The Space Thread

[Jus-X]

Anything I find pretty interesting about things in our Universe I normally post in seperate threads, I guess to reduce clutter, I firgure one thread would be better.

So if anyone else finds this shit interesting, discuss or post new articles and or pics

Here's one that finally strays from the whole "a new gas giant found" and is stating that many actual terrestrial planets (small and solid) have been found.

Source (http://news.discovery.com/space/kepler-scientist-galaxy-is-rich-in-earth-like-planets.html)

In a recent presentation, Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov preempted the official announcement that the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has discovered about 140 candidate worlds orbiting other stars that are "like Earth."

Usually, announcements like these happen after an official press release, but during the TEDGLobal conference in Oxford, U.K., Sasselov unexpectedly dropped the groundbreaking news in one of his presentation slides.

Can you guess which exoplanet discovery was voted #1?"You can see here the small planets dominate the picture," he casually said while referring to a graph depicting the different exoplanet sizes and their number as of July 2010.

Although he refers to these exoplanets as "candidate" Earth-like worlds, Sasselov goes on to talk about the statistical prevalence of small planets throughout the Milky Way.

Before Kepler, only the larger exoplanets could be seen. This is fairly obvious; large gas giants are easier to detect over the great interstellar distances. The highly sensitive Kepler has now leveled the playing field, indicating that there are many more exoplanets twice the size of Earth and smaller.

Undoubtedly, this is huge news. If officially confirmed by NASA -- and only then would it be advisable to pop the champagne corks -- the discovery of dozens of worlds of comparable size to Earth is historic.

Although it has largely been assumed to be the case, Kepler will have proven that our planet is not unique in our galaxy. If there are so many Earth-like worlds out there, will any be home to extraterrestrial life?

Speculation about the existence of alien life will have another strong case to suggest that if planets like Earth are not rare, than perhaps "life as we know it" is ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way.

A screen grab from Dimitar Sasselov's TED presentation. Note the bar labeled "like Earth."The unofficial "data leak" by Sasselov comes hot on the heels of some controversy that erupted last month over how Kepler data should be shared with the astronomical community. Data on 400 exoplanet candidates (presumably the same exoplanets presented in Sasselov's talk) were being withheld by the Kepler science team so they could publish news on any important discoveries first.

As our own Nicole Gugliucci pointed out in her fascinating June 15 article: "The 400 candidates are being withheld by the Kepler team so that they can do follow-up work and publish their results. This is generally considered a fair system where the principal investigators have the data for a set amount of time before having to make it public."

Usually, NASA data is considered proprietary for a year after the data are gathered. This allows the mission scientists to have first dibs on the data they've invested a lot of time, energy and money collecting. After this time, other research groups can have access.

This may be common practice, but for a mission that's looking for worlds like our own, there's a high degree of impatience for the data to become public.

Although these Kepler results were supposed to remain secret until February 2011, Sasselov has given the world an unofficial glimpse into the possible discovery of Earth-like extra-solar planets. But by the looks of things, we're not talking about one or two "second Earths." We could be looking at a galaxy with a dominance of small rocky worlds.

"The statistical result is loud and clear. And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. Our Milky Way galaxy is rich in these kinds of planets." --Dimitar Sasselov
There's a bittersweet feeling to this announcement. Although the news is groundbreaking, it's a shame that it was leaked during a TED talk rather than being released via official channels from the whole Kepler team.

Keith Cowing, of NASAWatch.com, goes one step further, pointing out that it's wrong for this news to be announced in the U.K., only for the news to finally break weeks later.

"What is really annoying is that the Kepler folks were complaining about releasing information since they wanted more time to analyze it before making any announcements," Cowing adds. "And then the project's Co-I goes off and spills the beans before an exclusive audience -- offshore. We only find out about it when the video gets quietly posted weeks later."

Although this announcement could have been handled much better (personally, I think it might be best until we hear what NASA has to say), all indications are that we are about to have our eyes opened to the possibility that Earth is no longer a unique world. It belongs to a common type of planet found throughout our galaxy.

[Kat]

What is everyone's favorite planet? I know most people think Mars kicks ass, or is in love with Saturn because of the rings, my personal favorite is Neptune.

[Uncle Hoody]

Uranus....

[Jus-X]

I've always liked Venus. There's just been something about knowing it "could have" once held life and carbon dioxide levels killed the planet, making it unlivable.

