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From a Chinese rover on the moon and new spacecraft orbiting Mars, to private spaceships and the most powerful digital camera ever built, space will be practically buzzing with human activities in 2014. Here are some of the things to look out for when you're looking up next year: 7 Rosetta Spacecraft Artist Impression [Pin It] In August 2014, the ESA's Rosetta Spacecraft will rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and deploy its Philae lander, as seen in this artist's impression. Credit: ESA–C. Carreau/ATG medialab View full size image From a Chinese rover on the moon and new spacecraft orbiting Mars, to...

Original Title:Hubblecast 70 Explains How Gravitational Lensing Will Help Uncover the Secrets of the Universe This eight minute Hubblecast video takes a look at gravitational lensing, explaining how it works and how it can help astronomers uncover the secrets of the Universe.

A team of European astronomers have confirmed the presence of an unseen but predicted exoplanet in a distant solar system designated Kepler-88. The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-88c, had not been seen crossing in front of its parent star but its existence had been predicted because of the gravitational perturbation it caused on Kepler-88b, a planet which the Kepler space telescope had previously observed transiting the star. The team used the SOPHIE (Spectrograph for Observation of Phenomena of Stellar Interiors and Exoplanets) spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence to confirm the presence of Kepler-88c. Over 3,500 planet candidates emerged from Kepler's...

There’s something odd floating around in the outer solar system. Actually, there’s lots of odd things floating around in the outer solar system, but 2002 UX25 is one of the most baffling. The mid-sized Kuiper belt object (KBO) measures 650 kilometers (400 miles) across, and yet it has a density less than water (less than 1 gram per cubic centimeter). Yes, if you put it in a huge bathtub, 2002 UX25 would float. ...planetary scientist Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, has taken a measure of 2002 UX25′s density and discovered that it is “the...

Could dandruff be altering the world’s climate? Along with fur, algae, pollen, fungi, bacteria, viruses and various other “bio-aerosols” wafting around in the atmosphere, it may well be. A global study has found that tiny fragments of biological detritus are a major component of the atmosphere, controlling the weather and forming a previously hidden microbial metropolis in the skies. Besides their climatic influence, they may even be spreading diseases across the globe. Scientists have known for some time that aerosols of soot, dust and ash can influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the Sun’s rays and by providing the condensation...

In conclusion then, the first video and gif of the Solar System as a “vortex” are not really all that bad. Unfortunately, the inaccuracies are not due to some minor over-simplifications, but are symptoms of a some very deep-seated misunderstandings. My feeling is that if your take-home message was only that the Solar System moves through space, and the planets trace out pretty spirally paths, then all is well and no harm done. But if it’s leading you to question the heliocentric model, then we’re all buggered. Solar system “vortex” gif (by DjSadhu)

A research team from the University of Singapore has developed a device that can make objects invisible by bathing them in a beam of darkness. The system takes the conventional approach to optics -- which generally aims to make images as sharp and clear as possible -- and turns it completely on its head. Usually imaging systems focus light into a pattern known as a point spreading function, which consists of a spiked central region of high intensity (the main lobe) surrounded by a concentric region of lower intensity light and a higher intensity lobe after this. In order to...

NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars that may have teemed with tiny organisms for tens of millions of years, far longer than scientists had imagined, new research suggests. The watering hole near the Martian equator existed about 3.5 billion years ago. Scientists say it was neither salty nor acidic, and contained nutrients _ a perfect spot to support microbes....

This writing was inspired by a FR article from yesterday about a new planet that has been discovered, and has not been named yet. I started reading about the other planet name orgins and came across the story of Venetia Burney. You may already know of her. On March 14, 1930, 11 year old Venetia and her family were eating breakfast at their home in Oxford England, discussing the biggest news of the day; the discovery of a new planet. Venetia's grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired head an Oxford library read to her from the London Times;. "New Planet; Discovery by...

An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star. The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The existence of such a massive and distantly orbiting planet raises new questions about how these bizarre worlds are formed, the researchers said. "This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star...

The planet, according to a study published online Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is unlike anything in our own solar system. Eleven times more massive than Jupiter, planet HD 106906 b orbits a single sun-like star at a distance of 60 billion miles - about 650 times the distance Earth is from our own sun. "This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said study coauthor Vanessa Bailey, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona.

Washington: In an encouraging sign of life beyond earth, Nasa scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. Though the presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exo-planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds, Nasa said. The strengths of their water signatures varied, it said. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the other three planets, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b,...

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

KOI-351 is “the first system with a significant number of planets (not just two or three, where random fluctuations can play a role) that shows a clear hierarchy like the solar system — with small, probably rocky, planets in the interior and gas giants in the (exterior),” Dr. Juan Cabrera, of the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center, told Universe Today.

You may have thought that NASA's Kepler spacecraft was finished. Well, think again. A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again. A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler's search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae. In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft, ending new data collection for the original mission. The spacecraft required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of...

A quiet milestone in modern astronomy may soon come to pass. As of today, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia lists a current tally of 998 extrasolar planets across 759 planetary systems. And although various tabulations differ slightly, very soon we should be living in an era where over one thousand exoplanets are known. The history of exoplanet discovery has paralleled the course of the modern age of astronomy. It’s strange to think that a generation has already grown up over the past two decades in a world where knowledge of extrasolar planets is a given. I remember hearing of the promise...

In 1995 the simultaneous discovery of extrasolar planets – planets orbiting stars other than the sun and brown dwarfs bigger than giant planets but smaller than stars – revolutionized astronomy. But no existing telescope is large enough to show details on exoplanets and brown dwarfs: we can only see them as faint points of light... In October 2012 we turned both the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth at 18,000 miles per hour, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which drifts in space 100 million miles away, to precisely the same target to try something new. Our target was a brown...

Today everybody wants to talk about it (exoplanets) and write about it. There’s a lot of hype. But back then it was very quiet. There was a huge amount of skepticism too. People don’t like change. I want you to imagine a world where the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are very far from the star and the terrestrial planets like Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are very close to the star. People had constructed theories on how planetary bodies form based on that one example. So when the first planets around sun-like stars were found, they were Jupiter-mass...

All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun, Petigura said. But the team’s analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun. ... If the stars in the Kepler field are representative of stars in the solar neighborhood, then the nearest (Earth-size) planet is expected to orbit a star that is less than 12 light-years from Earth and can be seen by the unaided eye. Future instrumentation to image and take spectra of these Earths need only...