Five-planet star

Kepler-444 hosts five earth-sized planets in very compact orbits. The planets were detected from the dimming that occurs when they transit the disc of their parent star, as shown in this artist’s conception.

On the basis of data gathered by NASA’s Kepler mission, scientists led by asteroseismologists from the University of Birmingham announced in The Astrophysical Journal their observation of a sun-like star (Kepler-444) hosting five planets with sizes between Mercury and Venus. Kepler-444 was formed 11.2 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 20 per cent its current age. This is the oldest known system of terrestrial-sized planets in the galaxy, two and a half times older than the earth.

Mystery cloud-like blobs over Mars baffle astronomers

For space watchers, Mars is like a second home. Astronomers have been studying the Red Planet for centuries – the first map of the Martian surface was sketched 500 years ago. Since then, it has become the most surveyed planet in the solar system, besides Earth. We have sent over 50 robot explorers to patrol its surface and watch it from orbit, seven of which are operational on and around the Red Planet right this minute. It's not for nothing that space aficionados quip that Mars is the only planet known to be inhabited solely by robots.

Is Mars Infested With Pareidolia Rats?

Is Mars Infested With Pareidolia Rats?

It has finally happened. Not content with (potentially) infecting the pristine Martian surface with our germs, it appears that we’ve sent a rat (yes, a whole rat) to the Red Planet. And this isn’t some far-fetched hypothesis, there’s photographic evidence!

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity snapped this panorama (above) of the “Rocknest” site with its MastCam camera on sol 52 (Sept. 28, 2012) of the mission. Now, with a keen eye and fertile imagination, a UFO enthusiast realized there was a camouflaged rodent hiding in the rocks. Needless to say, there’s no other evidence supporting this claim, it’s just something that looks like a rodent.

But as you may have guessed, after exercising an ounce of logical thought, what was once a cute furry four-legged creature suddenly becomes… wait for it… this is a good one… a rock. And there you have it ladies and gentlemen: We’ve found a rock on Mars… that looks like a rat.

Big asteroid swinging by Earth today has its own moon

Big asteroid swinging by Earth today has its own moon

Astronomers getting their first close-up glimpse of a giant asteroid about to whiz by Earth found a surprise bonus rock. A smaller moon asteroid is circling the larger space rock, an unusual but not unheard of space phenomenon.

The larger 1.7 mile-wide rock named Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be the closest to Earth on Friday at 4.59 pm EDT. Don't worry, though. It will still be 3.6 million miles away. NASA scientist Paul Chodas said it's one of the larger asteroids to swing by Earth and is the size of the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The smaller rock was discovered Wednesday night by astronomers using radar to look at QE2. The moon asteroid is about 2,000 feet wide. That's about average for such near-Earth objects.

The cores of black holes

The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say. http://oak.ctx.ly/r/5x4p

Below, an artist's concept of a supermassive black hole.

The Witch's Broom Nebula

The Witch's Broom Nebula

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh
Explanation: Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would have suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant. This sharp telescopic view is centered on a western segment of the Veil Nebula cataloged as NGC 6960 but less formally known as the Witch's Broom Nebula. Blasted out in the cataclysmic explosion, the interstellar shock wave plows through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material. Imaged with narrow band filters, the glowing filaments are like long ripples in a sheet seen almost edge on, remarkably well separated into atomic hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue-green) gas. The complete supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation Cygnus. This Witch's Broom actually spans about 35 light-years. The bright star in the frame is 52 Cygni, visible with the unaided eye from a dark location but unrelated to the ancient supernova remnant.

plot of a sci-fi film

Like the plot of a sci-fi film, a prominent asteroid defense expert says destroying an asteroid with a nuclear warhead could be the best protection if a dangerous asteroid appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. http://bit.ly/11pOvyS

Such a mission, which would cost about $1 billion, could be developed from work NASA is already funding, says Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University.

