But since ages, the question that has intrigued us the most is, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ This one question has always baffled our thoughts, challenged our imagination and of course made Spielberg in to a movie making icon. But off late scientists are starting to believe more and more that the answer to that question is ‘No’. The discovery of Gliese 581 was one of the most exciting moments in extra-solar planetary researcher. The star is said to be having a planetary system and now researchers claim that they have found two planets that might be conducive to existence of life on them.

Astronomers have found an Earth-massed planet orbiting within the habitable zone of a distant star. This would mean that liquid water could be on its surface - and maybe even life! Any planet needs to be at a right distance from its own sun, so as to be able to maintain conditions that help the sustenance of life on it. If it is too close to the star, it looses the water on its surface due to excessive heat and if it is too far, it might be too cold to harbor life. Two separate teams of astronomers have found out in two different ways that the system of Gliese 581 has planets in the habitable zone. They did this by calculating and comparing the position of Earth and the planet on which they believe life could exist.

The first team lead by Franck Selsis calculated that the inner boundary of this habitable zone around Gliese 581 should be somewhere between 0.7 and 0.9 astronomical units and the outer zone should be between 1.7 and 2.4 AU. At least one planet orbiting Gliese 581 falls within this range. Now that is indeed exciting news. I always thought that we would find life beyond earth first on Titan- Saturn’s largest moon. But I still think the problem is that we look for life that is organic-similar to ourselves in nature. Why can’t life have evolved out of Platinum and gold somewhere else in the cosmos? Now that would be ‘Rich life’, if not intelligent.

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In 2004, people saw comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacking into Jupiter. It was pretty cool. Now, scientists are even more excited that an asteroid speeding at 8 miles per second is on its way to hit planet Mars. Even though it is predicted that there is only 1 in 75 chances of hitting the Red Planet, this would leave a heck of a dent were it to hit.

It allows scientists to get some good data and images with that they could study better about the planet. Named 2007 WD5, the asteroid is likely to hit Mars by the end of January next year.

These are very hard to see and only very few observations are available to extrapolate its path. There are several orbital paths for the asteroid to travel, which includes the surface of the Mars. So if it hits, it has been predicted, it would get near to the equator, where rover Opportunity is traveling. The scientists have predicted that the collision would not affect the rover, since it will be on the back side of the planet when the asteroid hits the planet or passes by it.

It is relatively easy to predict the date and time the asteroid will be at the planet but it’s hard to predict its actual trajectory. If it hits, it would definitely lead to a new advancement in space exploration.

Source: msnbc

The 400 light-years away open cluster in the constellation of Taurus and among the nearest to the Earth — Pleiades — seems to be ever happening, now that small, rocky planets may be in the making in the cluster!

It is all happening around one of the hundreds of stars — known as HD 23514 — in the Pleiades cluster and interestingly, the forming planets could resemble either Earth or Mars! The star is found to be surrounded by an extraordinary number of hot dust particles, and these perhaps are the planets’ building blocks, researchers believe.

Leading the study, Joseph Rhee of the University of California at Los Angeles said,

This is the first clear evidence for planet formation in the Pleiades, and the results we are presenting may well be the first observational evidence that terrestrial planets like those in our solar system are quite common.

Terrestrial planets similar to those in our solar system might probably be quite common, but none of the 200 planets spotted around stars outside our solar system are as small as Earth and just one.

But, will the forming Pleiades cluster-planets be capable of supporting life? This question is surely the next that will keep the scientists busy with.

Our solar system is by far the largest of about 130 planetary systems that exist. There are stars other than the sun such as 55 Cancri and mu Ara around which planets have been found to orbit. The 55 Cancri is about 41 light-years away from solar system, in the constellation of cancer.

