#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect#it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system.
In fact, it is just a shade larger than Earth s moon.""What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,
says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER in Moffett Field, Calif. Barclay is lead author of a study published online February 20 in Nature announcing the discovery of Kepler 37 b and two slightly larger worlds in the same planetary system.
Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group. The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way
for occasional winks, or dips in brightness, that might be caused by a planet passing in front of its star, from the probe s perspective.
The Kepler mission has discovered already more than 100 new planets since its launch in 2009 and has identified thousands of additional candidates that await confirmation.
Planets smaller than Earth block relatively small amounts of starlight which limits astronomers ability to detect them with Kepler.
But the star Kepler 37 is bright and relatively free of disturbances, such as starspots, that can obscure a faint planetary signal.
By observing the planet Kepler 37 b as it transited, or passed in front of its star, more than 50 times,
Barclay and his colleague drew out a subtle but recurrent pattern. Every 13 days or so the star dimmed by a tiny fraction#just 0. 002 percent#as the tiny planet passed across the star s face.
The exoplanet that previously held the record on the tiny end of the size spectrum#a Mars-size object known as Kepler 42 d#is nearly twice the diameter of Kepler 37 b. The newfound body is just 80 percent
Mercury s diameter and 30 percent that of Earth. Kepler measures the diameters and orbital properties of exoplanets but is usually unable to pinpoint their masses.)
All three of the exoplanets found by Barclay and his colleagues, in fact, will rank among the smallest known:
Kepler 37 c is 74 percent the diameter of Earth, and Kepler 37 d is roughly twice our planet s diameter.
Orbiting its star at one tenth the distance between Earth and the sun, tiny Kepler 37 b must be extremely hot."
"Any water on the surface would disappear very quickly, Barclay says.""There is almost no chance of an atmosphere or liquid on the surface.
The researchers predict that Kepler 37 b would be a barren, rocky world similar to Mercury.
The larger worlds in the planetary system orbit somewhat farther out but would still suffer scorching heat from the star.
All three planets keep closer to the star Kepler 37 than any planet orbits the sun."It just shows that Kepler has just an extraordinary ability to see a wide diversity of planetary architectures,
says Greg Laughlin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa cruz, who did not contribute to the new study.
Kepler was built to search for exo-Earths#rocky planets in cooler orbits than the uninhabitable worlds of the Kepler 37 system.
But in the meantime it has found numerous planetary systems that little resemble ours.""What Kepler is also showing,
and this is a side dividend to the main mission, is that the galactic planetary census is a lot different than we had believed from looking at our own planetary system,
"Our solar system just contains nothing whatsoever inside Mercury s orbit. But it turns out that the average planetary system has a lot going on in the inner region.
There is one catch in Kepler s search for worlds comparable with or smaller than Earth: Whereas giant Jupiter-size planets often exert a gravitational tug on their host stars that is detectable with Earth-based telescope spectrographs,
smaller exoplanet discoveries have proved difficult to confirm with observations other than Kepler s . So researchers have turned to statistical arguments
instead to quantify the probability of a false positive#for instance, a pair of undetected binary stars whose regular eclipses mimic a planetary signal.
Barclay and his colleagues used computer modeling to identify potential false positives and then rule them out with additional observations from the ground.
In the end, based on population estimates of exoplanets binary stars and other astronomical objects, the researchers calculated the probability that the signal collected from Kepler represents a true planet."
"In this case, with the innermost planet we are confident that it is a true planet orbiting the target star with a confidence of 99.95 percent,
Barclay says.""So we re very confident that this is what we think it is
#FDA Approves First Retinal implant An article by Scientific American. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded
#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,
and distributed in laboratory space in Newhouse, Scotland, that was closed by Merck in 2010. Starting this July or August
Such things have included everything from spare parts for the International space station above to the beef on our dinner plates to the organs inside our bodies.
#Planck snaps infant Universe For astronomers, it is the ultimate treasure map. On 21 march, the Planck space telescope team released the highest-precision map yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB),
the faint but ubiquitous afterglow of the Big bang. Crowning nearly 50 years of CMB study,
That dials back the amount of gravity-countering dark energy to 68.3%of the Universe and adds a little more unseen dark matter to the mix.
The map even shows that the number of neutrino flavours permeating the cosmos will probably remain at three#had there been a fourth,
Where the Planck spacecraft, watching the sky from a vantage point 1. 5#million kilometres away,
yet riddled with clumps, filaments and sheets of galaxies.""Planck could have found that there was something majorly wrong with inflation,
which ultimately snowballed into the galaxies seen today.""All the structures we see in the Universe are coming from these little perturbations,
says Paul Shellard, a Planck cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. SLIDESHOW: Homing in on the cosmic microwave background In 1965,
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background. Their giant but crude microwave receiver saw the radiation as being the same in all directions,
occurring at 2. 7 kelvin. NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAMIT was not until the launch of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft that astronomers could begin to see variations in the background, at levels of 1 part in 100,000.
