SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: November 2003
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& science news > space & science news: November 2003
| Possible Earth-like planets found
around Vega |
Nov 30, 2003 |
| Solo planet formed like a star |
Nov 29, 2003 |
| China manned Moon trip by 2020 |
Nov 29, 2003 |
| Does vacuum energy dominate the
universe? |
Nov 26, 2003 |
| Biggest star in our Galaxy sits
within a rugby-ball shaped cocoon |
Nov 26, 2003 |
| Venus has metal-coated mountains |
Nov 25, 2003 |
| Jupiter encounter for Pluto mission |
Nov 24, 2003 |
| "Great dying" caused by space
rock |
Nov 21, 2003 |
| Most extreme halophiles discovered |
Nov 19, 2003 |
| Giant Kuiper belt object found |
Nov 17, 2003 |
| Interstellar Boundary Mission |
Nov 17, 2003 |
| The rivers of Mars |
Nov 16, 2003 |
| Lunar ice in question |
Nov 13, 2003 |
| Interstellar computer viruses |
Nov 11, 2003 |
| Dark matter forms a ghost universe |
Nov 9, 2003 |
| HD 172051: the star of life? |
Nov 8, 2003 |
| New nearest galaxy found |
Nov 7, 2003 |
| Martian desert on Earth |
Nov 7, 2003 |
| Voyager 1 at the terminal shock |
Nov 6, 2003 |
| Largest solar flare ever seen |
Nov 5, 2003 |
| Space amino acids: life clues |
Nov 4, 2003 |
| Sun most active in 1,000 years |
Nov 3, 2003 |
| Hubble observes early starbirth |
Nov 2, 2003 |
| Big Bang sounded like a deep
hum |
Nov 1, 2003 |
Possible Earth-like planets found around
Vega
(Nov 30, 2003)
Astronomers say they have evidence for Earth-like planets orbiting
a nearby star, making it more like our own Solar System than any yet
discovered. The star, Vega,
is one of the brightest in the sky, only 25 light-years away. It is
three times larger than our Sun and, at 350 million years old, much
younger as well. Vega has a disc of dust circling it, and at least
one large planet which could sweep debris aside allowing smaller worlds
like Earth to exist. The analysis, by astronomers from the Royal Observatory,
Edinburgh, is published in The Astrophysical Journal, and is based
on observations taken with one of the world's most sensitive cameras.
Read more. Source: BBC. |
Solo planet formed like a star
(Nov 29, 2003)
Planets can be spawned by the same process that makes stars, say astronomers
who have discovered a developing planet floating alone in a stellar
nursery. "It's a planet but it has all the hallmarks of an embryonic
star," says Jane Greaves of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (ROE).
Until recently, it was thought that planets could only build up, or
"accrete", from gas and dust swirling in a disc around a newborn star.
But everything changed in 2000 with the discovery of isolated planets
without parent stars in the Sigma
Orionis star cluster. "Their existence strongly suggested there
was another way of making planets," says Greaves. Now, Greaves and
ROE colleague Wayne Holland, together with Marc Pound of the University
of Maryland at College Park, have looked at the Rho
Ophiuchus B star-forming region, which is 500 light years away,
only one-third as far from us as the famous star nursery of the Orion
nebula. Picture: Rho Ophiuchus complex.
Read full article. Source: New Scientist. |
China manned Moon trip by 2020
(Nov 29, 2003)
China plans to land a human on the moon by 2020, the country's chief
space official said in comments broadcast by state television. "By
2020, we will achieve visiting the moon," said Luan Enjie, director
of the National Aerospace Bureau. Luan used a verb that specifically
describes a human act. Luan said that would follow the launch of a
probe to orbit the moon by 2007 and an unmanned lunar landing by 2010.
China's once-secret space program has released a stream of such disclosures
following the Oct. 15 flight of astronaut Yang Liwei on the country's
first manned space voyage. "We will focus on deep space exploration.
The first target selected is the moon," Luan said Thursday.
Read full article. Source: AP. |
Does vacuum energy dominate the universe?
