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Researchers are racing to find the first planet that might support life as we know it.Gliese 876 is a modest star, just one-third the mass of our sun and only 15 light-years away, but it has a history-making planetary system all its own. In 1998 a team led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley detected the first sign of something interesting there: a giant planet, twice the mass of Jupiter, circling Gliese 876 once every two months, its gravity yanking the star back and forth at the speed of a jet plane. Three years later the...

Sole member of world's first single-species ecosystem depends on rocks and radioactivity for life. The rod-shaped D. audaxviator was recovered from thousands of litres of water collected deep in the Mponeng Mine in South Africa.Greg Wanger, J. Craig Venter Institute / Gordon Southam, University of Western Ontario Nestled kilometres down in the hot, dark vaults of Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a remarkably lonely bacterium species. The rod-shaped bacterium, Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, lives independently of any other organism in a part of the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, some 2.8 kilometres beneath Earth's surface. There, water flows from...

Desulforudis audaxviator is an organism that lives independently in total darkness and at high temperature by reducing sulfate and fixing carbon and nitrogen from its environment, deep within the Earth. It constitutes the first known single-species ecosystem. Illustration © 2008 Thanya Suwansawad Click here to enlarge image The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat...

Washington, Oct 06: A meteorite, which crashed into Australia 40 years ago, is telling researchers new things about how life may have started on Earth, and how that almost universal protein left-handedness came to be. For more than 150 years, scientists have known that the most basic building blocks of life - chains of amino acid molecules and the proteins they form - almost always have the unusual characteristic of being overwhelmingly “left-handed.” The molecules, of course, have no hands, but they are almost all asymmetrical in a way that parallels left-handedness. This observation, first made in the 1800s by...

Jeff Kantor, on building and managing a 150 Petabyte databaseInterview It makes for one heck of a project mission statement. Explore the nature of dark matter, chart the Solar System in exhaustive detail, discover and analyze rare objects such as neutron stars and black hole binaries, and map out the structure of the Galaxy. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is, in the words of Jeff Kantor, LSST data management project manager, "a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night...

the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS), spent two years periodically photographing portions of the sky to look for small chunks of rock and ice orbiting beyond Neptune, in a region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt. The survey targeted Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) with sizes between 2 miles (3 km) and 17 miles (28 km). Since such objects are too small to see directly, the survey watched for stars to dim as KBOs passed in front of and occulted them. After accumulating more than 200 hours of data watching for stellar flickers lasting a second or less, TAOS did...

After 11 years of (robotically) scanning the skies almost every single night... I am done, as of last night... The sky-scanning has evolved greatly over the past 11 years. The very first version, started in July 1998, consisted of real people at the telescope taking real photographic plates (!) of the sky... When the photographic plates were finished we sent them to David Monet at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff who digitized the photographic plates using an outrageously precise mega-scanner he had painstakingly develop just for these purposes. Soon after the initial survey ended, the telescope got a giant...

First Light for the PRIMA instrumentThe PRIMA instrument [1] of the ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) recently saw "first light" at its new home atop Cerro Paranal in Chile. When fully operational, PRIMA will boost the capabilities of the VLTI to see sources much fainter than any previous interferometers, and enable astrometric precision unmatched by any other existing astronomical facility. PRIMA will be a unique tool for the detection of exoplanets.

This weird object initially misled its discoverers as it showed up as a gamma-ray burst, suggesting the death of a star in the distant Universe. But soon afterwards, it exhibited some unique behaviour that indicates its origin is much closer to us. After the initial gamma-ray pulse, there was a three-day period of activity during which 40 visible-light flares were observed, followed by a brief near-infrared flaring episode 11 days later, which was recorded by ESO's Very Large Telescope. Then the source became dormant again... The most likely candidate for this mystery object is a 'magnetar' located in our own...