NASATHE Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, launched in 2001, improved on COBE by looking for such anisotropy at much smaller angular scales.
NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAMPLANCK launched in 2009, provides a capstone to the study of the cosmic microwave background.
But unambiguous confirmation of a cosmic burst of expansion known as inflation remains elusive. ES a
there is a piecemeal approach, with the government"picking winners and providing new money to the automotive, aerospace, forestry and aquaculture sectors."
#Planck telescope peers into primordial Universe The Planck space telescope has delivered the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background, the residual glow of the Big bang. Unveiling the results from the##700-million (US$904-million) European space agency (ESA) probe,
"For cosmologists, this map is a gold mine of information, says George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, UK,
and one of Planck s lead researchers. The results strongly support the idea that in the 10##32 seconds or so after the Big bang,
and why we cannot detect any curvature in the fabric of space (other than the tiny indentations caused by massive objects such as black holes).
The sudden ballooning also amplified quantum fluctuations into clumps of matter that went on to seed the first stars,
and, eventually, the straggly superclusters of galaxies that now span hundreds of millions of parsecs.
The cosmic microwave background radiation studied by Planck dates from about 380,000 years after the Big bang, by
That transition allowed photons to travel unimpeded through space, in a pattern that carried the echoes of inflation.
Since the cosmic microwave background was detected first in 1964, two space-based experiments#the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)# have mapped the tiny temperature variations within it.
Those data have enabled cosmologists to work out when the Big bang happened, estimate the amount of unseen dark matter in the cosmos
and measure the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Planck, launched in 2009,
is more than three times more sensitive than the WMAP. Its high-frequency microwave detector is cooled to just 0. 1 degrees above absolute zero
which enables it to detect temperature variations as small as a millionth of a degree.
The Planck data also implies that dark energy makes up 68.3%of the energy density of the Universe,
The simplest models of inflation predict that fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background should look the same all over the sky.
The asymmetry"defines a preferred direction in space, which is an extremely strange result, says Efstathiou.
or for eye-popping views of the Earth
#Waterproof transistor takes cell's electric pulse Think of it as a medical monitor for the cell.
they are crucial for technologies in the aerospace and alternative-energy industries. China currently controls the vast majority of supplies.
"It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.
#Life found deep under the sea For the first time, scientists have discovered microbes living deep inside Earth s oceanic crust#the dark volcanic rock at the bottom of the sea.
and covers 60%of the planet s surface, making it the largest habitat On earth. The microbes inside it seem to survive largely by using hydrogen,
which uses sunlight for the same purpose. Chemosynthesis also fuels life at other deep-sea locations such as hydrothermal vents
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of Brainx3 users can explore and analysis dynamical activity patterns of brain networks
The pits are among the largest and deepest pockmarks ever found in Earth lakes, the researchers said.
which would (hypothetically, at least) be repelled by magnetic forces from the Earth itself. Duru's real-life flying skateboard is a bit simpler than Mcfly's:
Interaxon, the company behind the Muse headband and a Mars venture client, claims that sustained use of the device will train one brain to stay more naturally calm and focused.
assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&t told Gizmag. Artists Discover 3-D Printingthe Missouri S&t team believes the mechanical coloring on the silver/silica materials provide a much higher printing resolution than conventional color printing, according to Gizmag.
#Smog Harvested from Tower Made into Jewelry A Smog Free Tower that stands 23 feet tall is being built to scrub pollution out of the air in parks and other public outdoor spaces in Rotterdam, The netherlands.
and space. think this work is a real advance, says materials scientist Daniel Jaque at the Autonomous University of Madrid,
as the poles of Mars and almost 200 degrees hotter than the surface of Venus. They can also detect temperature changes across distances as small as 5 m (roughly the size of a sperm cell head) and on timescales as short as 800 picoseconds(.
a rare-earth metal that is highly magnetic and sometimes given to patients to increase contrast in an MRI.
because pentaquarks might be formed inside collapsing stars, their discovery might tell us more about what stars are composed of
and how they evolve. The new data might also lead to the discovery of other pentaquarks with different masses."
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
Along the way the rover's onboard cameras scan for rocks that are too small for the satellites to catch.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
Along the way the rover's onboard cameras scan for rocks that are too small for the satellites to catch.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.
#China set to launch probe on round trip to the moon China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth.
The Chang'e 5-T1 mission is set to blast off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan China on 23 october.
It will fly around the back of the moon and return to Earth using a parachute to slow its decent through the atmosphere about 8 days later.
