First Earth-like planet spotted outside solar system likely a volcanic wasteland

When scientists confirmed in October that they had detected the first rocky planet outside our solar system, it advanced the longtime quest to find an Earth-like planet hospitable to life.

Rocky planets - Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars - make up half the planets in our solar system. Rocky planets are considered better environments to support life than planets that are mainly gaseous, like the other half of the planets in our system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The rocky planet CoRoT-7 b was discovered circling a star some 480 light years from Earth. It is, however, a forbidding place and unlikely to harbor life. That's because it is so close to its star that temperatures might be above 4,000 degrees F (2,200 C) on the surface lit by its star and as low as minus 350 F (minus 210 C) on its dark side.

Stellar mosh pit, complete with crashing stars, resolves a mystery

For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers.

Blue stragglers are the timeworn Hollywood starlets of the cosmos: They shine brightly, they are older than they appear, and they have, disconcertingly, gained mass at a late stage of life."These blue, luminous stars should have used up their hydrogen fuel and flamed out long ago," explains Robert Mathieu, a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer.

Fog discovered on Titan

Photo:Mike Brown/CaltechSaturn's largest moon, Titan, looks to be the only place in the solar system – aside from our home planet, Earth – with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. According to planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog.

The presence of fog provides the first direct evidence for the exchange of material between the surface and the atmosphere, and thus of an active hydrological cycle, which previously had only been known to exist on Earth.

Colliding auroras produce an explosion of light

Image: Toshi Nishimura/UCLAA network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. Movies of the phenomenon were unveiled at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time," said space scientist Larry Lyons of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the team that made the discovery. "These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras."

Supernova explosions stay in shape

Credit: NASA/CXC/UCSC/L. Lopez et al.At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same.

A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants - the debris from exploded stars - shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.

World with thick, inhospitable atmosphere and an icy heart

This artist's impression shows how the newly discovered super-Earth surrounding the nearby star GJ1214 may look. Image: ESO/L. CalçadaIn this week's issue of Nature, astronomers announce the discovery of a planet around the nearby, low-mass star GJ1214 [2]. It is the second time a transiting super-Earth has been detected, after the recent discovery of the planet Corot-7b [3].

A transit occurs when the planet's orbit is aligned so that we see it crossing the face of its parent star. The newly discovered planet has a mass about six times that of our terrestrial home and 2.7 times its radius, falling in size between the Earth and the ice giants of the Solar System, Uranus and Neptune.

Inside the dark heart of the Eagle

An unseen stellar nursery comes into view in this Herschel image. Image: ESA and the SPIRE & PACS consortia, P. André (CEA Saclay) for the Gould’s Belt Key Programme Consortia.Herschel has peered inside an unseen stellar nursery and revealed surprising amounts of activity. Some 700 newly-forming stars are estimated to be crowded into filaments of dust stretching through the image. The image is the first new release of 'OSHI', ESA's Online Showcase of Herschel Images.

This image shows a dark cloud 1000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. It covers an area 65 light-years across and is so shrouded in dust that no previous infrared satellite has been able to see into it. Now, thanks to Herschel's superior sensitivity at the longest wavelengths of the infrared, astronomers have their first picture of the interior of this cloud.

New results from a terra-ific decade in orbit

ASTER's ability to sense fine-scale heated surfaces provided a look at a flow from the side of Russian volcano Bezymianny in Kamchatka on Dec. 28, 2000. Image: NASA Earth ObservatoryDecember 18, 2009, marks the tenth year since the launch of Terra, one of NASA's "flagship" Earth observing satellites. But the decade is more than just a mechanical milestone. With each additional day and year that the satellite monitors Earth, scientists achieve a lengthened record of Earth's vital signs. It's that record that helps scientists assess the health of Earth's ocean, land, and atmosphere, and determine how these systems are changing.

"Earth system science is a relatively young science," said Marc Imhoff, project scientist for the mission and a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md.

Close-up photos of dying star show our Sun's fate

Chi Cygni, a red giant star as shown in this artist's conception of Betelgeuse, is nearing the end of its life.Image: ESO/L. CalçadaAbout 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system. Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart. New close-up photos of the surface of this distant star show its throbbing motions in unprecedented detail.

"This work opens a window onto the fate of our Sun five billion years from now, when it will near the end of its life," said lead author Sylvestre Lacour of the Observatoire de Paris.

Unlocking the secrets of mysterious "night-shining" clouds

This image of Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) from the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere Cloud Imaging and Particle Size (AIM-CIPS) instrument on July 14, 2009 in the northern polar region. The North Pole (90N) is in the centre. Latitude bands of 80N, 70N, and 60N are also indicated by the light blue circles. Image: NASANASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite has captured five complete polar seasons of noctilucent (NLC) or "night-shining" clouds with an unprecedented horizontal resolution of 3 miles by 3 miles.