Theoretical models of stellar formation propose the existence of very massive stars that can attain up to 150 times the mass of our Sun. Until very recently, however, no scientist had discovered a star of more than 83 solar masses. Now an international team of astrophysicists, led by Universite de Montreal researchers from the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Quebec (CRAQ), has found and "weighed" the most massive star to date. Olivier Schnurr, Jules Casoli and Andre-Nicolas Chene, all graduates of the Universite de Montreal, and professors Anthony F. J. Moffat and Nicole St-Louis, successfully "weighed" a star of...

On December 28th, 2004, I discovered a Kuiper belt object brighter than anything anyone had ever seen before. Being only a few days after Christmas, I naturally nicknamed it Santa... How would I have known back in 2004 that Santa would be the single most interesting object ever discovered in the Kuiper belt? It has a moon -- wait, no, two moons! It is oblong, sort of like a football (American style) that has been deflated and stepped on. And it rotates end over end every 4 hours, significantly faster than anything else large known anywhere in the solar system......

An image released today of a distant star and its potential planetary companion could go down in history as the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star. The possible planet -- a hot, young body (upper left) about eight times more massive than Jupiter -- sits roughly 330 times as far from its host star as Earth is from the sun. The pair lies about 500 light-years from Earth. In 2004 a European team took the first direct snapshot of a likely planet near a brown dwarf, a dim object that astronomers think is...

Don't get the idea that we've found every kind of astronomical object there is in the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of. Now you don't see it, now you do. Something in Bootes truly in the middle of nowhere — apparently not even in a galaxy — brightened by at least 120 times during more than three months and then faded away. Its spectrum was like nothing ever seen, write the discoverers, with "five broad...

The new object, called 2008 KV42, lies in the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. Its orbit is inclined 103.5° to the plane of the Earth's orbit, or ecliptic. That means that as it orbits the Sun, it actually travels in the opposite direction to the planets. Researchers led by Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia first spotted the maverick object in May. Observations suggest it is about 50 kilometres across and travels on a path that takes it from the distance of Uranus to more than twice that of Neptune (or between 20 and...

So far, more than 300 extrasolar planets have been discovered, but as yet no moons have been found orbiting those planets. Now, Cheongho Han from Chungbuk National University in Chongju, South Korea, suggests gravitational 'microlensing' could reveal the presence of large moons in other solar systems. In the past, this technique has been used to detect seven extrasolar planets, including some of near Earth-size. Hans, who published his findings in the Astrophysical Journal this week, thinks it could also reveal the presence of large moons in other solar systems. His research mathematically models how far a moon could be from...

...planetary scientist Mark Sykes... director of the Planetary Science Institute headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., is one of many scientists calling for a definition of the word "planet" other than the IAU definition. A planet in the solar system, the IAU says, must: orbit the sun; have enough gravity to make it nearly round; and have gobbled up or sent packing any objects found in its orbit. A dwarf planet, under IAU rules, is not a planet. The IAU says a dwarf planet orbits the sun, is not a satellite, has enough mass to make itself nearly round and has not...

The ensemble of now more than 250 discovered planetary systems displays a wide range of masses, orbits and, in multiple systems, dynamical interactions. These represent the end point of a complex sequence of events, wherein an entire protostellar disk converts itself into a small number of planetary bodies. Here, we present self-consistent numerical simulations of this process, which produce results in agreement with some of the key trends observed in the properties of the exoplanets. Analogs to our own solar system do not appear to be common, originating from disks near the boundary between barren and (giant) planet-forming.

The accepted timeframe for the beginnings of life on Earth is now being questioned by a Curtin University of Technology led team of scientists, after finding a key indicator to the earliest life forms in diamonds from Jack Hills in Western Australia... The Curtin led team's discovery of very high concentrations of carbon 12, or "light carbon" within these crystals is remarkable as it is a feature usually associated with organic life... Evidence for ancient life stretches back in time to at least 3.5 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled organisms that did not require oxygen. The discovery...

A "minor planet" with the prosaic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune. But this lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). The discovery of this remarkable object was reported today in Chicago, at an international symposium titled "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Asteroids to Cosmology." A...

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...