(Nov 26, 2003)
New results from a study of distant galaxy clusters, observed as they
were when the universe was only half as old as it is today, lead to
some surprising conclusions. The observations were obtained by the
European Space Agency's (ESA) satellite XMM
in the context of an international collaboration involving researchers
from two laboratories (the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique and the Centre
d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements (CESR) at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées
(OMP ) in Toulouse, the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in
Paris, the Collège de France, the Service d'Astrophysique (SAp) in
Saclay, and the ESA center ESTEC in Holland.
Read full article. Source: Space Daily. |
Biggest star in our Galaxy sits within
a rugby-ball shaped cocoon
(Nov 26, 2003)
Ever since 1841, when the until then inconspicuous southern star Eta
Carinae underwent a spectacular outburst, astronomers have wondered
what exactly is going on in this unstable giant star. However, due
to its considerable distance – 7,500 light-years – details
of the star itself were beyond observation. This star is known to
be surrounded by the Homunculus Nebula, two mushroom-shaped clouds
ejected by the star, each of which is hundreds of times larger than
our solar system. Now, for the first time, infrared interferometry
with the VINCI instrument on ESO's Very
Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) enabled an international
team of astronomers to zoom-in on the inner part of its stellar wind.
For Roy van Boekel, leader of the team, these results indicate that
"the wind of Eta Carinae turns out to be extremely elongated and the
star itself is highly unstable because of its fast rotation."
Read full article. Source: European Southern Observatory. |
Venus has metal-coated mountains
(Nov 25, 2003)
The highlands of Venus
are covered by a heavy metal "frost", say planetary scientists from
Washington University. Because it is hot enough to melt lead at the
surface, metals vaporise and condense at cooler, higher elevations.
This may explain why radar observations made by orbiting spacecraft
show that the highlands are highly reflective. Detailed calculations,
to be published in the journal Icarus, suggest that lead and bismuth
are to blame for giving Venus its bright, metallic skin.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Jupiter encounter for Pluto mission
(Nov 24, 2003)
The main goal of NASA's New
Horizons mission may be to explore Pluto-Charon
and the Kuiper Belt
beginning in 2015, but first the mission plans to fly by the solar
system's largest planet, Jupiter,
during February-March 2007. The Jupiter flyby would be used by New
Horizons to provide a gravitational assist that shaves years off the
trip time to Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper belt.
Read full article. Source: Space Daily. |
"Great dying" caused by space rock
(Nov 21, 2003)
Scientists have found new evidence that the greatest extinction in
the Earth's history was triggered by an asteroid.
About 250 million years ago, something unknown wiped out most of the
life on the planet. It was far more devastating than the impact that
ended the rule of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. New geological
evidence suggests that the "great dying" was caused by a space rock
slamming into the Earth. Dozens of rare mineral grains found in ancient
rocks in Antarctica could be the "smoking gun", according to scientists
in the US.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Most extreme halophiles discovered
(Nov 19, 2003)
The world's most alkaline
lifeforms are living in contaminated water in the US. Scientists
found microbial communities thriving in the slag dumps of the Lake
Calumet region of southeast Chicago where the water can reach a pH
of 12.8. Living in this extreme environment is comparable to swimming
in caustic soda or floor stripper, the researchers say. They found
the microbes while studying contaminated groundwater created by more
than a century of industrial iron slag tipping in Illinois and Indiana.
Picture: A phase-contrast microscope view of the newly-found halophiles.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Giant Kuiper belt object found
(Nov 17, 2003)
Astronomers have found a large object orbiting the Sun near Neptune's
orbit. It was discovered on Friday by an automated sky survey project
designed to search for threatening asteroids that may be on an Earth
impact course. The object is about 570 km across, making it one of
the largest bodies of its kind found in modern times. The new body,
made of rock and ice, is designated 2003 VS2. Re-examining past records,
astronomers have found it in images taken as far back as 1998.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Interstellar Boundary Mission
(Nov 17, 2003)
NASA has selected a proposal by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)
to examine the feasibility of a mission to study the interstellar
boundary, the region between our solar system and interstellar space.
The proposal is one of five candidates vying for two mission slots
in NASA's Explorer Program of low cost, rapidly developed scientific
spacecraft. The Interstellar
Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission led by SwRI would launch a pair
of energetic neutral atom "cameras" to image the interaction between
the solar system and the low-density material between the stars, the
interstellar medium – an interaction that has never been directly
observed before. Picture: Voyager and Pioneer departure trajectories.