[Jus-X]

Sounds like wishful thinking to me (http://gizmodo.com/5597671/this-is-how-mars-can-turn-into-a-new-earth)

Mars. The most tantalizing of all planets, with mountains three times as tall as Mount Everest and canyons 2,485 miles long and four miles deep. Our next stop in our return to the stars. And possibly our next home.

We are not nearly there yet. We don't have the technology. Heck, we barely have any real project to send humans to that planet, now that Constellation is almost gone. But as NASA readies Curiosity for its big Mars mission—which will send back 3D images of unprecedented quality among many other things—is nice to imagine how a terraformed Mars could look. And dream about starting there anew. If we avoid self-destruction, first, that is.

Looking at the end result, it's totally worth it—as long as we don't get BP up there

[Kat]

I've always liked Venus. There's just been something about knowing it "could have" once held life and carbon dioxide levels killed the planet, making it unlivable.

It's weird that it was thought of to have oceans

This is a cool picture of the said planet.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Venus-venera13-right.jpg

[Jus-X]

New Solar System found: (http://news.discovery.com/space/exoplanets-solar-system.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1)

European astronomers on Tuesday said they had found a distant star orbited by at least five planets in the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.

The star is similar to our sun and its planetary lineup has an intriguing parallel with own solar system, although no clue has so far been found to suggest it could be a home from home, they said.

The star they studied, HD 10180, is located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, the male water snake, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a press release.

The planets were detected over six years using the world's most powerful spectograph, an instrument to capture and analyze light signatures, at ESO's telescope at La Silla, Chile.

The method consists of observing a star and seeing how the light that reaches Earth "wobbles" as a result of the gravitational pull of a passing planet.

The tiny fluctuation in light can then be used as a telltale to calculate the mass of the transiting planet.

The five detected planets are big, being the size of Neptune, although they orbit at a far closer range than our own gas giant, with a "year" ranging from between six and 600 days.

The astronomers also found tantalizing evidence that two other candidate planets are out there.

One would be a very large planet, the size of our Saturn, orbiting in 2,200 days.

The other would be 1.4 times the mass of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet yet to be discovered. It orbits HD 10180 at a scorchingly close range, taking a mere 1.18 Earth days to zip around the star.

If confirmed, that would bring the distant star system to seven planets, compared with eight in our own solar system.

A total of 402 stars with planets have been logged since the first was detected in 1995, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The tally of exoplanets stands at 472.

None, though, is even remotely similar to Earth, which is rocky and inhabits the famous "Goldilocks zone" where the temperature is just right to enable water, the stuff of life, to exist in liquid form.

ESO astronomer Christophe Lovis said knowledge was progressing fast.

"We are now entering a new era in exoplanet research -- the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," Lovis said. "Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system."

[Kat]

I often wonder if there is life out there, somewhere like us. Like a completely Earth like planet. I am sort of a agnostic astronomer, I can totally see it being true, but I can see it not being true either. Although, I do lean more to the side of somewhere it exists, due to the fact that it's seemingly endless.

[Jus-X]

I often wonder if there is life out there, somewhere like us. Like a completely Earth like planet. I am sort of a agnostic astronomer, I can totally see it being true, but I can see it not being true either. Although, I do lean more to the side of somewhere it exists, due to the fact that it's seemingly endless.

I don't know if there if life out there as or more integillent than we are, but I definitely believe in a universe created as large as it is, it most definitly has stars and moons that contain water, bacteria, trees and grass and meadows and fruit, birds, dinosaurs, mammals, etc. It doesn't make much sense for God to create only one planet with life on it... but we could be the only planet with intelligent life? Not saying animals are dumb or anything, but we're the only species on the planet that combines decision making skills with communication skills with the ability to make choices and are driven by emotion.

[Kat]

I don't know if there if life out there as or more integillent than we are, but I definitely believe in a universe created as large as it is, it most definitly has stars and moons that contain water, bacteria, trees and grass and meadows and fruit, birds, dinosaurs, mammals, etc. It doesn't make much sense for God to create only one planet with life on it... but we could be the only planet with intelligent life? Not saying animals are dumb or anything, but we're the only species on the planet that combines decision making skills with communication skills with the ability to make choices and are driven by emotion.

I can only imagine what would happen if we discovered a planet with other life on it. Intelligent or not. My bet, we fuck it up somehow... either by bringing them here, going to war with them or trying to make them more like us, or some other crazy shit.

[Jus-X]

Over the past 15 years much planet-hunting has focused on simply cataloging individual worlds whirling about other stars. This search was turbo-boosted last week. Two teams of astronomers reported that they are at the point where they can study of the architecture of entire planetary systems.

