the source came from the University of Calgary. Their research was based on...

PARIS (AFP) - A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef causes more greenhouse-gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home, according to a Japanese study. A team led by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, calculated the environmental cost of raising cattle through conventional farming, slaughtering the animal and distributing the meat, New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue. Producing a kilo (2.2 pounds) of beef causes the equivalent of 36.4 kilos (80.08 pounds) in carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, Ogino found. Most...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had spotted the first planet beyond the Solar System that has water, the precious ingredient for life. The watery world, though, is far beyond the reach of our puny chemically-powered rockets -- and in any case is quite uninhabitable. It is made of gas rather than rock and its atmosphere reaches temperatures hot enough to melt steel, which means the water exists only as superheated steam. The find, named HD189733b, is about 15 percent bigger than our Jupiter and orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula the Fox, according to a...

The French-led Corot mission has spied its first planet - a very hot world bigger than Jupiter - passing in front of a far-off star. The spacecraft was launched on 27 December last year and is the first to hunt for Earth-like planets from space. Corot scientists said to find a planet so early on "significantly exceeded pre-launch expectations". Artist's concept: A planet is seen as it transits a star

Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, a world which could have water running on its surface. The planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra. Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile. They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life. "We have estimated that the mean temperature of this 'super-Earth' lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be...

WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe." The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun. There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable...

Munich, April 24: An international team of astronomers from Switzerland, France and Portugal have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date. The planet has a radius only 50 percent larger than Earth and is very likely to contain liquid water on its surface. The research team used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-m telescope to discover the super-Earth, which has a mass about five times that of the Earth and orbits a red dwarf already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet. Astronomers believe there is a strong possibility in the presence of a third planet with...

Astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal, confirms previous theories that say water vapor should be present in the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets. Even hot Jupiters, gaseous planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury to our Sun, are thought to have water. The discovery, announced today, means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars. 'We know that water vapor...

Nasa release on the topography of the south polar region of Mars Scientists studying pictures from Nasa's Odyssey spacecraft have spotted what they think may be seven caves on the surface of Mars.The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening. Details were presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. Temperature data from Mars Odyssey's Themis instrument support the idea. The authors say that the possible discovery of caves on the Red Planet is significant. The caves...

The Cassini radar image (left) shows one of Titan's seas is larger than Lake Superior (right) Nasa's Cassini probe has found evidence for seas, probably filled with liquid hydrocarbons, at the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan.The dark features, detected by Cassini's radar, are much bigger than any lakes already detected on Titan. The largest is some 100,000 sq km (39,000 sq miles) - greater in extent than North America's Lake Superior. It covers a greater fraction of Titan than the proportion of Earth covered by the Black Sea. The Black Sea is the Earth's largest inland sea...

The international Cassini spacecraft has beamed back to Earth never-before-seen angles of Saturn from high above and below its majestic rings. The planet is fully surrounded by the rings in images released Thursday by NASA. "Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. "It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breathtaking, it almost gives you vertigo," Porco said. Cassini snapped the images while in a highly inclined orbit during the past two months. The $3.3 billion Cassini mission,...

The plume is seen as an umbrella-shaped feature in the long exposure image to the right Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back images of a huge volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io.A massive dust plume, estimated to be 150m (490ft) high, can be seen erupting from the Tvashtar volcano on Io. On Wednesday, the US probe flew by Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to boost its speed, reducing the travel time to its ultimate target of Pluto. New Horizons also took photos of the icy moons Europa and Ganymede in the run-up to its encounter with Jupiter. Turning...

An op-ed written by an economics professor at the University of Georgia counters Gore’s dire assertions, and fervently stated that this invention is actually saving the planet. In his piece published Tuesday in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dwight R. Lee wrote (h/t JunkScience.com, emphasis mine throughout): "The motto of all environmentalists should be "Thank goodness for the internal combustion engine." Got your attention? Good, for Lee was armed for Gore, err, I mean bear: The abuse heaped on the internal combustion engine by environmentalists was never justified. But a recent story on cow flatulence in the British newspaper, The Independent, makes...

