This handout illustration provided by San Diego State University, shows a newly discovered planets

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society‘s conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

“We’re finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn’t even think could exist,” said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror “Star Wars” Luke Skywalker’s home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

“We’re awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren’t even sure there were planets” outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Astronomers are finding other worlds using three different techniques and peering through telescopes in space and on the ground. Confirmed planets outside our solar system — called exoplanets — now number well over 700, still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands.

This 2011 handout photo provided by the European Southern Observatory, shows the Milky Way above the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

NASA’s new Kepler planet-hunting telescope in space is discovering exoplanets that are in a zone friendly to life and detecting planets as small as Earth or even tinier. That is moving the field of looking for some kind of life outside Earth from science fiction toward plain science.

One study in Nature this week figures that the Milky Way averages at least 1.6 large planets per star. And that is likely a dramatic underestimate.

That study is based on only one intricate and time-consuming method of planet hunting that uses several South American, African and Australian telescopes. Astronomers look for increases in brightness of distant stars that indicate planets between Earth and that pulsating star. That technique usually finds only bigger planets and is good at finding those further away from their stars, sort of like our Saturn or Uranus.

Kepler and a different ground-based telescope technique are finding planets closer to their stars. Putting those methods together, the number of worlds in our galaxy is probably much closer to two or more planets per star, said the Nature study author Arnaud Cassan of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris.

Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at the University of California Berkeley’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence program and who wasn’t part of the studies, was thrilled: “It’s great to know that there are planets out there that we can point our telescopes at.”

Kepler also found three rocky planets — tinier than Earth — that are circling a dwarf star that itself is only a bit bigger than Jupiter. They are so close to their small star that they are too hot for life.

“It’s like you took your shrink ray gun and you set it to seven times smaller and zap the planetary system,” said California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson, co-author of the study presented Wednesday at the astronomy conference.

Because it is so hard to see these size planets, they must be pretty plentiful, Johnson said. “It’s kind of like cockroaches. If you see one, then there are dozens hiding.”

It’s not just the number or size of planets, but where they are found. Scientists once thought systems with two stars were just too chaotic to have planets nearby. But so far, astronomers have found three different systems where planets have two suns, something that a few years ago seemed like purely “Star Wars” movie magic.

“Nature must like to form planets because it’s forming them in places that are kind of difficult to do,” said San Diego State University astronomy professor William Welsh, who wrote a study about planets with two stars that’s also published in the journal Nature.

The gravity of two stars makes the area near them unstable, Welsh said. So astronomers thought that if a planet formed in that area, it would be torn apart.

Late last year, Kepler telescope found one system with two stars. It was considered a freak. Then Welsh used Kepler to find two more. Now Welsh figures such planetary systems, while not common, are not rare either.

“It just feels like it’s inevitable that Kepler is going to come up with a habitable Earth-sized planet in the next couple of years,” Caltech’s Johnson said.

Source: Yahoo News

After the failure, Chinese rocket engineers “started all over again,” putting an all-out effort to solving the problem. As a result of their diligence, the modified rocket carrying Shenzhou-8 was launched at its originally scheduled time and put the spacecraft into orbit in a “near perfect” fashion, said Jin Muchun, chief rocket system designer for the mission.

This rapid and successful correction of a design flaw reflects the quest for perfection and dedication of Chinese space engineers. It may also explain how China’s space program has achieved such success.

“We never push ahead for the sake of speed and we don’t turn our back on problems,” said Li Jie, a senior official with China’s manned space program. “At meetings, instead of praising each other, we always put forward questions, one after another.“

Compared with the United States and Russia, China came late to manned space exploration. However, since the start of the country’s manned space program in 1992, China has sent six astronauts into space and completed the country’s first space walk and space docking.

“China has steadily pursued a solid space program by making incremental steps,” Canadian space expert Erik Seedhouse told Xinhua.

Phillip Clark, a long-time observer who has been following the Chinese space endeavors since the launch of Dongfanghong-1 in 1970, said China is making impressive progress and is following its own pace without racing against anyone.

“Although there have been long gaps between Chinese manned flights, each mission has been a greater progression than we saw in the 1960s,” Clark said.

For example, he said, when Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei flew in 2003 China’s first manned space adventure he was in orbit for nearly a day. In contrast, the United States didn’t have such a long flight until its sixth manned mission.

China sent three men into space and completed a space walk on Shenzhou-7, the country’s third manned flight. China hit these important milestones during earlier missions than did either the Soviet Union or the United States.

Neither of the latter countries achieved a space walk until its eighth space mission. As for three-man space flights, the Soviets had their first during the seventh mission and Americans achieved this feat on its 17th mission, according to data collected by Clark.

“This shows how China has progressed in greater leaps from one flight to the next,” Clark said.

The success of the Nov. 3 docking procedure makes China the third country in the world, after the United States and Russia, to master the technique, moving the country one step closer to establishing its own space station.