By being able to characterize entire planetary systems -- from Jovian gas giants to Earth-sized planets -- we will gain important insights into the construction of alien solar systems in our galactic neighborhood.

In what seemed like a battle of press releases, last Tuesday the European Southern Observatory announced that five confirmed planets are circling the sun-like star HD10180, which is just 27 light years away in the southern constellation Hydrus.

Two days later, NASA's Kepler space observatory reported possibly three planets (two of which have been confirmed) around a star called Kepler-9, which is a whopping 2,000 light years away in the summer constellation Lyrae. Two of the confirmed Kepler planets are the size of Saturn. This adds to the fifteen planetary systems known to have at least three planets.

I find the HD 10180 system more intriguing than Kepler-9 because it has five Neptune-mass planets huddle close to the star -- within the radius of Mars’ orbit. The outermost of these, HD 10180g, is within this star’s habitable zone where liquid water would remain stable. Though the planet is a 24 Earth-mass gas giant, it probably has a family of moons. Some may be big enough to be habitable by possessing an atmosphere and seas. This might be a great place to go looking for the blue-skinned "Avatar" aliens.

We see stark similarities and differences when comparing both systems to our solar system. The layout of the worlds offers insights into the assembly and evolution of planetary systems:


The planets in the Kepler-9 system follow orbits that are coplanar. Kepler detects them passing in front of their star. This means their orbits are nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. This solidifies the centuries-old notion that our solar system -- also coplanar -- formed by the agglomeration of dust in a flattened disk. The HD 10180 system was studied through stellar wobbles and therefore planet inclinations are not known.
Both systems have one "candidate" super-Earth. But these are no places to call home. They each orbit so close to their star that they might have 3,000 degree Fahrenheit oceans of molten magma. The Kepler-6 super-Earth is 1.5 times the radius of our planet. The HD 10180 super-Earth is 1.4 times the mass of Earth. This is the smallest exoplanet found to date along the road to pinpointing an Earth clone out there.
Each system has gas giant planets crowding in close to their stars. This means that the worlds migrated inward after amassing ices and gasses at a farther and colder distance from the star. This could have been caused by drag within a thick gas disk, or due to a gravitational billiards game with a clutter of smaller bodies. By contrast, dynamical simulations show that Jupiter barely migrated at all after it formed. But these simulations imply that our solar system is a fluke -- only 10 percent of star systems may have non-migrating planets.
What's intriguing is that the HD 10180 planets are roughly spaced in the same proportions as our solar system. This suggests there is some common type of resonance in a planet-forming disk that builds worlds according to an empirical relationship called the Titus-Bode Law.


The mapping of these two systems will also allow us to eventually put our solar system into a broader context and determine how typical it is among what seems to be incredible diversity among planetary systems.

HD 10180 would be an intriguing system for a far future interstellar probe to reconnoiter. The artificial intelligent machine would be like the Saturn Cassini mission on steroids. The probe would tour all the moons and planets in HD 10180. It would obediently send back streams of spellbinding pictures to the descendants of its earthbound builders -- who would have to patiently wait 27 years for the first snapshot following the probe’s arrival. The probe might dispatch nanobot landers to do biology experiments on the surfaces of earth-like moons.

No doubt other bizarre and wondrous stellar systems await planet-hunters. It's a booming industry.

I guess this kinda shit excites me more than it does other people... :shifty:

[Jus-X]

This (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2022489,00.html) is actually pretty exciting.

Article (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-09/freshly-discovered-earth-planet-orbiting-nearby-star-could-be-first-truly-habitable-exoplanet)The star known as Gliese 581 is utterly unremarkable in just about every way you can imagine. It's a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the Milky Way, weighing in at about a third the mass of the Sun. At 20 light years or so away, it's relatively nearby, but not close enough to set any records (it's the 117th closest star to Earth, for what that's worth). You can't even see it without a telescope, so while it lies in direction of Libra, it isn't one of the shining dots you'd connect to form the constellation. It's no wonder that the star's name lacks even a whiff of mystery or romance.

But Gliese 581 does have one distinction — and that's enough to make it the focus of intense scientific attention. At last count, astronomers had identified more than 400 planets orbiting stars beyond the Sun, and Gliese 581 was host to no fewer than four of them — the most populous solar system we know of, aside than our own. That alone would make the star intriguing. But on Wednesday, a team of astronomers announced they'd found two more planets circling the star, bringing the total to six. And one of them, assigned the name Gliese 581g, may be of truly historic significance.