Read full article. Source: Space Daily. |
The rivers of Mars
(Nov 16, 2003)
Newly seen details in a fan-shaped apron of debris on Mars
may help settle a decades-long debate about whether the planet had
long-lasting rivers instead of just brief, intense floods. Pictures
from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor
orbiter show eroded ancient deposits of transported sediment long
since hardened into interweaving, curved ridges of layered rock. Scientists
interpret some of the curves as traces of ancient meanders made in
a sedimentary fan as flowing water changed its course over time.
Read full article. Source: Spaceflight Now. |
Lunar ice in question
(Nov 13, 2003)
New data suggests that if there is ice at the Moon's
poles then it is probably in the form of scattered grains rather
than thick sheets, say scientists. Radar data from the permanently
dark regions of the Moon lack the tell-tale signature of thick ice
deposits. The observations, from the Arecibo
radio telescope in Puerto Rico, do not rule out ice, which could
be a valuable resource for a future base on the Moon. (Picture: Arecibo
radio telescope.)
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Interstellar computer viruses
(Nov 11, 2003)
Microsoft may have to fork up big bounty bucks trying to unearth future
hackers, particularly when they are light years away on distant worlds.
Add one more worry to the computerized world of the 21st century.
Could a signal from the stars broadcast by an alien intelligence also
carry harmful information, in the spirit of a computer virus? Could
star folk launch a "disinformation" campaign - one that covers up
aspects of their culture? Perhaps they might even mask the "real"
intent of dispatching a message to other civilizations scattered throughout
the Cosmos. These are concerns that deserve attention explains Richard
Carrigan, Jr., a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
in Batavia, Illinois. Those engaged in the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), he contends, should
think about decontaminating potential SETI signals. (Picture: Allen
Telescope Array.)
Read full article. Source: space.com. |
Dark matter forms ghost universe
(Nov 9, 2003)
The "dark matter"
that comprises a still-undetected one-quarter of the universe is not
a uniform cosmic fog, says a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist,
but instead forms dense clumps that move about like dust motes dancing
in a shaft of light. In a paper submitted this week to Physical Review
D, Chung-Pei Ma, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley,
and Edmund Bertschinger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), prove that the motion of dark matter clumps can be modeled
in a way similar to the Brownian motion of air-borne dust or pollen.
Read full article. Source: UC Berkeley. |
HD 172051: the star of life?
(Nov 8, 2003)
A little-known star about 42 light-years away is the top target for
European astronomers searching for planets that might harbour life.
The star, which has the rather dull designation HD 172051, is much
like our own Sun but is just a little cooler. Scientists believe it
is one of the best contenders in nearby space to have planets in orbit
that resemble Earth. It will be a key observational target when Europe
launches its Darwin
space telescope system (see picture) in the next decade.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
New nearest galaxy found
(Nov 7, 2003)
An international team of astronomers has found a previously unknown
galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way. Called the Canis Major dwarf
galaxy after the constellation in which it lies, the star grouping
is about 25,000 light-years away from our Solar System. Its distinctive
red stars are slowly being pulled into the Milky Way and the dwarf
will soon lose all its structure.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Martian desert on Earth
(Nov 7, 2003)
A report in the journal Science finds striking similarities
between the soil in Chile's Atacama Desert (see photo) and that sampled
by the Viking landers
on Mars in 1976. The
chemical properties of the Atacama soil could explain the strange
life-like results obtained by some of Viking's experiments. In the
end, NASA officially wrote off the results as non-biological because
another instrument on the spacecraft, known as the GCMS,
failed to detect organic (carbon-based) matter. But controversy has
surrounded this interpretation ever since and there have been calls
for the experiments to be repeated. Now, in a sense, this has happened
through the work done on a terrestrial desert, though the results
have raised fresh questions.
The party line on the Viking results is that the Martian samples were
active because of chemicals such as super-oxides - not because of
microbes. In fact, these active chemicals would be devastating to
life as we know it. The new work has found similar chemical properties
in the Atacama soils, which are extremely dry like those found on
Mars. Low water levels combined with sunlight seem to have created
a chemical cycle that decomposes organic materials and inhibits life.