Love thy planet -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: December 4, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern Recently Rev. Joel Hunter, the elected president of the famed Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson, stepped down due to what appears to be irreconcilable differences over how to use the organization's political and real capital. Does the organization, as it has in the past, continue to focus on pet personal piety issues such as same-sex marriage, or does it take a completely new tack and resurrect the social justice roots of Christianity? Rev. Hunter wanted to fix the Christian Coalition's massive energy beam on the environment — which...

Did you know that the ancient Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl—the all-encompassing plumed serpent whose return has been prophesied for centuries—has decided to weigh in on politics? Here’s an excerpt from his message for the world of mortal men: “The global capitalist system that is currently devouring your planetary resources will soon self-destruct, leaving many of you bereft.” Quetzalcoatl has chosen to speak through the curious medium of Daniel Pinchbeck, 40, a former editor of the Manhattan lit-journal Open City. Pinchbeck has had a glowing reputation in hipster circles since his 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, a travelogue and treatise on...

Pluto has been given a new name to reflect its new status as a dwarf planet. On Sept. 7, the former 9th planet was assigned the asteroid number 134340 by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the official organization responsible for collecting data about asteroids and comets in our solar system. The move reinforces the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) recent decision to strip Pluto of its planethood and places it in the same category as other small solar-system bodies with accurately known orbits. Pluto's companion satellites, Charon, Nix and Hydra are considered part of the same system and will not be...

WASHINGTON - The largest planet ever found orbiting another star is so puffy it would float on water, astronomers said Thursday. The newly discovered planet, dubbed HAT-P-1, is both the largest and least dense of the nearly 200 worlds astronomers have found outside our own solar system. HAT-P-1 orbits one of a pair of stars in the constellation Lacerta, about 450 light-years from Earth. "This new planet, if you could imagine putting it in a cosmic water glass, it would float," said Robert Noyes, a research astrophysicist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. HAT-P-1 is an oddball planet, since it orbits...

A distant, icy rock whose discovery shook up the solar system and led to Pluto's planetary demise has been given a name: Eris. The christening of Eris, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, was announced by the International Astronomical Union on Wednesday. Weeks earlier, the professional astronomers' group stripped Pluto of its planethood under new controversial guidelines. Since its discovery last year, Eris, which had been known as 2003 UB313, ignited a debate about what constitutes a planet. Astronomers were split over how to classify the object because there was no universal definition. Some argued it should...

Not for the first time, but with new urgency in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) impaneled a committee to define both the word "planet" and the status of Pluto. Our committee -- seven in number, like the planets of old -- met at the Paris Observatory in late June and reached a unanimous agreement. In short: A planet is a body in orbit around a star (as opposed to orbiting another planet) and big enough for gravity to make it round. The full text of our proposed definition is being released today, to be discussed by astronomers from around...

Global warming puts 12 US parks at riskreport By Deborah Zabarenko Tue Jul 25, 3:51 PM ET Grizzly bear cubs in Yellowstone National Park. Global warming puts 12 of the most famous U.S. national parks at risk, environmentalists said on Tuesday, conjuring up visions of Glacier National Park without glaciers and Yellowstone without grizzly bears. (National Park Service/Reuters) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming puts 12 of the most famous U.S. national parks at risk, environmentalists said on Tuesday, conjuring up visions of Glacier National Park without glaciers and Yellowstone Park without grizzly bears. All 12 parks are located in the...

Astronomers detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away. "For years we've looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going through the same processes our own solar system did when the rocky planets, including Earth, were forming," commented lead author Aki Roberge, who began the research while at Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. "But we got a big surprise--there is much more carbon gas than we expected. Something very different is going on." The research, published in the...

Mars orbiter reaches Red Planet It will take six months for the MRO to attain its final orbit Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has survived a critical phase in its mission by parking itself in an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet. News of its success followed a tense period of radio silence while the spacecraft passed behind Mars. Over the next six months, the probe will steadily reduce the size of its orbit until it reaches an optimal position to start scientific studies. MRO will examine the Martian surface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail. At 2124 GMT (1334 PST),...

"Some people say that I study darkness, not optics," jokes Grover Swartzlander. But it's a kind of darkness that will allow astronomers to see the light. Swartzlander, an associate professor in The University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, is developing devices that block out dazzling starlight, allowing astronomers to study planets in nearby solar systems.