For one thing, the planet is only about three or four times as massive as our home world, meaning it probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that's a minimum requirement for the presence of life. For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have wondered whether other Earths existed out in the cosmos. And since the first, very un-Eearthlike extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995, astronomers have been inching closer to answering that question. Now, they've evidently succeeded (although to be clear, there's no way at this point to determine whether there actually is life on the new planet).

"We're pretty excited about it," admits Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of the team, in a masterpiece of understatement. "I think this is what everyone's been after for the past 15 years."

Planetary scientist James Kasting, of Penn State University, who wasn't involved with the discovery, agrees. "I think they've scooped the Kepler people," he says. Kasting refers to the Kepler space telescope, launched into space early last year on a mission to determine how common Earthlike planets might be. The "Kepler people" have a number of candidate Earths in the can, but are still working to confirm them.

Being first isn't the main reason Vogt is excited, however. "Someone had to be first," he says. "But this is right next door to us. That's the big result." What's particularly big about it is a matter of simple arithmetic. With only 116 stars closer to Earth than this one, it was hardly a sure thing that so small a sample group would produce two habitable planets, including Earth. And two such planets may be an undercount, Vogt says, since just nine out of those 100-plus stars have been studied in any detail. Indeed, one of Gliese 581g's sister planets, known as Gliese 581d (OK, they truly don't put a lot of creative energy into naming these things) could conceivably be a habitable world itself.

One of the four planets known to orbit Gliese 581 before the latest discovery, 581d was found by a team of Swiss astronomers in 2007 and was thought to be outside the habitable zone, and thus too cold for liquid water. But a reanalysis last year brought it into the zone, albeit just barely. The problem is, Gliese 581d is also too big to be Earthlike; it's probably made mostly of nonwater ice, like Neptune and Uranus, which makes a poorer candidate for life than 581g.

Lost in the excitement over possible life on the new world is what a remarkable achievement its mere discovery was. Detecting a planet this small is monstrously hard—and would have been impossible when Vogt and co-discoverer Paul Butler, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington first got into the planet-hunting game in the early 1990s. The instruments you use to detect tiny back-and-forth motions in the star — motions caused by the orbiting planet's gravitational tugs, which are often the only way to infer that the worlds exist at all—simply weren't sensitive enough. Since then, though, says Vogt, "I've been busting my gut to improve the instruments, and Paul has been busting his got to do the observations." In all, those observations span more than 200 nights on the giant Keck I telescope in Hawaii over 11 years, supplemented by observations from the Geneva group — and that painstaking work finally confirmed 581g's existence.

None of this proves that there actually is water on Gliese 581g. "Those are things we just have to speculate about," says Vogt. But he goes on to point out that there's water pretty much everywhere else you look. "There's water on Earth," he says, "and on the Moon, and Mars, and on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, and in interstellar space. There's enough water produced in the Orion Nebula every 24 seconds to fill the Earth's oceans."

It's not hard to imagine, in other words, that Gliese 581g might have plenty of water as well. "It could have quite a good ocean," Vogt says. Certainly, it could still be a sterile, non-biological ocean. But unlike any planet found until now, there's nothing to rule out the idea that could also be teeming with life.


A couple of math geeks recently calculated that the discovery of the first “habitable” exoplanet would be announced in May of next year -- but a few stargazers from UC Santa Cruz and their colleagues simply couldn’t wait that long. In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, the astronomers report the discovery of what may be the first truly habitable earth-like exoplanet orbiting the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581.

Discovered via the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers claim their candidate planet is about three times the mass of Earth and orbiting smack in the middle of the “habitable zone,” or at the right distance for liquid water to be present on the surface (that is, not too hot and not too cold). Its mass also suggests it is a rocky planet with a solid surface and enough gravity to maintain an atmosphere.

The planet is tidally locked into orbit around the Gliese 581, which means the same side always faces the star, keeping one side in perpetual daylight and the other in darkness. If indeed Gliese 581g, as the planet is known, is habitable for humans, it would probably best sustain life right along the border between darkness and light.

The discovery, of course, leaves plenty of questions to be answered about Gliese 581g. First of all, “habitable zones” are a bit of a grey area in exoplanet astronomy, and some scientists think there are too many variables at play to even consider a certain distance or range of distance “habitable.” Further, the findings are very preliminary and a lot more observation will be necessary before astronomers really know what they are looking at.