A new fifth planet has been found to be revolving around the 55 Cancri star making it the only quintuple planetary system other than our own solar system. However, the 55 Cancri is much older and dimmer, than the sun, with only 58% of the sun’s luminosity. Researchers contemplate that the new planet should be 45 times the mass of earth and around half the size of Saturn. The discovery has been made and announced by a team from UC Berkeley and Carnegie planet search team. UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy said

This system is interesting because there’s a giant planet at 6 AU and four smaller planets inward of 0.8 AU, with a huge remaining gap in between, right where we would expect to find an Earth-sized planet,”

Debra Fischer, an astronomy professor at the San Francisco State University states that since the fifth planet is within the habitable zone of the star, water could be present if not on the planet, on a moon within the zone. The astronomers’ expedition of the 55 Cancri doesn’t end there.

Seemingly, they are focusing on a zone between 260-day orbit of the new planet and the 14-year orbit of another gaseous mass. Any possibility of a planet being present in this zone should be around the size of Neptune or smaller, only in that case can the planetary orbits be so stable.

Discovery of a new planet is based on stellar wobbles. Wobbles are caused due to Doppler’s effect wherein, frequency of a signal changes when the source of the signal moves either away from or toward us.

This is probably not the last planet to this star and more such extra solar planets are yet to be discovered. 55 Cancri has produced “a rat’s nest of radial velocity data,” Fischer said.

“We probably still don’t have all the planets. We are pulling out one thread at a time, disentangling all these orbits, and it has taken a lot more data and time than we predicted. I think it’s amazing what we have been able to do with the system.”

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via : Eurekalert

Recently, the scientists monitored the sky for what they call ‘teenager galaxies’. It is extremely hard to find young galaxies because they are just a tiny spot in the sky. Nevertheless, the scientists managed to locate these young guys in space with their massive telescopes. A group of international researchers discovered and identified 27 pre galactic fragments. These are supposedly the young building blocks of big galaxies in the universe.

Cambridge University scientist Martin Haehnelt used European Southern Observatory’s very large telescope to keep an eye on part of the universe. The monitoring was done for a constant 92 hours. Apparently, the scientists think that the galaxies are formed when smalled chunks of spatial objects get together. The Cambridge researchers did manage to locate the smaller proto galaxies in the universe.

The powerful telescopes help scientists follow the light sources. The process can be likened with a regular camera. As Martin agrees:

The process was a bit like taking a photograph and keeping the shutter open for a very long time.

The technique used to locate the smaller lumps took the scientists as far back as 11 billion years or should I say light years? I think the discovery of the proto galaxies is a major milestone although, scientists aren’t sure about the scope of this discovery.

Image: Dailymail

However, the next big discovery on the astronomical scene is that of the massive hydrogen gas cloud which is speeding towards our galaxy — The Milky Way. This cloud of hydrogen gas is known as the Smith’s cloud, named after the scientist who first discovered it in 1963.

Till date, it was not clear as to if the cloud has emerged from the Milky Way or is coming towards it until recently, when the scientists confirmed that the latter was true. When measured with the help of the Green Bank Telescope, the cloud was found to be 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide. It is said to be containing enough hydrogen to make a million stars like our sun. It is traveling with the monstrous speed of 240 km/s and is set to hit the galaxy at 45 degrees.

The origin and orbit of the cloud is yet not discovered. However, if the collision of the cloud and Milky Way is visible to the naked eye, it would be a delight. Scientists speculate that the collision could set off huge fireworks, making it a spectacle. It is being termed as being the Celestial New Year, where the heavenly bodies will put on a firework show.

Via: BBC

Out of the various experiments conducted in space, the space tether experiment conducted by a team of students calling themselves YES2 is probably the most interesting and record breaking experiment. The primary idea was to create a space tether that will help the folks in space deliver parcels back to earth. The tether was built to be 19.7 mile long and Foton M3 spacecraft was responsible for uncoiling this tether in space.

So, essentially a mail delivery system is what these people designed. Even though the tether system broke the record of longest man made object flown in space, the experimental project was a failure. Due to a ‘technical snag’, the system failed. The extremely imperative telemetry data of the system stopped functioning.