An amazing photo of a stellar nursery

An amazing photo of a stellar nursery located 6,500 light-years away from Earth marks the 15-year cosmic anniversary of the Very Large Telescope, located in Chile's Atacama Desert and operated by the European Southern Observatory. http://bit.ly/11ftcjn

When Virgin Galactic Broke the Speed of Sound

On April 29, 2013, Virgin Galactic took a huge step toward suborbital spaceflight -- the six-person SpaceShipTwo ignited its rocket engine for the first time in flight, accelerating it to supersonic speeds. Richard Branson called the test "critical." Seen here, WhiteKnightTwo -- SpaceShipTwo's mothership -- taxis along the airstrip at California's Mojave Air ans Space Port shortly before takeoff at 7 a.m. PST.

NASA's Asteroid Mission a Dead-End to Mars?

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An artist's impression of the NASA's Orion space capsule attached to the canceled Constellation lunar lander -- could this plan be revived?

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VIDEO: Huge Asteroid Nearly Hits Earth

Top 10 Ways to Stop an Asteroid

NASA to Hunt Down and Capture an Asteroid

 

NASA’s newly announced plan to capture an asteroid and re-position it around the moon for an astronaut visit sounds cool, but it’s a side-show on the road to Mars, scientists and long-time space mission managers told Congress.
“To me, the connection between the asteroid retrieval mission, which involves proximity operations with a rock that would fit comfortably in this hearing room, I see no obvious connection between that and any of the technologies and capabilities required for Martian exploration,” Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres told the House Subcommittee on Space on Tuesday.
VIDEO: The Moon is so Damn Awesome
A better stepping-stone for human expeditions to Mars is the moon, argued Paul Spudis, senior scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
“It has partial gravity like Mars. It has a dust environment that you have to learn to deal with. You can learn how to explore and how to get the most out of the missions,” Spudis said.
NASA planned to follow the space shuttle and International Space Station programs with a return to the moon, but President Obama canceled the project, known as Constellation, in 2010 due to funding shortfalls.
NASA salvaged Constellation’s heavy-lift rocket and deep-space Orion capsule and set about crafting a more flexible exploration initiative that would first send astronauts to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.
NEWS: NASA to Hunt Down and Capture an Asteroid
President Obama’s spending plan for NASA for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 requests $105 million to begin work on a revamped asteroid mission which combines a robotic precursor spacecraft to fetch a 23- to 33-foot diameter asteroid with a follow-on expedition by astronauts.
NASA has not yet said how much the asteroid-retrieval mission would cost, but expects it would be less than the $2.65 billion estimate made last year by the California Institute of Technology’s Keck Institute for Space Studies.
But for that money, scientists told Congress, NASA may be able to afford a lunar lander -- a key reason for Constellation's fall -- or an upper-stage engine for the heavy-lift Space Launch System to bring it to its full potential.
Top 10 Ways to Stop an Asteroid
Spudis also pointed out that if returning samples from an asteroid was the driver for the mission, scientists already have about 45,000 pieces of near-Earth asteroids at their disposal in the terrestrial meteorite collection.
“The largest one is three meters across and 60 tons. It was found by a farmer digging in a field in Africa and can’t be moved because it’s too heavy. So we actually have an NEO (near-Earth object) right here on the Earth, right now for study,” Spudis said.
“I think we would learn something (by sending astronauts to an asteroid). No space mission is value-less, but in terms of what we’d actually learn compared to a robotic sample return, I don’t think we’d actually learn that much more,” he added.
While NASA officially remains focused on a mission to an asteroid, it also is supporting lunar exploration efforts. On Thursday, the agency will unveil a partnership agreement with privately owned Bigelow Aerospace to look at potential commercial lunar ventures.

Hyperactive Sun Fires Off 3 Major Solar Flares in 1 Day

The sun, it seems, is in overdrive. Late Monday night, the sun unleashed its third major solar flare in 24 hours — the biggest and most powerful solar storm of the year, so far.
This latest sun storm erupted Monday (May 13) at 9:11 p.m. EDT (0111 GMT) and registered as an X3.2 solar flare, one of the strongest types of flares the sun can release, space weather officials said. It came on the heels of two other recent X-class solar flares on Sunday night and Monday, all of which were sparked by a highly active sunspot on the sun's far left side.
Officials at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., appeared amazed at the intense activity from the crackling sunspot

Sunspot Blasting Out Major Solar Flares Will Face Earth Soon

 

The super-active sunspot responsible for unleashing the three most powerful solar flares of 2013 within a 24-hour stretch this week is slowly rotating toward Earth and will likely be facing our planet by the weekend, experts say.
Active Region 1748, as the sunspot is known, unleashed three monster solar flares between Sunday and Monday (May 12 to 13). Every one of the solar storms registered as an X-class flare — the most powerful type — with each successive event stronger than the last, culminating in an X3.2 megablast Monday night.
These solar explosions did not affect Earth, since AR1748 was not facing our planet at the time. But the sunspot is now circling into view, so future flares and any associated eruptions of super-hot solar plasma — called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — could potentially target our planet, scientists say. 