But the fact that researchers have found another similarly-sized, potentially similarly-surfaced planet so close to Earth – Gliese 581 is only 20 light years away – in both composition and distance would suggest that such planets aren’t rare in the galaxy. That raises hopes that as the exoplanet search extends outward that we’ll find even more potentially life-harboring rocks out there.

This is pretty big if you ask me. This was all over Popular Science, Discovery, Time Magazine, and CNN yesterday. This means there's a planet out there that could be just like earth. This means it could either hold existing lifealready, or support our own life in the future. (Jason X's Earth 2 everyone?)

[Uncle Hoody]

Why does everyone assume extra terrestrial life needs H20 to sustain? It just seems to me that maybe some aliens need something other than water. Maybe they need Kryptonite to survive or something, and they're looking around the galaxy for a planet with extensive amounts of "life sustaining kryptonite for a planet like ours."

[Jus-X]

Well it has nothing to do with water, but temperature. A planet that can sustain a liquid form of water means it has tolerable temperatures. It has four seasons. Seasons mean a breathable atmosphere because the process or precipitaion, surface runoff, percalation, evaporation, and condensation purifes the air.

Water also seems to be the life force for carbon based lifeforms, which the building blocks and elements of the universe support that most lifeforms will be carbon based.

[The Taff]

Well it has nothing to do with water, but temperature. A planet that can sustain a liquid form of water means it has tolerable temperatures. It has four seasons. Seasons mean a breathable atmosphere because the process or precipitaion, surface runoff, percalation, evaporation, and condensation purifes the air.

Water also seems to be the life force for carbon based lifeforms, which the building blocks and elements of the universe support that most lifeforms will be carbon based.

That goe sunder the asusmption there the only life forms capable of living are carbon based. What about silicon based life forms? What about creatures adapted to an arid rock with a methane atmosphere and high pressure? We assume that our planet it the perfect conditions for life, but that doesn't mean life can't develop under other conditions. If you look at our own damn planet, we've got creatures that live in tons of different temperatures, climates and conditions.

Life finds a way.

[Brett H.]

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/3557/spacerye.png

[Jus-X]

It came from space... so why not post this (http://news.discovery.com/space/meteorite-amino-acids-101221.html) here?

Planetary scientists have found amino acids, building blocks of life, in an unexpected place: a meteorite whose parent asteroid formed at temperatures so high that such fragile organic compounds should have been destroyed. One explanation for the surprising discovery is that some amino acids might form through a mechanism that does not require the presence of water, upping the chances of finding life beyond the solar system, says Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Amino acids are forming in environments that we really didn’t think were possible," Glavin says. He and his colleagues found the material in a fragment of the asteroid 2008 TC3, the first celestial object that has ever been spotted before slamming into Earth’s atmosphere and raining meteorites onto the planet’s surface (SN: 4/25/09, p. 13). The researchers describe their discovery in an article posted online December 13 in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Asteroid 2008 TC3 has an unusually violent history, notes Glavin and study coauthor Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. The roughly 4-meter-long (13-foot-long) asteroid is believed to be a fragment of a fledgling planet that formed at the birth of the solar system and was heated to temperatures exceeding 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,012 degrees Fahrenheit) -- hot enough to melt iron. The rich amalgam of materials in the chunks of the asteroid that fell to Earth suggests that 2008 TC3 was then subject to a series of violent collisions with other asteroids that fused different pieces of space rocks.

That’s why Glavin and his collaborators didn’t expect to find anything but terrestrial amino acids in the gram of material they got when 2008 TC3 broke apart in Earth’s atmosphere in October 2008, leaving remnants scattered in the Nubian desert in Sudan. The sample they analyzed was classified as a ureilite meteorite, a type that comes from parent asteroids devoid of water, and thus unable to form amino acids by known mechanisms.

But the team did discover amino acids in the sample that are either rare or nonexistent on Earth. More importantly, the two possible forms of the compounds -- a left-handed structure and its mirror image -- were equally common. In contrast, amino acids made by life on Earth are predominantly left-handed.

"The pattern of amino acid abundances... are hard to explain via terrestrial contamination," comments Conel Alexander of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. Because of the high heat, Glavin adds, the extraterrestrial origin of these amino acids also can’t be explained by a familiar process in which two types of highly reactive organic compounds -- aldehydes and ketones -- interact with ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and water to produce the protein building blocks.

One possibility, favored by Glavin, is that once the asteroid cooled below 500 degrees C (932 degrees Fahrenheit), carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen and ammonia gases could have reacted with grains of iron or nickel to produce amino acids. That mechanism has long been speculated to occur in asteroids but has never been documented outside the laboratory.

