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One long-standing exoplanet researcher argues that we don’t know very much about about alien planet atmospheres, as an example. Princeton University’s Adam Burrows says that not only is our understanding at an infancy, but the media and scientists overhype information based on very little data. Burrow’s skepticism comes from how information on exoplanet atmospheres is collected. That uses a method called low-resolution photometry, which shows changes in light and radiation emitted from an object such as a planet. This could be affected by things such as a planet’s rotation and cloud cover.

The shape of the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system's home, may look a bit like a snail, but spiral galaxies haven't always had this structure, scientists say. In a recent report, a team of researchers said they now know when and how the majestic swirls of spiral galaxies emerged in the unicerse. Galaxies are categorized into three main types, based on their shapes: spiral, elliptical and irregular. Almost 70 percent of those closest to the Milky Way are spirals. But in the early universe, spiral galaxies didn't exist. A husband and wife team of astronomers, Debra Meloy Elmegreen at...

Whether water is produced by solar wind (SW) radiolysis has been debated for more than four decades. In this paper, we exploit the high spatial resolution of electron microscopy and sensitivity of valence electron energy-loss spectroscopy to detect water (liquid or vapor) in vesicles within (SW-produced) space-weathered rims on interplanetary dust particle (IDP) surfaces. Water in the rims has implications for the origin of water on airless bodies like the Moon and asteroids, the delivery of water to the surfaces of terrestrial planets, and the production of water in other astrophysical environments... The solar wind (SW), composed of predominantly ∼1-keV...

Are We Alone?Our recent success on Mars leaves us no reason to think otherwise--and reason to ponder what makes the earth unique. By: Jay W. Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez The American Spectator May 1, 2004 The American taxpayers recently footed the bill for a risky $800 million NASA mission. The good news? It worked. In January, two NASA landers bounced to their destinations and released their rovers Spirit and Opportunity to prowl the Martian landscape. These remarkable little robots were not searching for archaeological ruins or strange, black monoliths but something much less exotic--the fingerprints of water in liquid form....

Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard, made the claim that we are alone in the universe after an analysis of the 500 planets discovered so far showed all were hostile to life. Dr Smith said the extreme conditions found so far on planets discovered outside out Solar System are likely to be the norm, and that the hospitable conditions on Earth could be unique. “We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it,” he said. He pointed to stars such as HD10180,...

An Earth-size planet has been spotted orbiting a nearby star at a distance that would makes it not too hot and not too cold -- comfortable enough for life to exist, researchers announced Wednesday. If confirmed, the exoplanet, named Gliese 581g, would be the first Earth-like world found residing in a star's habitable zone -- a region where a planet's temperature could sustain liquid water on its surface.[Illustration of planet Gliese 581g.] And the planet's discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there. "Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I...

We have heard a lot about exoplanets in the past year. But for all the talk about these planets, which orbit a star other than our sun, we still haven't actually seen one. One tool could change that, giving us our first look at a distant planet that could be the next best thing to Earth. Currently, scientists detect an extra-solar planet by measuring the dimming of its star as the planet passes between it and our line of sight (this is known as the Transit Method). By observing the way the star's light shines around the planet, it's possible...

The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will likely come within the next quarter-century, a prominent alien hunter predicts. By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium here at Stanford University "Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems,...

A team led by astronomers at The Australian National University has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe, which formed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The discovery has allowed astronomers for the first time to study the chemistry of the first stars, giving scientists a clearer idea of what the Universe was like in its infancy.

Team found that Polaris is 2.5 times brighter today than in 137CE Experts say find is 'entirely unexpected' Astronomers have discovered that Polaris, the north star, is getting brighter. They say the star has suddenly reversed two decades of dimming. It is expanding at more than 100 times the rate they expected - and nobody is sure why. A team led by Scott Engle of Villanova University in Pennsylvania recalibrated historic measurements of Polaris by Ptolemy in 137 C.E., the Persian astronomer Al-Sufi in 964 C.E., and others. They investigated the fluctuations of the star over the course of several...

“If true, the stirring provided by migrating planets may have been essential to bringing those asteroids,” the astronomers stated in a press release. “This raises the question of whether an Earth-like exoplanet would also require a rain of asteroids to bring water and make it habitable. If so, then Earth-like worlds might be rarer than we thought.” To take this example further, the researchers found that the asteroid belt comes from a mix of locations around the solar system. Well, a model the astronomers cite shows that Jupiter once migrated much closer to the sun, basically at the same distance...