Close window Published online: 1 February 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060130-7 'Tenth Planet' found to be a whopperLarge size of 2003 UB313 fuels debate over what is and isn't a planet.Mark Peplow 2003 UB313 and its moon - currently nicknamed Xena and Gabrielle - take time off from their sword and sorcery shenanigans.© W. M. Keck Observatory The recently discovered 'tenth planet' of our Solar System is substantially larger than Pluto, astronomers have found. For many, the discovery that object 2003 UB313 is about 3,000 kilometres across will remove any doubt that it deserves to be called a planet. "Since UB313...

LOS ANGELES - Scientists say they have confirmed that a so-called 10th planet discovered last year is bigger than Pluto, but that likely won't quell the debate over what makes a planet. The astronomers who spotted the icy, rocky body — informally called UB313 — had reported only a rough estimate of its size based on its brightness. But another group of researchers has come up with what is believed to be the first calculation of UB313's diameter. By measuring how much heat it radiates, German scientists led by Frank Bertoldi of the University of Bonn estimated that UB313 was...

TBN EXPOSED! Hal Lindsey Refuses to Compromise to Stay on Air!Here is the letter written by Hal Lindsey to Paul and Jan Crouch, of TBN....(way to go Hal!) Hal Lindsey Leaving TBN http://www.hallindseyoracle.com/articles.asp?ArticleID=12286 Refuses to Compromise to Stay on Air January 1, 2006 Dear Paul and Jan, Paul, Jr. relayed your message to me that you are both in agreement on the policy of nothing negative being said on TBN about Muslims. Hearing that you also warned John Haggee, Perry Stone, Jack VanImpe and others of this policy caused me to realize that your are not going to modify your...

Huntsville AL (SPX) Nov 17, 2005 We'll soon know the answer: A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth--and, possibly, the vortex. Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

PASADENA, Calif. - A NASA telescope has detected for the first time the building blocks of planets around brown dwarfs, suggesting that such failed stars probably undergo the same planet-building process. Until now, the microscopic crystal building blocks that eventually collide to form planets have only been seen around stars and comets - considered the remnants of the solar system. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently spotted the tiny crystals and dust grains circling five brown dwarfs located 520 light years away in the Chamaeleon constellation. The crystals, composed of a green mineral commonly found on Earth known as olivine, are...

PLANET-DISSOLVING DUST CLOUD IS HEADED TOWARD EARTH!Monday September 12, 2005 By MIKE FOSTER CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they've dubbed a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars -- and it's headed directly toward Earth! Discovered April 6 by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an "acid nebula" and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light -- making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014. "The good news...

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by the University of Rochester has detected gaps ringing the dusty disks around two very young stars, which suggests that gas-giant planets have formed there. A year ago, these same researchers found evidence of the first "baby planet" around a young star, challenging most astrophysicists's models of giant-planet formation. The new findings in the Sept. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters not only reinforce the idea that giant planets like Jupiter form much faster than scientists have traditionally expected, but one of the gas-enshrouded stars, called GM Aurigae, is analogous...

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system. The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego.The discovery was announced today by Dr. Mike Brown of the Califorina Institute of Technology. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the earth, the planet is now the farthest known object in the solar system. It will be visible by telescope over the next six months and currently is almost directly overhead in the early morning eastern sky in the constellation Cetus. Dr. Mike Brown (Cal Tech),...

Thiruvananthapuram, July 28: Exhorting space scientists to ‘think beyond our planet,’ President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on Thursday said the next industrial revolution would not be on earth but on moon and Mars. “The developed countries are moving to moon and Mars. India has the capability to establish industries there using space technology,” Kalam said, inaugurating a symposium on ‘Launch Vehicle Development: Past, Present and Way Ahead’ as part of the silver jubilee celebrations of the first successful launch of SLV-3 at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). The rich Helium deposits on the moon could be a source of energy...

Newly discovered planet has 3 suns Scientists puzzled at how such a planet could form A newly discovered planet has bountiful sunshine, with not one, not two, but three suns glowing in its sky. It is the first extrasolar planet found in a system with three stars. How a planet was born amidst these competing gravitational forces will be a challenge for planet formation theories. "The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," said Maciej Konacki from the California Institute of Technology. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world -- literally and figuratively."...