SCIENTISTS have found a new world orbiting the solar system – more than 3 billion kilometres further away from the Sun than Pluto and 40 years away from Earth in a space shuttle. NASA is expected to announce today the discovery of the space object, which some experts believe could be a new planet. It is provisionally known as Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea. The discovery of Sedna – 10 billion kilometres from Earth – is a testament to the new generation of high-powered telescopes. Measurements suggest Sedna's diameter is almost 2000km – the biggest find...

Donald Savage/Dwayne Brown Headquarters, Washington (Phone: 202/358-1547/1726) Jane Platt Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. (Phone: 818/354-0880) March 12, 2004 NOTE TO EDITORS : N04-040 NASA Schedules News Briefing About Unusual Solar Object The discovery of a mysterious object in our solar system is the topic of a listen-and-log-on news briefing on Monday, March 15, at 1 p.m. EST. Dr. Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. will present his discovery of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun. He and colleagues made the discovery as part of a NASA-funded research project. The...

One debater, Neil deGrasse Tyson, did the boxing entrance a la Rocky. That's how hot the matchup is between Pluto as a planet and Pluto as a plutoid. Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium in New York, supports the demotion of Pluto. In the other corner, Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Ariz., does not agree with the recent ruling that essentially booted Pluto from the planet lineup. The debate over whether Pluto should be considered a planet is part of "The Great Planet Debate: Science as Process" conference here at...

From a swivel chair in the basement of the astronomy department at the University of California, Berkeley, he's directing the world's largest functioning telescope, on Hawaii's 14,000-foot Mauna Kea volcano. Dr. Marcy's remote-controlled system of interconnected computers, screens, and a real-time audiovideo connection shows him what the telescope is "seeing" -- and it's not the twinkling light of a distant star. Rather, the screens fill with the spectrum of colors that starlight produces. To the untrained eye, it's no more than a blotch of 1960s psychedelia. Marcy is a planet hunter, a kind of Indiana Jones of the astronomy world...

Using the new Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA), Eisner and his colleagues observed more than 250 stars in Orion's central region and found that less than 8% had dust disks thought massive enough to create a Jupiter. The radiation from hot, massive stars in the cluster probably clears out a lot of surrounding material and keeps high-mass disks from forming, explains co-author John Carpenter (Caltech). In all, about 10% of the observed stars emit radiation associated with warm dust disks. The results agree almost perfectly with findings by Geoff Marcy (UC Berkeley) and his colleagues, who conclude...

Astronomers using a variety of techniques have discovered more than 300 planets circling other stars since 1995, when a Swiss team announced finding the first Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a sun-like star, but few of them bear any resemblance to rocky planets like Earth. Because planets are far smaller and dimmer than the star they circle, most techniques rely on detecting not the planet itself, but its effects on its star, such as changes in the star's light or wobbles in the star's rotation due to a planet's gravitational tug as it circles. Consequently, most of the planets found so far...

The discovery of planets around other stars is going through an "inflation era" of rapidly expanding new knowledge. Beginning in 1995, the first decade of exoplanet observations involved simply doing an inventory. In the second decade we are rapidly characterizing the physical properties of these remote worlds, and by the third decade well will be cataloging inhabited Earth-like planets. The first potentially inhabitable exoplanet we find will likely be a super-Earth several times the mass of Earth. Super-Earths are probably more abundant in the local stellar neighborhood than puny Earth-mass worlds. Several have already been discovered. A super-Earth could have...

Astronomers have discovered a new planet about the same size as Jupiter, it was announced today. The planet, which has been given the less-than-romantic name CoRot-Exo-4b, was spotted by a European space mission. It forms part of the Monoceros constellation - the Unicorn - and lies about 3,000 light years from our solar system. Astronomers believe it is mostly made up of gas and has a similar composition to Jupiter.