When the researchers repeated the Viking experiments on the Atacama
soils, they came up with similar results. However, they did find minute
traces of organic matter, at levels lower than the Viking experiments
would have been able to detect on Mars. So, the possibility remains
that organic matter was there all the time. If so, there's a chance
that the Beagle 2
lander, currently Mars-bound, will detect it. Also, two new instruments
are being developed to characterise chemical processes on Mars (Mars
Oxidant Instrument) and to detect organic compounds (Mars Oxidant
Detector). It's hoped these instruments will be flown to Mars on a
future probe in a further effort to identify soils that may have contained
life at some point in the planet's past. Ref: "Mars-Like Soils in
the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life," Rafael
Navarro-González et al, Science Nov 7 2003: 1018-1021. |
Voyager 1 at terminal shock
(Nov 6, 2003)
Scientists say the Voyager
1 spacecraft is near the outer limit of the Solar System, 26 years
after its US launch. The boundary is a region called the termination
shock where particles from the Sun begin to slow down and clash
with atomic matter from deep space. Nasa says Voyager 1 is about 13.5bn
kilometres from Earth and will not reach another system for 40,000
years. The spacecraft carries greetings in 55 languages and audiovisual
materials depicting life on Earth. Beyond the ever-shifting termination
shock boundary, lies a region called the heliopause,
that marks the beginning of interstellar space.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Largest solar flare ever seen
(Nov 5, 2003)
The Sun has unleashed its largest recorded solar
flare, capping 10 days of unprecedented activity for the star.
The blast sent billions of tonnes of superhot gas into space –
some of it directed towards our planet. Scientists say the Sun's current
spate of activity has produced the most dramatic events seen on the
solar surface since regular monitoring began. Space weather forecasters
have been kept busy tracking the impact of geomagnetic storms on the
Earth.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Space amino acids: life clues
(Nov 4, 2003)
Amino
acids have been found in interstellar
clouds and in meteorites
- but with some enigmatic omissions and tantalizing similarities to
life on Earth. Just why some amino acids are present in meteorites
and others are absent, and why they seem to prefer the same "left-handed"
molecular structure as Earth's living amino acids are questions that
could unravel one of the most fundamental questions of science: Where
and how did life begin? "The bottom line is that you have these materials
that come from space," says Steve Macko, professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Macko refers
specifically to eight of the amino acids found in a certain kind of
meteorite – a carbonaceous
chondrite. All eight amino acids are identical to those used by
life on Earth. That could seem to point to a cosmic origin of these
basic biological building blocks, says Macko.
Read full article. Source: Geo. Soc. Am. |
Sun most active in 1,000 years
(Nov 3, 2003)
The Sun is more active
now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes
from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes
just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes
of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into
space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth. The dark patches on the
surface of the Sun that we call sunspots are a symptom of fierce magnetic
activity inside. Ilya Usoskin, a geophysicist who worked with colleagues
from the University of Oulu in Finland and the Max Planck Institute
for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, has found that there have
been more sunspots since the 1940s than for the past 1150 years
Read full article. Source: New Scientist. |
Hubble observes early starbirth
(Nov 2, 2003)
The Hubble Space Telescope
has observed the most dramatic and most energetic stellar nursery
ever found in space. It lies at the edge of the Universe. It was detected
nestling behind a distant cluster of galaxies. Because of its distance
we see the object as it was when the Universe was young, some 12 billion
years ago. A million bluish stars – hotter than today's stars
– have been formed out of this cocoon of gas, which must have
been common when the cosmos was young. Illustration: Artist's impression
of the stellar nursery.
Read full article. Source: BBC. |
Big Bang sounded like a deep hum
(Nov 1, 2003)
The Big Bang sounded
more like a deep hum than a bang, according to an analysis of the
radiation left over from the cataclysm. Physicist John Cramer of the
University of Washington in Seattle has created audio files of the
event which can be played on a PC. "The sound is rather like a large
jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night,"
he says. Giant sound waves propagated through the blazing hot matter
that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These squeezed
and stretched matter, heating the compressed regions and cooling the
rarefied ones.
Read full article. Source: New Scientist. |
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