A new way of naturally producing amino acids "really increases the likelihood, in my opinion, of life existing elsewhere in the universe" and may have also helped seed the solar system’s terrestrial planets with prebiotic compounds, Glavin says.

A less likely possibility, he notes, wouldn’t require a new mechanism to explain the amino acids. In this scenario, collisions would vaporize and then transfer amino acids from other asteroids to 2008 TC3.

Alexander cautions that the new results may not be directly applicable to the origin of life, especially because the concentrations of the amino acids in the sample are low and because ureilite meteorites constitute a minority of the meteorites that fall to Earth. Nevertheless, he adds, "it does show that synthesis of amino acids in nature can occur in unexpected places and ways, and that we should keep a very open mind about how and where prebiotic chemistry can occur."

[Jus-X]

Great article (http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/21/will-the-earth-have-two-suns-by-2012/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+ Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)

In the Star Wars saga, George Lucas imagined a world where twin suns rose and fell in the horizon. Looks like his vision may not be so far-fetched.

Astrophysicists say that Betelgeuse, the red super-giant that is the ninth brightest star in the sky, is losing mass—an indication of gravitational collapse. Brad Carter, a senior lecturer of physics at the University of Southern Queensland, explained to news.com.au that the star is essentially running out of the fuel at its core. “This fuel keeps Betelgeuse shining and supported. When this fuel runs out the star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly,” he said. The subsequent explosion will appear tens of millions of times brighter than the sun, meaning 24-hours of light on Earth.

“It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up," Carter said. "We'll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.”

And while the celestial event could take place before the end of 2012, it may not occur for a million years.

As you'd expect, plenty of folks interpret the impending supernova as a sign of the Apocalypse. (Coincidentally, the Mayan calendar predicts Armageddon in 2012, and the word "Betelgeuse" has strong associations with the devil.) But Carter dismisses the doomsayers, pointing out that the implosion will shower the earth with tiny particles called neutrinos that are absolutely harmless. “They will flood through the Earth and bizarrely enough, even though the supernova we see visually will light up the night sky, 99 per cent of the energy in the supernova is released in these particles that will come through our bodies and through the Earth with absolutely no harm whatsoever.”


Updated (http://news.discovery.com/space/dont-panic-betelgeuse-wont-explode-in-2012.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1)

Betelgeuse is a dying star. It's reached the end of the line and currently in the terminal throes of shedding vast bubbles of gas into space. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star and it's so massive that it will detonate as a supernova.

With all this drama happening 640 light-years away in the constellation of Orion, there's little wonder that this tumultuous star is easy headline bait.

Betelgeuse is a celebrity amongst stars and no stranger to astronomers' zoom lenses. And like any celebrity, news can break at any time, for any reason, and today I received a surge of messages via Twitter and email pointing me to a big Betelgeuse scoop that can be summarized as: The star is gonna blow! Soon! Possibly around 2012!

Naturally, I checked out the source of this breaking story to find... well, not much.

On reading a few sentences from the Australian News.com.au article, one would think the journalist had found the story of the decade. NEWS FLASH: An exploding Betelgeuse is one of the most over-used sensationalist stellar events to appear in the tabloid press in recent years. There's no scoop here, move along.

Not Like Tatooine, Actually.

The article kicks off by equating Betelgeuse's impending explosion with the "twin suns" on Tatooine, the world where Star Wars' Luke Skywaker lived. In Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke watches the setting binary stars of Tatoo. When Betelgeuse goes supernova, will it really shine as bright as our sun, perhaps giving us that famous double-sun scene from Star Wars?

That's a nice thought, but 640 light-years is still quite a distance, and although when it does blow astronomers think we'll be able to see the explosion for some weeks during the day -- still a very impressive and historic event -- that's a far cry from thinking a sun-supernova combo could resemble any binary star system.

But the biggest issue to come out of this article is the ominous and completely erroneous mention of... wait for it... 2012.

"The infamous red super-giant star in Orion’s nebula -- Betelgeuse -- is predicted to go gangbusters and the impending super-nova may reach Earth before 2012, and when it does, all of our wildest Star Wars dreams will come true," the article says.

2012? Really?

The last time Betelgeuse hit the news was when research revealed the star was shrinking. But as pointed out by astronomers, this shrinkage could be part of a natural cycle, or it could be that Betelgeuse isn't symmetrical. Naturally, people got all weird about this fascinating science and concluded that a big boom was imminent.