A new class of cosmic object has been found by a Dutch schoolteacher, through a project which allows the public to take part in astronomy research online. Hanny Van Arkel, 25, came across the strange gaseous blob while using the Galaxy Zoo website to help classify galaxies in telescope images. Astronomers subsequently confirmed that the object was one-of-a-kind. The work has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The object quickly became known as "Hanny's Voorwerp" - Voorwerp being the Dutch word for "object". Researchers think this green blob got its energy from light emitted...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a "cosmic ghost," a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object. The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online. "At first, we had no idea what it was. It could have been in our solar system, or at the edge of the universe," Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski, a member and co-founder...

DALLAS -- Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion. They used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in West Texas to capture the 123rd planet known beyond the solar system. Planet hunting is one of astronomy's hottest fields. "This will be the first of many planets coming out of the HET," said William Cochran, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and leader of the research team. The planet orbits a star called HD 37605, near the bright star Betelgeuse, The Dallas Morning News reported in Thursday's online edition. The newfound planet, called HD 37605b, is...

Are comets born in great swarms? The puzzling abundance of comets in short solar orbits has led a pair of astronomers to suggest that they are fragments of larger bodies that crumbled as they entered the inner solar system. Short-period comets take less than 200 years to circle the sun and are thought to originate in the Kuiper belt of icy objects beyond Neptune. Some Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs) are in vulnerable orbits that allow the gravity of the outer planets to tug them inwards, where the sun's heat turns them into comets. However, there seem to be too few KBOs...

Friday, August 1 is a red-letter day for eclipse enthusiasts. On that date, the sun will be partially eclipsed over an immense area that includes western and central Asia, parts of northern and central Europe, all of Greenland and even a small slice of northeastern North America. A total solar eclipse — the first in nearly two and a half years — will be visible along a narrow track that will start over the Northwest Passage of Canada, gives a glancing blow to northern Greenland, then shifts southeast through Siberia and western Mongolia and before ending near the famed Silk...

Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming. TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, on 26 April 1986, reactor No 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in Ukraine, blew apart, spewing radioactive dust and debris far and wide. Ever since, a 30 km 'exclusion zone' has existed around the contaminated site, accessible to those with special clearance only. It's quite easy, then, to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the area; to imagine an eerily deserted wasteland, utterly devoid of life. But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife...

Top Astronaut: 'Aliens Do Exist' 11:37am UK, Thursday July 24, 2008 Aliens do exist and have even contacted humans on Earth, according to top astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell who was the sixth man on the Moon. l-alien Dr Edgar Mitchell says aliens are just like little men The truth has been hidden by governments for more than 60 years, the Moon walker says. And he claims he is lifting the lid on a conspiracy to keep aliens a secret. Dr Mitchell, who was on Apollo 14 in 1971, has told how he was aware of many UFO visits to Earth...

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...

Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun. Researchers say the crossing confirms that the heliosphere—the region swept out by the solar wind—is actually lopsided, perhaps due to a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space. The shock wave, or heliospheric termination shock, occurs when the supersonic wind thins to the point that it can no longer rebuff the denser haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Instead,...

Jafar Arkani-Hamed of McGill University discovered that five impact basins--dubbed Argyre, Hellas, Isidis, Thaumasia and Utopia--form an arclike pattern on the Martian surface. Three of the basins are well-preserved and remain visible today. The locations of the other two, in contrast, were inferred from measurements of anomalies in the planet's gravitational field... a single source--most likely an asteroid that was initially circling the sun in the same plane as Mars--created all five craters. At one point the asteroid passed close to the Red Planet... and was broken apart by the force of the planet's gravity. The resulting five pieces subsequently...

Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy. Momentum is building: Just last week, astronomers announced they had discovered three super-Earths — worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky — orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars. "Being able to find three Earth-mass planets around a single star really makes the point that not only may many stars have one Earth, but they...

Ancient_antarctic_microbes_2_2 The unusual properties of frozen water may have been the ticket that made life possible. Over the decades, several notable scientists have began to suspect that life on Earth did not evolve in a warm primordial soup, but in ice—at temperatures that few living things can now tolerate. The very laws of chemistry may have actually favored ice, says Jeffrey Bada, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “We’ve been arguing for a long time,” he says, “that cold conditions make much more sense, chemically, than warm conditions.” If Bada and others are correct, it would...