“Completing this in-orbit test is a significant milestone in China’s space program,” said Tim Robinson, editor of the Aerospace International journal.

“The successful docking is another strong sign that underlines the position of strength that is increasingly defining China’s space industry,” space expert Seedhouse told Xinhua in an e-mail message.

“It will also help China’s commercial space business and bring Chinese closer to realizing their own space station; by doing that they will demonstrate just how capable and robust their space program is, and (they) will be well-positioned to realize the goals of landing astronauts on the Moon,” Seedhouse said.

After the first space docking, China will push ahead with its space program with more confidence in the decade to come.

The Chinese manned space program has announced its plan on 20 future space voyages, which will help satisfy demand for indigenous spacecraft manufacturing and launch services.

China also plans to establish its own space lab around 2016 and assemble a 60-tonne manned space station around 2020, when the current International Space Station is estimated to likely retire.

Source: Space Daily | Space News at One Piece Discoveries

“It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great — and rare — chance to study a near-Earth object like this,” astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon,” Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55′s approach, which will be visible from the planet’s northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States,” Yeomans said. “It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by.”

Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.

“These sorts of events have been happening for most of the lifetime of the Earth, about 4.5 billion years,” Fisher said. Computer models showing the asteroid’s path for the next 100 years show there is no chance it will hit Earth during that time, added Yeomans.

“We do not think that it will ever impact the Earth or moon (but) we only have its orbit calculated for the next 100 years,” he said. Previous studies show the asteroid, which is blacker than charcoal, is what is called a C-type asteroid that is likely made of carbon-based materials and some silicate rock.

More information about its composition and structure are expected from radar images and chemical studies of its light as the asteroid passes by the planet. “I’ve read that we will be able to see details down to a size of about 15 feet across on the surface of the asteroid,” Fisher said.

NASA is working on a mission to return soil samples from an asteroid known as 1999 RQ36 in 2020, followed by a human mission to another asteroid in the mid-2020s. Japan also plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission in 2018.

Source: Yahoo News

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Source: Fred Espenak

Thanks to Reddit.com, this petition has reached the Front Page of The White House’s Petition site and all the reddit posts about white house petitions have brought down the site. Great. Thanks. We need some more signs from you. Go to this link to sign the petition: White House.

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Source: Twanight

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What the photographer says:

‘When I travelled to see the total solar eclipse of 11 July 2010, I stayed in Oneroa village on the west coast of Mangaia, Cook Islands. This is how the sky looked from a relatively open area just outside Oneroa village.’

Hutech modified Canon 5D DSLR camera with a 24 mm lens – What it shows:

Forming a dramatic backdrop to a tropical skyline, the Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars in a disc-like structure. Our Sun lies within the disc, about two-thirds of the way out from the centre, so we see it as a bright band encircling the sky. This southern hemisphere view highlights dark clouds of dust that aboriginal Australian astronomers called the ‘Emu in the sky’.

What the judges say:

Will Gater says: ‘This beautiful image has a truly magical feel to it. I love how the rich star fields of the Milky Way appear to follow the line of the horizon. Look closely and you’ll see many pink nebulae nestled within our galaxy’s spiral arms.’

What Flickr members say:

Ayiomamitis says: ‘WoW!…Truly outstanding in every sense of the word. Great composition and equally great execution.’

Source: NMM UK

But the truth is, somebody from the insider said this, “How we made the Firefox crop circle. Executing this project was one of the best summers of my life. Mozilla Firefox hired me as a marketing intern and I came with the idea of doing a crop circle — we ran into a lot of doubters but made it happen in the end. Mozilla is a great company!” End of the story. Crop circle is an art, not from extraterrestrial life being. This is how they made the Firefox crop circle:

Aliens Use Firefox from John X. Carey on Vimeo.

Saturn’s beautiful aurora change and shimmer at different time period which makes it very much unique in their own way. Ingersoll also confirms that both the auroras on Earth and on Saturn have charged particles from outer space that are colliding with the inner atmosphere which is how they glow and create some sparkling effects. The magnetic field of the Saturn guides the particles into higher latitude which is why auroras on Saturn are only seen on poles like on Earth. The auroras on Saturn also provide a lot of insight information about space weather and how certain planets behave to different conditions.

On March 28, 1989 Russian ground controllers lost their contact with their spaceship which was circling around Phobos, and taking some exclusive pictures of Martian moon Phobos. Many astronauts and space experts believe that Phobos monolith is an alien object which should never be there on Phobos. However, in 2011, Russia will again try to put another spacecraft on Phobos to take some exclusive pictures of Martian moon and even to find answers about the existence of Phobos monolith. Currently, Phobos circles around Mars every seven hours and the monolith circles around as well. The new Russian spaceship that will go to Phobos will also bring in some samples of the rock which will help experts to determine more about Phobos monolith. Below are some screenshots from the video.