New Laser Vision Helps Telescope Probe Distant Star Cluster

A powerful new ultraviolet laser that fires into the night sky is helping scientists take their most detailed look yet at a distant star cluster.
A team of astronomers at the Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research (SOAR) and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Cerro Pachon in Chile used an instrument called SOAR Adaptive Module, or simply SAM, to peer deep inside the crowded NGC 6496 cluster to understand how its stars evolved.
The researchers measured the color and brightness of over 7,000 stars in NGC 6496, and determined that the star cluster is 10.5 billion years old and 32,600 light years away from Earth — the most exact measurement yet of the star cluster's key parameters.

Gallery of Curiosity Rover's 'UFO' Photos

 When the Curiosity rover beamed back its first batch of photos, a hazy, distant object mysteriously appeared and then disappeared in consecutive images of the Martian horizon. Cries of alien activity echoed across the Internet and even NASA scientists were perplexed at first. They eventually decided the hazy object was the plume of dust kicked up by the sky crane that delivered the rover close to the Martian surface, then veered off and struck the ground some 2,000 feet (600 meters) away.

Meteor streaks

A meteor streaks across the sky in eastern Russia in this picture released by the Russian Emergency Ministry. Hundreds were injured in the Friday (Feb. 15) morning blast, mostly from falling glass shattered by the shock wave.

Mars rock

NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into a second Mars rock. Read about what they're looking to find: http://bit.ly/194uuWe

How to build a Mars colony that lasts – forever

"Mars can't just be a one-shot mission," says Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon.

He's part of a group who met last week in Washington DC for the first Human to Mars Summit, or H2M. The astronauts, researchers and space flight firms aim to chart a path to the Red Planet by 2030.

And they are thinking beyond mere visits. Though it won't be easy, they say establishing a permanent, sustainable outpost on the Red Planet may be our civilisation's only chance of long-term continuity.

"Single-planet species don't survive," says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, who still works at NASA. "That's a pretty sound theorem – just look at the dinosaurs. But we don't want to prove it."

Modular base

As the only other planet in the solar system we are likely to be able to settle on, Mars looks like the best first step towards establishing an off-Earth foothold. But making Mars a sustainable destination will require a few advances beyond those needed for one-off trips.

For a start, humans who plan on seeding a colony will need bigger living quarters – both to accommodate life-support systems and supplies, and to minimise psychological trouble, said David Dinges at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He recently reported on the behaviours of participants in the mock Mars 500 project, in which six men spent 520 days in a 3.6-by-20-metre habitat on Earth.

Despite screenings, four had extensive problems with lethargy, insomnia and productivity, which Dinges attributes in part to their tight confinement. Just imagine how this would play out on much longer missions.

But building larger habitats will require a rethink in transport, as landing heavy loads on Mars is a huge challenge. The International Space Station, which was built in stages during a series of launches, provides some inspiration. The parts for a Martian base could be delivered similarly, by landing modules in a series of missions.

Phobos first

Then it could be built by a crew already on the surface, by robots in orbit or even by a crew based on a Martian moon. At H2M, Aldrin suggested sending three people to spend 18 months on Phobos, where they would remotely construct a base on Mars. Phobos has a nearly constant view of the Martian surface and is easier to land on than Mars because its lack of an atmosphere removes the need for technologies such as heavy heat shields and supersonic retro-rockets.

Assuming a large enough base can be built, the next challenge will be a sustainable food supply. Growing vegetables is an option, but plants may need to deal with higher radiation, low air pressure and reduced gravity. If Mars gardeners are to use Martian soil, a knowledge of how crops respond to its contents, such as sulphates and perchlorates will be required.