A newfound extrasolar planet is the smallest yet discovered orbiting a star smaller than our sun, astronomers announced today. The find may increase the chances of finding life-supporting "exoplanets," they added... The planet, dubbed MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, is just three times more massive than Earth and orbits what is most likely a brown dwarf -- a "failed" star that is so small its core may not be massive enough to maintain nuclear reactions for very long. The planet is 3,000 light-years from Earth and has a close-in orbit similar to Venus's. But because the newfound body's parent is so much cooler than...

NANTES, France (AFP) - European scientists on Monday said they had located five 'super-Earths', each of them between four and 30 times bigger than our planet, in a trio of distant solar systems. The discovery suggests that at least one third of stars similar to our own Sun host these difficult-to-detect celestial bodies, multiplying previous estimates by five. It also brings astronomers closer to finding planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, that could potentially duplicate the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth. "In a year or two, it is likely that we will find habitable planets circling...

PARIS (AFP) - Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a study to be published Sunday. European and US scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial. Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact. Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead...

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term "plutoid" as a name for Pluto and other objects that just two years ago were redefined as "dwarf planets."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The Ulysses solar probe will cease operations around July 1 after nearly 18 years in outer space, NASA announced Thursday. The U.S.-European spacecraft has been suffering from a decline in its plutonium power for some time. Despite conservation measures by ground controllers, the power has dwindled to the point where thruster fuel soon will freeze up. Ulysses already has surpassed its expected lifetime by almost four times, traveling 5.4 billion miles since its launch aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1990. "When the last bits of data finally arrive, it surely will be tough to say goodbye,"...

Some weeks ago, I wrote about microbes in the air and their possible role in helping clouds form, in causing rain and in altering the chemistry of the high atmosphere. This week, I want to go in the opposite direction and plunge down into the earth. For many bacteria live deep in the oceans and deep in the earth, far from light, far from what we normally think of as good, comfortable places to live. For example: the bottom of the Mariana Trench. This is a seam on the sea floor in the northwestern Pacific, not far from the island...

Enlarge ImageFresh look.Recent surveys of the Milky Way show it contains a prominent central bar feature (bottom), distinguishing it from other galaxies of the classic spiral variety (top).Credit: (top) NASA/Spitzer Space telescope (bottom) NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech) The Milky Way Gets a Facelift By Phil BerardelliScienceNOW Daily News03 June 2008Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that the Milky Way is missing two...

The lost civilization of Atlantis may just be legend, but way down below the ocean (to quote the folksinger Donovan) there are some things that are very real — namely, bacteria and archaea. By some estimates, sub-seafloor prokaryotes may account for two-thirds of the biomass of these types of organisms on Earth. The latest evidence for such a huge undersea biosphere, and a depth record of sorts, is reported in Science by R. John Parkes of Cardiff University and colleagues. They have found living prokaryotes 5,335 feet below the ocean floor off Newfoundland, about twice as deep as the previous...

According to a report in New Scientist, the youthful looking family of objects were found in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. They appear puzzlingly fresh-faced, despite the fact that they probably formed in a collision more than a billion years ago. The largest member of the family, a rapidly tumbling blimp-shaped object called 2003 EL61, was discovered in 2005. In 2007, astronomers found five smaller objects travelling in similar orbits. Their paths suggested they all formed a single object that was broken apart in a collision more than a billion years ago. Now, a team...

Mysterious Meteorites Stymie Scientists Anne Minard for National Geographic NewsMarch 12, 2008 A pair of mysterious meteorites discovered in Antarctica is baffling scientists who are struggling to determine the origin of the space rocks. The meteorites, dubbed GRA 06128 and GRA 06129, were found in the Graves Nunataks region of Antarctica in 2006 (see an interactive map of Antarctica). The rocks were oddly rusty and salty and smelled like rotten eggs, its discoverers said. Initially, a team at the University of New Mexico (UNM) caused a stir when its analysis hinted that the pair may hail from Venus or the...