And now we have some 2012 nonsense thrown into the equation. Even though it is abundantly clear that Betelgeuse is far enough away just to give us a safe firework display and not a roasting when it does go supernova, it seems the temptation is just too great for some doomsday theorists and tabloid writers.

Phil Plait weighed on the previous Betelgeuse-doomsday scenario last year, and in two paragraphs he puts the danger of Betelgeuse to bed:

Having said all that, I’ll note that someday, Betelgeuse will explode. That’s for certain! But it’s also way too far away to hurt us. A supernova has to be no farther than about 25 light years away to be able to fry us with light or anything else, and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance (which means its power to hurt us is weakened by over 600x). It’s the wrong kind of star to explode as a gamma-ray burst, so I’m not worried about that either.


At that distance, it’ll get bright, about as bright as the full Moon. That’s pretty bright! It’ll hurt your eyes to look at it, but that’s about it. The original post says it may get as bright as the Sun, but that’s totally wrong. It won’t even get 1/100,000th that bright. Still bright, but it’s not going to cook us. Even if it were going to explode soon. Which it almost certainly isn’t.


But what's all this fuss about the star exploding by 2012? That's complete garbage. There is absolutely no indication that the star will explode in the next year or so. Even the most advanced telescopes and sophisticated computer models cannot predict an exploding star with that precision!

By the article's own admission, the supernova might not happen for a million years -- begging the question as to why a half-baked 2012 Betelgeuse doomsday theory is even being mentioned.

Betelgeuse is a fascinating star, but don't be concerned about its planet-killing ability. It's too far away and it might not go "gangbusters" for another million years.

As Cosmic Log's Alan Boyle would say: DON'T PANIC!

So in a nutshell, Orion's shoulder is going to explode anytime between now and a hundred centuries. It can't be predicted when, and it would either give us perpetual sunlight for almost a month, or might just look like a second moon for a bit. Either way I would love to see this in my lifetime.
ADDED:
If an MOD could please take out the double paste below the first quote, that'd be great. (Still can't edit)

[Kat]

I must say, I love this picture.
http://www.fpsoftlab.com/images/screenshots/saturn-640x480-4.jpg

[Kat]

I must say, I love this picture.
http://www.fpsoftlab.com/images/screenshots/saturn-640x480-4.jpg

[The Dream Master]

Bumping this up so this thread will be of some use, finally.

[Jus-X]

A planet outside of our solar system has been found and is within the Goldielocks zone, making it the right distance from it's sun to support life. Here's the article (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-12/kepler-team-confirms-first-earth-planet-habitable-zone-and-finds-1094-more-worlds):

Nestled in the Goldilocks zone of a small, sun-like star is a room-temperature world a little more than twice the size of Earth. Scientists do not yet know if it is rocky or gaseous and whether it has water or clouds, but they do know that it’s the right size, and in the right place, for liquid water to exist. If it does exist, it may be one of the best places to look for life outside of our solar system.

The new planet, Kepler-22, is about 600 light-years away and the smallest planet confirmed to exist smack in the middle of the habitable zone of a sun-like star. It’s one of the most stunning announcements from the Kepler Space Telescope, which stares at a field of stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra and looks for blips in brightness to find other planets. While Kepler has (as of today) found more than 2,000 possible planets, finding an Earth-like world in a sun-like environment has proved elusive — until now.

On top of this announcement today, the Kepler science team is sharing 1,094 more planet candidates, many of which are also potentially Earth-like and in habitable zones. Now there are 2,326 planet candidates in the sun-orbiting space telescope’s field of view, in a small sliver of the sky.

Kepler-22b’s discovery was first announced last February, when the Kepler team shared its initial treasure trove of planet candidates. Among 1,235 candidate worlds, there were 54 habitable zone candidates, Kepler-22b among them. Now it’s the first of these to be confirmed.

It takes 290 days to orbit around its star, Kepler-22, a G-class star a lot like the one we know best. “It’s almost a solar twin; it is very similar to our sun,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University, said in a press conference.

The planet is about 15 percent nearer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But this is OK because the star is cooler (by about 220 degrees), a bit dimmer, and a little smaller than our star. So the planet is in a really analogous Earth-like orbit. The planet’s temperature is even pretty close to Earth’s, said William Borucki, the Kepler mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “If greenhouse warming on this planet was similar (to atmospheric warming on Earth), its surface temperature would be something like 72° F,” he said.



