Tag Archives: scientist

Steamy windows for possible settlers

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This looks like a mighty cool – hot – planet. A waterworld under an atmosphere of water vapor. There could be boiling some life over there! It’s clear (yet damp) that there’s a whole lot more to (exo)planets than the casual rock- and gas planets we have in our neighborhood:

Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

An international team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b.

“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” Berta said. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA’s David Charbonneau, discovered GJ 1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometers, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ 1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ 1214b’s atmosphere. … (Hubble)

The Big Bang inventor will leave Earth with a big bang

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ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are an essential contribution by Europe to running the International Space Station. Naming the fifth after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaître continues the tradition of drawing on great European visionaries to reflect Europe’s deep roots in science, technology and culture.

The first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which made a flawless flight in 2008, was named after French science fiction writer Jules Verne.

It was followed in 2011 by ATV-2, named in honour of German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler.

It will be the turn of the third ATV, named after the Italian physicist and space pioneer Edoardo Amaldi, to head towards the Space Station on 9 March.

ATV-4, aiming for launch in early 2013, carries the name of Albert Einstein.

 

Naming the last vehicle of the family, ATV-5, after Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître, father of the Big Bang theory, continues this approach. … (ESA)

 

Tellurium in the distance

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Nearly 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was made of only hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium — byproducts of the Big Bang. Some 300 million years later, the very first stars emerged, creating additional chemical elements throughout the universe. Since then, giant stellar explosions, or supernovas, have given rise to carbon, oxygen, iron and the rest of the 94 naturally occurring elements of the periodic table.

 

Today, stars and planetary bodies bear traces of these elements, having formed from the gas enriched by these supernovas over time. For the past 50 years, scientists have been analyzing stars of various ages, looking to chart the evolution of chemical elements in the universe and to identify the astrophysical phenomena that created them.

 

Now a team of researchers from institutions including MIT has detected the element tellurium for the first time in three ancient stars. The researchers found traces of this brittle, semiconducting alloy — which is very rare on Earth — in stars that are nearly 12 billion years old. The findingsupports the theory that tellurium, along with even heavier elements in the periodic table, likely originated from a very rare type of supernova during a rapid process of nuclear fusion. The researchers published their findings online in Astrophysical Journal Letters. …  (MIT-news)

Dried up aliens

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Alien planets might experience tidal forces powerful enough to remove all their water, leaving behind hot, dry worlds like Venus, researchers said.

 

These findings might significantly affect searches for habitable exoplanets, scientists explained. Although some planets might dwell in regions around their star friendly enough for life as we know it, they could actually be lifelessly dry worlds.

 

The tides that we experience on Earth are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Our tides are nothing compared to what we see elsewhere in the solar system — the gravitational pull Europa experiences from Jupiter leads to tidal forces roughly 1,000 times stronger than what Earth feels from our moon, flexing and heating Europa. … (Discovery)

Venus on the brakes

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ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the orbiter found surface features were not quite where they should be.

Using the VIRTIS instrument at infrared wavelengths to penetrate the thick cloud cover, scientists studied surface features and discovered that some were displaced by up to 20 km from where they should be given the accepted rotation rate as measured by NASA’s Magellan orbiter in the early 1990s. These detailed measurements from orbit are helping scientists determine whether Venus has a solid or liquid core, which will help our understanding of the planet’s creation and how it evolved.  … (ESA)

 

New superearth, new superchances

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A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone — there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.” … (SciAm)

Crackpot CWRU

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A “theory of everything” from a scientist at Case Western Reserve University got a lot of attention for positing that inanimate objects, from planets and water to strands of DNA, are alive. Not only is the assertion bunk, but the scientific and media phenomena surrounding the study reveals how sometimes crackpot ideas can get traction. … (SPACE.com)