To get around any difficulties, genetically modified crops may come in useful, says Robert Ferl, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research at the University of Florida in Gainesville: "This is the era of understanding what happens to organisms at the genetic level."

We now know the patterns of gene expression behind how many plants on Earth assimilate key nutrients such as sulphates. This could eventually allow the right genes to be added to crops bound for Mars. Terrestrial plants growing in extreme places could also be adapted or mined for their hardier genes.

Printed noodles

For a less conventional meal, Anjan Contractor of Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin, Texas, has NASA funding to develop a 3D printer for hot food on deep-space missions. The food powders are UV sterilised, fortified with nutrients and have a shelf life of at least 15 years, says Contractor. His team has so far printed noodles, turkey loaf, basil paste, bread and cake – though they won't taste their creations until a new, food-only printer is used for the job.

There could be longer-term challenges to sustaining a colony, however. Richard Zurek, Mars chief scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, fears a colony will only sustain itself if it can find a resource to trade with Earth. "But that seems unlikely unless the cost of transport between planets is greatly reduced," he says.

Still, high public interest and the emergence of private space flight suggest that the dream of reaching Mars is closer to becoming reality, says Aldrin. "By implementing a step-by-step vision for Mars, we'll plunge further outward into the solar system," he says.

Neutrinos from outer space open new eye in the sky

Fancy seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and enormous stellar explosions may give up their secrets now that neutrinos from space can be detected.

The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy.

"We are witnessing the birth of this field," says Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a member of IceCube.

Until now, the only space neutrinos definitively detected came from the sun and a 1987 supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Last month, the IceCube collaboration published news of the detection of two high-energy neutrinos, each with an energy of about one petaelectronvolt. These neutrinos, discovered by accident a year ago and nicknamed Bert and Ernie, prompted the collaboration to go back and look at their data in more detail.

Flavour shift

The new analysis, reported today at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has raised the stakes.

IceCube, which monitors a cubic kilometre of ice at the South Pole, saw 26 more neutrinos of about 50 teraelectronvolts between May 2010 and May 2012. There is only a 0.004 per cent chance that these 28 detections are due to chance. "This is not a statistical fluctuation," says Francis Halzen the leader of the IceCube collaboration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Up to half of the observed events could be so-called atmospheric neutrinos, produced when cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere, but the rest must be coming from outside our solar system, according to IceCube team member Thomas Gaisser of the University of Delaware in Newark.

A key indication of this is the distribution of the different types of neutrinos. Neutrinos come in three flavours: muon, tau and electron. As they travel through space, they can change, or oscillate, from one type to another. Atmospheric processes produce twice as many muon neutrinos as electron neutrinos. However, the events detected by IceCube suggest that the different types are coming in equal numbers. "This is typical of a neutrino beam that has oscillated over a very long distance," says Halzen.

Microquasar probe

Being chargeless, neutrinos zip from a source direct to Earth without being waylaid. This makes them useful for investigating supernovae, mysterious objects called microquasars and active galactic nuclei – galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, all of which are thought to produce neutrinos.

"If you have something that looks into the hearts of these beasts, maybe it'll help untangle what's going on," says John Learned at the University of Hawaii, who is not part of IceCube.

Neutrino astronomy could also pinpoint the sources of cosmic rays, which are thought to be produced by the same processes as neutrinos. Because they are charged, cosmic rays get bent by intervening magnetic fields. This has made it impossible to work out their source by the time they reach Earth.

"IceCube being able to see the sky in neutrinos for the first time is absolutely going to transform how we view cosmic ray physics," says Hooper.

Dark direction

Neutrinos are also expected to be produced in regions such as the centre of the Milky Way, where dark matter particles are thought to accumulate in large numbers and smash into each other. Now that IceCube has shown it can detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, the next step is to work out their direction. Neutrinos with a specific energy coming from the galactic centre would be an indirect detection of dark matter.

While the latest IceCube neutrino detections are too few to provide information about their direction, Halzen says that his team is sitting on a goldmine of unanalysed data collected after May 2012. "We will have lots of events to work with, and we will figure this out, if not this year then next year," he says. "You cannot imagine the excitement in the collaboration."