Kepler-22 System: This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler telescope. The habitable zone is the sweet spot around a star where temperatures are right for water to exist in its liquid form. Kepler-22's star is a bit smaller than our sun, so its habitable zone is slightly closer in. The diagram shows an artist's rendering of the planet comfortably orbiting within the habitable zone, similar to where Earth circles the sun. NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

It will be a mighty nice place to look for signs of life, he added. Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, said astrobiologists are taking that to heart.

“We will give a higher priority to worlds that our colleagues tell us are not too warm, not too cold, but just right,” she said.

With so many exoplanets, astronomers will need to start making some catalog decisions, ranking planets by their habitability potential. Along with the Earth Similarity Index we covered last month, the Kepler team has their own proposed planetary directory to make this easier. The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog ranks planets by their surface temperature, similarity to Earth, and capacity to sustain organisms at the bottom of the food chain.

Monday’s announcement came during the inaugural Kepler Science Conference in Mountain View, Calif. With the addition of 1,094 new candidate worlds, the number of planet candidates has increased by 89 percent and now totals 2,326. Of these, 207 are approximately Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter. So since February, the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates has increased by more than 200 and 140 percent, respectively.

That’s a lot of numbers, and here’s another good one: 10. That’s the number of these new candidates that are near-Earth-sized and in the habitable zones of their host stars. Kepler-22b is not among that list, so that makes at least 11 places elsewhere in the galaxy that might look very, very familiar.

There’s still a bit of work to do to quantify just what Kepler-22b looks like. Now that astronomers are convinced it’s a planet and they know where it is, confirming their findings with the Spitzer Space Telescope, they want to find out what it's made of. Ground-based telescopes like the Keck Observatory will start making some measurements next summer, when the field of sky that Kepler studies is visible from Earth.

And there is still much more to come, according to NASA scientists. Some software improvements have made it a little simpler to sift through Kepler light-curve data and hunt for planet candidates, so there will be at least one more big batch, according to Batalha. Among those, there may be many more Earth-like candidates to join the ranks.

“We are really zeroing in on the true Earth-sized habitable planets,” she said.

I believe in life beyond our planet, I'd like to think this planet has it... even if it's just animals and trees and fungus or something.

[Jus-X]

World made of water found (http://m.gizmodo.com/5887003/hubble-discovers-a-new-type-of-world-made-of-water)

Zachory Berta says that "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of." Like Berta, part of a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lead by David Charbonneau, his colleagues were surprised when they discovered that this planet is made mostly of water.

Larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus, GJ1214b has a lot more water and a lot less solid material than our home planet. According to their research, this waterworld is entirely covered with an ocean. Even its atmosphere is a thick steam layer. Not just hazy, but a "dense atmosphere of water vapor."

According to Berta, what's happening in this new type of world is something that we can't imagine: "the high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water,' substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience."

Their theory is that GJ1214b formed "farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful" and then it kept getting closer, which started to make all that ice to liquify.

Right now, GJ1214b orbits its red-dwarf star "every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles." This results in a steam temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not good if you are in the Swedish sauna business. [Hubble]

[Jus-X]

Extraterrestrial water discovered in our own solar system! (http://news.discovery.com/space/oxygen-discovery-raises-hopes-for-saturn-moon-life-120302.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1)


Two years ago, when NASA's Cassini Solstice spacecraft flew past the moon Dione, it noticed something familiar. Oxygen is present in Saturn's third-largest moon's exosphere (it's extended, tenuous atmosphere), and according to research published this week, Cassini's hi-tech "nose" had sniffed it.

Obviously, the first thing that springs to mind when discussing oxygen is that it's a pretty important component for life on Earth. But Dione, a barren and icy world, possesses few attributes that would make it suitable for life as we know it.

Although it is known to be composed of significant quantities of water ice, there is no indication -- unlike sister Saturn moon Enceladus -- that there is any sub-surface aquifer of liquid water. Liquid water is key to the evolution of life.

So why is the discovery of oxygen in Dione's exosphere important? If Dione's got it, then perhaps its sibling moons also have it, giving us a tantalizing clue as to the possibility of life on the natural satellites around Saturn and Jupiter.

"Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life," Andrew Coates, of University College London and lead scientist of the study, told BBC News.

It is thought the oxygen is being produced via interactions between Saturn's powerful radiation belts and Dione's water ice. The radiation breaks the water molecules down, liberating oxygen into the moon's exosphere.

This most recent discovery will no doubt give a boost to scientists lobbying for sending missions to the gas giant's satellites to search for alien life as, like the presence of liquid water, the presence oxygen could support microscopic lifeforms on other, more habitable moons.