The folks who designed the whole system were kind of disappointed. Mission analyst Marco Stelzer expressed his disappointed and grief:

We were kind of disappointed by the fact.Later on, we found out that the tether deployed to its full length, even more than originally planned

According to reports from the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, the Foton moved a mile higher into orbit before cutting the capsule loose. The sad part is that the on board beacon system of the capsule failed to get activated and there’s no clue as to where the capsule might be.

Several theories exist regarding the existence of the capsule. Nevertheless, this was a great experiment. In future, we can expect a mail system to be created in space out of a tether. I think that’s a pretty neat idea. The ESA education office played a crucial role in this project.

Image Credit: Esa

Astrophysicists are optimistic that the new technologies will aid them in opening new vistas on the origin of the universe and its complexities. In a series of articles published in the latest edition of Science, leading astrophysicists have explained how new technologies are helping them to unravel the cosmic web theory by which the universe is held together by dark matters.

Dark matters are difficult to be traced, as they do not reflect light waves. New technologies capable of analyzing radio waves are capable of detecting these mysterious dark matters that hold galaxies together with their gravitational attraction. In 2013 James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in the space that scientists expect will help in detecting neutral hydrogen - the remnants of the ingredients from which the first stars were born.

In 2011, the European Space Agency will launch its GALA experiment by which the stars in the universe will be mapped and their motions measured. Another important discovery the astrophysicists are waiting for is the tracking of the cosmic baryons in space using high-resolution ultra-violet optics. Baryons are protons and atomic nuclei that are present in every object big or small from stars to the tiniest insect on earth. The missing baryons will help resolve all arguments on the standard cosmological model.

Source: raw story
image:many universes

In 1990, when the Hubble space telescope was launched in space, the orbiting telescope opened a new era of cosmic information. Since then, it has been an astounding source of information with its most splendid breathtaking pictures of inner space objects and events. However, with the passing of time, Hubble’s machineries also started aging and the death knell of the telescope was heard. Nevertheless, Hubble enthusiasts had in the end succeeded in their mission of rescuing the telescope from abandonment.

The American Astronomical Society has announced in Austin, Texas that astronomers would undertake a spacewalk in August this year, to install a cosmic-origin spectrograph and replace Hubble’s wide-field camera with a more advanced third generation wide-field camera.

The astronomers who would fly to space in Atlantis will undertake the rather daunting task that would make Hubble more 90 percent more powerful extending its life span by over 5 to 10 years. Of late, Hubble and astronomy had become synonymous. Thus, a more powerful Hubble could peep further inside our mysterious universe.

Image: how stuff works

Source: monsterandcritics

For centuries, men have wondered whether we are alone in this universe or there are other living beings similar to us in the giant cosmos. While science fictions have delved into the world of extra-terrestrials, but astronomers are yet to discover anything close to it. In a new study presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, astronomers say that they are optimist about finding a large number of earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy and even in galaxies in the vicinity of Milky Way. The evidence of the existence of a large number of Sun-like stars with discs of cosmic dust around them suggests existence of a large number of planetary systems. The cosmic dusts are rocky debris, the by-products of planets formed by collision and merging of giant rocks.

NASA’s Kepler mission due to be launched next year is expected to bring news about the undiscovered worlds. The precondition for the existence of life lies in the earth-like planets lying at the right distance from its parent star so that its surface is not too hot or too cold to support liquid water, the zone astronomer’s call the ‘Goldilock’s zone’.

The most Earth-like planet yet to be explored by astronomers is a planet 20.5 light-years away in the constellation of Libra. The discovery that was made last year detected the planet orbiting around the faint star Gliese 581. The mean temperature of this planet, Gliese 581c is between 0 to 40 degrees Celsius that is capable of maintaining water in the liquid state.

Source: BBC
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