Results show that the cloud season turns on and off like a "geophysical light bulb" and they reveal evidence that high altitude mesospheric "weather" may follow similar patterns as our ever-changing weather near the Earth's surface. These findings were unveiled at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union today in San Francisco.

Born in beauty: Proplyds in the Orion Nebula

Image:NASA, ESA and L. Ricci (ESO)A collection of 30 never-before-released images of embryonic planetary systems in the Orion Nebula are the highlight of the longest single Hubble Space Telescope project ever dedicated to the topic of star and planet formation.

Also known as proplyds, or protoplanetary discs, these modest blobs surrounding baby stars are shedding light on the mechanism behind planet formation. Only the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with its high resolution and sensitivity, can take such detailed pictures of circumstellar discs at optical wavelengths.

Low-mass planets are common around nearby stars

An international team of planet hunters has discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth. The researchers, led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the two "super-Earths" are the first ones found around Sun-like stars.

"These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away," said Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.

Kansas scientists probe mysterious possible comet strikes on Earth

An investigation by the University of Kansas' Adrian Melott and colleagues reveals a promising new method of detecting past comet strikes upon Earth and gauging their frequency.

It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside. But this isn't a disaster movie plotline.

Earth's atmosphere came from outer space

Photo:NASAThe gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere - and probably its oceans - did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists.

The report published this week in the prestigious international journal Science means that textbook images of ancient Earth with huge volcanoes spewing gas into the atmosphere will have to be rethought.

Life on Mars theory boosted by new methane study

Image:NASAScientists rule out the possibility that methane is delivered by meteorites into the Martian atmosphere

Scientists have ruled out the possibility that methane is delivered to Mars by meteorites, raising fresh hopes that the gas might be generated by life on the red planet, in research published tomorrow (Wednesday 9 December 2009) in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Methane has a short lifetime of just a few hundred years on Mars because it is constantly being depleted by a chemical reaction in the planet's atmosphere, caused by sunlight.

Hubble's deepest view of Universe unveils never-before-seen galaxies

Image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 TeamThe new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest image yet of the Universe in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are likely the oldest galaxies ever identified, having formed between only 600–900 million years after the Big Bang.

In 2004, Hubble created the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the deepest visible-light image of the Universe, and now, with its brand-new camera, Hubble is seeing even farther. This image was taken in the same region as the visible HUDF, but is taken at longer wavelengths.

The first portrait of a cool planet

Size comparison between (from left) the Sun, Jupiter, GJ 758 B and GJ 758. At a temperature of between 280 and 370 degrees Celsius, GJ 758 B glows cherry red, as can be seen on its night-side facing away from the central star. Image: MPIA/C. ThalmannA bull's-eye in the hunt for planets: astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have discovered and directly imaged a faint celestial body that orbits the star GJ 758. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 40 Jupiter masses. Accordingly, it is either a giant planet or a brown dwarf, a would-be sun. One thing is certain: with a temperature of around 330 degrees Celsius, GJ 758 B is the coldest companion of a Sun-like star ever to be directly imaged.

Explosion of a super star reveals new kind of supernova

What happens when a really gargantuan star – one hundreds of times bigger than our sun – blows up? Although a theory developed years ago describes what the explosion of such an enormous star should look like, no one had actually observed one – until now.

An international team, led by scientists in Israel, and including researchers from Germany, the US, UK and China, tracked a supernova – an exploding star – for over a year and a half, and found that it neatly fits the predictions for the explosion of a star of over 150 times the sun's mass. Their findings, which could influence our understanding of everything from natural limits on star size to the evolution of the universe, appeared recently in Nature.

A superbright supernova that's the first of its kind

In this schematic illustration of the material ejected from SN 2007bi, the radioactive nickel core (white) decays to cobalt, emitting gamma rays and positrons that excite surrounding layers (textured yellow) rich in heavy elements like iron. The outer layers (dark shadow) are lighter elements such as oxygen and carbon, where any helium must reside, which remain unilluminated and do not contribute to the visible spectrum. Image: Berkeley Lab
But not the last, now that astronomers know where to look

An extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first populated the Universe. The superbright supernova occurred in a nearby dwarf galaxy, a kind of galaxy that's common but has been little studied until now, and the unusual supernova could be the first of many such events soon to be discovered.

Caltech scientists explain puzzling lake asymmetry on Titan

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles.

A paper describing the theory appears in the November 29th advance online edition of Nature Geoscience.