Astronomy
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Mars
NASA finds 'significant' water on moon - CNN.com
(CNN) -- NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station. The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. "I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Black hole 'bully' blasts
A powerful jet of particles from a "supermassive" black hole has been seen blasting a nearby galaxy, according to the US space agency (Nasa). They were obtained using Nasa's space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, its Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as the Very Large Array (VLA) and Merlin radio telescopes on the ground. It is like a black hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy Neil Tyson, Hayden PlanetariumCOROT-7b, a rocky planet around twice the size of the Earth but of similar density, is only 1.6 million miles from its star: 23 times closer than the innermost planet in our solar system, Mercury, is to the Sun. While scientists are not sure of the exact chemical makeup of the planet, the sheer temperatures mean that whatever it is, the rocky ground will boil, forming a mineral atmosphere. And when cold fronts move in, small pebbles will condense and form rain and hail, just like water on Earth. Professor Bruce Fegley, one of the team behind the research, said: "The only atmosphere this object has is produced from vapor arising from hot molten silicates in a lava lake or lava ocean. "As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of 'rock' the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth.
Hell planet where rock falls as rain found - Telegraph
The new research was presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, the largest annual European gathering of scientists studying the Earth, its climate and its neighbours in space. Bernard Foing, a senior scientist with the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec) in the Netherlands, believes growing plants on the Moon would be a useful tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions, and as a practical aid to establishing manned bases. "We would bring a system of water circulation and recovery, which is also the type of system that in any case you want to develop when you are going to manufacture a primitive sort of life support system," he told BBC News.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Plants 'thrive' on Moon ro
"I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth," team leader Ignasi Ribas told a news conference on Wednesday. The rocky planet, with a radius about 50 percent greater than the Earth's, circles a small red dwarf star 30 light years away in the constellation of Leo, said the scientists from Spain's Superior Council for Scientific Investigations (CSIC). The planet, known as GJ 436c, was found by analyzing distortions in the orbit of another, larger planet around the star GJ 436, a technique similar to that used more than 100 years ago to discover Neptune. With a mass about five times greater than Earth's, it is the smallest planet yet discovered outside the solar system and improving techniques are opening the way to discovering worlds ever more like our own.
Smallest planet outside solar system found | Science | Reuters
Scientists spot organic molecule on distant planet - Yahoo! News
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Earth's Final Sunset Predicted
"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice," wrote the poet Robert Frost. Astronomers, it turns out, are in the former camp. A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun's gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses," Professor Gaensler said. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought. Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.
The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was - News and Eve
In a statement announcing the competition, Google and the X-Prize Foundation said it had been created in a bid to stimulate research into low-cost robotic exploration of space. A prize of $5m will be given to the second firm that manages to reach the Moon with a rover that roams the surface and shoots some pictures. Google said it would give bonuses of $5m if the rovers complete other objectives such as travelling further on the Moon, taking pictures of Apollo hardware, finding water-ice and surviving the freezing lunar night. Rovers taking part must be fitted with high-definition video and still cameras. "We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration," said Dr Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation in a statement. Great test
BBC NEWS | Technology | Google backs private Moon landing
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form. The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own.
Water Vapor Seen 'Raining Down' on Young Star System
News - Researchers Seek Mysterious Dark Matter
The page you have requested is no longer available. If you have reached this page via a link from another Wired.com page, please use our feedback page to send a site fix request.Do black holes really exist?
Black holes might not exist - or at least not as scientists have imagined, cloaked by an impenetrable "event horizon". A controversial new calculation could abolish the horizon, and so solve a troubling paradox in physics. The event horizon is supposed to mark a boundary beyond which nothing can escape a black hole's gravity.Update: The researchers have retracted their claim about the possibility of standing water on Mars after readers pointed out the terrain lies on the sloped wall of a crater - see our blog explaining what happened . A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars. The report identifies specific spots that appear to have contained liquid water two years ago, when Opportunity was exploring a crater called Endurance. It is a highly controversial claim, as many scientists believe that liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars today because of the planet's thin atmosphere. If confirmed, the existence of such ponds would significantly boost the odds that living organisms could survive on or near the surface of Mars, says physicist Ron Levin, the report's lead author, who works in advanced image processing at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin in Arizona.
Mars rover finds "puddles" on the planet's surfac
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Water detected on distant planet
Understanding the distribution of water in other solar systems is important for understanding whether or not conditions for life are possible Water vapour (or steam) was expected to be present in atmospheres of most known extrasolar planets, even those that orbit more closely to their parent star than Mercury is to our Sun. For the majority of exoplanets, their close proximity to their parent star has made detecting water and other compounds difficult.The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening. The caves may be the only natural structures capable of protecting primitive life forms from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface. Co-author Glen Cushing, from the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, said this was exactly what would be expected if the feature were a cave. "Nothing like these features has been seen elsewhere on Mars," he told BBC News.