And it's actually (relatively) nearby. This is poor, unfortunate Ceres. Discovered in 1801, it was at first called a planet, then soon classified as an asteroid, and recently as a dwarf planet, not quite qualifying for real planet status despite residing in the solar system's asteroid belt. But now it can feel special: the Herschel Telescope has, the for the first time, detected water on the lil' planet--probably a whole lot of it, too. The telescope, using infrared vision, detected a signature of water vapor from Ceres. The researchers think when the 590-mile-wide Ceres moves closer to the sun, part...

Sam Mellon, a graduate of Bradford Area High School and a junior physics major and music minor at Westminster College in New Wilmington, was involved in the finding of KELT-b6, a Saturn-like planet located outside our solar system, called an exoplanet. Mellon is the son of David and Martha Mellon of Bradford. Sam Mellon, along with two other Westminster students and one Westminster faculty advisor, are part of a larger group called KELT (Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope), which seeks to identify exoplanets. Research leading to the discovery of KELT-b6 was made with the help of the KELT-North survey telescope at...

The planet, named KOI-314c, is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured, and it is the first Earth-mass planet to have been located as it passes its host star... The newfound planet is in close orbit with its host star, a red dwarf, which it orbits every 23 days. At 220 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature on the planet, which is about 200 light years away, is too hot for life as we know it to exist. The planet is only about 30 percent denser than water, the astronomers report, which suggests that the gaseous planet...

We explore the general astrobiological significance of F-type main-sequence stars with masses between 1.2 and 1.5 Msun. Special consideration is given to stellar evolutionary aspects due to nuclear main-sequence evolution. DNA is taken as a proxy for carbon-based macromolecules following the paradigm that extraterrestrial biology may be most likely based on hydrocarbons. Consequently, the DNA action spectrum is utilized to represent the impact of the stellar UV radiation. Planetary atmospheric attenuation is taken into account based on parameterized attenuation functions. We found that the damage inflicted on DNA for planets at Earth-equivalent positions is between a factor of 2.5 and...

Astronomer Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley presented data showing that about 85 percent of planets found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope are “mini-Neptunes” or “super-Earths.” Marcy noted that these planets orbit close to their parent stars and that it is possible, with advances in instrument sensitivity, that scientists will discover an abundance of small, rocky planets at more distant orbits. But that’s not what we see so far. Instead, there seems to be a distinct cosmic preference for this intermediate range of planet. These planets also seem to follow a pronounced pattern: Up to about twice...

The artist's conception depicts Kepler-62f,a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The small shining object seen to the right of Kepler-62f is Kepler-62e. Kepler-62f is a remarkably Earth-like planet about 1,200 light-years from our planet. The world is only 1.4 times bigger than Earth and is in orbit around a star that is somewhat dimmer and smaller than the sun. It orbits in what is believed to be the habitable region of its star. The planet was announced in 2013 as...

1. The Earthiest Kepler-78b is most similar to Earth in mass, diameter and composition; it could be made of rock with an iron core. But it’s no Earth analog, whizzing around its star in 8.5 hours, with temperatures exceeding 2,000° Celsius (SN Online: 10/30/13). 2. The wettest HR 8799c’s atmosphere lacks methane, which could signal life, but does have water and carbon monoxide (SN: 4/6/13, p. 5). Water has also been found in the atmospheres of WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b. 3. The rogue Planetary candidate PSO J318.5-22 has no parent star. The object is roughly six times the...

Big-bang-defying giant of astronomy passes away by John G. Hartnett Published: 31 December 2013 (GMT+10) Halton Arp passed away on Saturday morning 28th December 2013 in Munich, Germany. He will be sorely missed by many but not so much by others because of his challenges to the ruling big bang paradigm. With Geoffrey Burbidge and others, Professor Halton Arp was a thorn in the side of those who held to the standard story line of the big bang. In many papers and several books1 he promoted the idea that quasars are born from the nucleus of active galaxies—parent galaxies. In...

While astronomers didn't bag that elusive first "alien Earth" in 2013, they made plenty of exciting exoplanet discoveries during the past year. Here's a list of the top exoplanet finds of 2013, from a tiny world about the size of Earth's moon to a blue gas giant on which it rains molten glass: The most Earthlike world yet Also this year, researchers found the closest thing to an Earth twin in size and composition, though it's far too hot to support life as we know it. Kepler-78b is just 20 percent wider and about 80 percent more massive than our...