Astrophile: Saturn's egg moon Methone is made of fluff

Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse

Object: Oval moon Methone
Location: Saturn's rings

Out among Saturn's menagerie of moons, a shiny white egg rests in a nest of ice crystals.

Named Methone, this small, oval moon was seen in close-up for the first time last year by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Methone is utterly unlike the other small balls of ice and rock that dot the solar system, which are deeply scarred by impacts. Instead it is smooth, with not a hill or pockmark in sight. Now astronomers may have a clue as to why: Methone is made of lightweight fluff.

Objects in our solar system have been battered by asteroids and comets for billions of years, but planets and big moons have ways of smoothing themselves out. For one thing, their strong gravity pulls them into a spherical shape. Some worlds have enough internal heat to create lava flows and other volcanic events that can fill in craters, and a few boast rain or strong winds to erode away evidence of the impacts.

Small moons, though, are geologically inactive and airless, so are unable to erase the damage. "When we look at objects less than 200 kilometres in radius, they are all like potatoes. They have lumps, grooves, craters," says Cassini team member Peter Thomas, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That makes Methone's smooth exterior a puzzle.

Clutch of lunar eggs

In fact, this 5-kilometre-wide moon is one of a clutch of space eggs, all orbiting Saturn in the same region between the larger moons Mimas and Enceladus. None of its siblings have been imaged as closely as Methone, but from a distance two – Pallene and Aegaeon – appear to be fairly smooth as well.

Each moon lies within its own ring arc, a fragmentary ring of Saturn. One idea was that ice crystals in the ring arc might be settling down on the surface of Methone to bury any craters or other topography. Something similar has probably happened to two other moons of Saturn, the flying-saucer-shaped Atlas and Pan. Material from Saturn's rings seems to have piled up around each moon's equator.

But Thomas points out that the ring arcs are much more tenuous than the main rings, so much so that it would take ten billion years for just 1 metre of obliterating snow to accumulate on Methone.

Thomas and his colleagues at Cornell have now attempted to crack the egg and look inside – by calculating Methone's density.

They assumed that Saturn's gravity pulls the moon into its elongated shape, just as Earth's moon raises tides in our oceans. Then the team worked out how dense the moon would have to be for its own gravity to balance those tidal forces and create the egg-like shape.

It comes out at about 300 kilograms per cubic metre, as they reported in March at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. That's less than a third the density of water, making Methone less dense than any other known moon or asteroid.

Fluffy fluid?

Material at Methone's surface could be even more lightweight, says Thomas. It is possible that such fluffy stuff can flow, at least on timescales of thousands or millions of years, to erase any crater scars.

The team also suggests that electrostatic forces could help keep the egg soft-boiled. Electrons in Saturn's radiation belt could be charging ice crystals on the surface, levitating them and making them more mobile. But so far these are just speculations.

"We are just beginning to try and figure out quantitatively how all this might smooth a surface," says Thomas. Cassini might collect some indirect clues by analysing the ring arc material, but it is unlikely to come close to the moon again before the mission ends in 2017.

Meanwhile, planetary scientists are trying to work out how often crater-forming impacts should happen in this neighbourhood, which will tell us how fast Methone must be reforming its surface to cover up the damage and maintain its eggy appearance.

Over the rainbow: Patchwork view of Kansas from space

(Image: USGS/ESA)

"I'VE a feeling we're not in Kansas any more." Indeed not, we are 700 kilometres above Kansas, looking down from the venerable Landsat 5 satellite.

What you can see is how huge swathes of the state have been given over to agriculture. It ain't known as the nation's breadbasket for nothing. Kansas produces almost 20 per cent of all wheat grown in the US – more than any other state. Its 63,000 farmers produce more than 5 million tonnes of wheat a year, worth about $1 billion, according to the Kansas Department of Agriculture. And that's not all – the state also produces sorghum, soybeans, cotton, pork, corn and salt.

Landsat 5 was launched on a three-year mission in 1984. To say it has exceeded expectations is an understatement – in February, Guinness World Records confirmed Landsat 5 as the longest-operating Earth observation satellite.

In this false-colour image, taken last year, circles and rectangles represent different types of irrigation systems. The town of Ulysses is in the centre-right, and the Cimarron river interrupts the patchwork in the bottom-right