It's a precursor to a more advanced mission planned for 2017. This future mission will send a lunar orbiter that will release a lander to touch down on the moon's surface and collect 2 kilograms of soil and rock.
The lander will then blast off and dock with the orbiter for the return trip to Earth.
China's most recent moon mission Chang'e 3 placed a lander and rover on the moon last year.
Chang'e 5-T1 will test China's heat-shield technology which is essential for surviving a high-speed re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
The country is following a path blazed by other major spacefaring nations: the US sent humans to retrieve rocks during the Apollo moon landing missions
The spacecraft will also carry experiments to test what happens to bacteria and plants exposed to radiation beyond low Earth orbit.
China has partnered also with a Luxembourg-based firm called Luxspace to send a tiny spacecraft called the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission around the moon.
It will ride on the same rocket as Chang'e 5-T1 and broadcast a ham radio signal for amateurs to tune in to o
#Spacecraft seek geysers without human help When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 november the lander will follow prearranged orders from Earth to touch down safely
and send data home for analysis . But future spacecraft may be able to do it all on their own.
Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California have developed software that can identify a plume of water
or vapour on a celestial body's surface with the goal of directing another instrument to make follow-up observations.
Comets asteroids and icy moons have shown all signs of venting plumes into space. But because these bodies are far from Earth
and the jets are not always active exploring them remotely is challenging. The more the spacecraft can do without waiting for communication with Earth the better they can explore especially
when they encounter activity that may be short-lived or only within viewing range for a short time Wagstaff says.
The researchers tested the software on unprocessed images of comet Hartley 2 and Saturn's moon Enceladus.
We want to replicate what the instrument sees says team member David Thompson. The program looks for bright material outside the limb of the moon or comet checks that the material meets up with the surface
and is larger than a minimum size and then determines if it is seeing a plume.
Wagstaff thinks an upcoming Europa orbiter mission would be a great opportunity to use this technology.
But the software will be of even more benefit on future missions to the outer solar system and eventually planetary systems outside our solar system.
#Mini MRI to check bone health on space station Astronauts may soon have a portable MRI machine to keep an eye on their muscles and bones during a spell on the International space station.
Bone and muscle loss in microgravity is a major health issue in orbit astronauts are checked usually before and after missions.
So Sarty and his colleagues at MRI manufacturer MRI-Tech Canada of Calgary Alberta and space flight hardware maker Com Dev International of Cambridge Ontario have developed a technique called Transmit Array Spatial Encoding
Astronauts need only place their wrists inside to have checked their bones. Sarty presented the technology at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto Canada on 3 october.
which saves us considerable weight making it suitable for space flight Sarty told New Scientist. It also leaks very little magnetism outside of its enclosure so it won't interfere with other experiments on the ISS.
if the Canadian space agency selects their ISS-MRI for a life science berth on a rocket flight in 2016.
While a system based on permanent magnets sounds perfect for use in space where power is scarce the Canadians will have their work cut out expanding the technology On earth predicts David Taylor founder of scanner-maker MR Solutions in Guildford UK.
#Desktop sonic black hole emits Hawking radiation A model black hole that traps sound instead of light has been caught emitting quantum particles thought to be the analogue of the theoretical Hawking radiation.
The effect may be the first time that a lab-based black hole has created Hawking particles in the same way expected from real black holes.
Black holes are ultra-dense concentrations of matter left behind when a star or other massive body collapses.
Given that physicists expected that black holes would be well black. But in 1974 Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge predicted they should emit a faint glow of particles now known as Hawking radiation.
An oddity of quantum theory that says that the vacuum of space is not truly empty
But if one gets caught inside a black hole's event horizon the other is free to escape
The glow from real-life black holes would be too faint to see so to confirm Hawking's prediction physicists have built artificial black holes that mimic the event horizon.
In 2010 a team led by Francesco Belgiorno at the University of Milan made a model black hole the horizon
whether it used the same physics as a real black hole horizon. A quantum mechanical fluid should be able to mimic the exact physics of a black hole's event horizon albeit at a much smaller scale.
In 2009 Jeff Steinhauer at the Technion-Israel Institute of technology in Haifa and his colleagues made just such a model black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates (BECS) a quantum state of matter where a clump of super
-cold atoms behaves like a single atom. Now the team claims that their black hole has produced just the kind of Hawking radiation expected of a real black hole.
This tells us that the idea of Hawking actually works Steinhauer says. A black hole should really produce Hawking radiation.
The team used one laser to confine the BEC to a narrow tube and another to accelerate some of it faster than the speed of sound.
The Hawking effect comes from quantum noise at the horizon says William Unruh at the University of British columbia in Canada one of the first to propose fluid-based black hole analogues.
but the phonons inside the black hole bounce back and forth between the inner and outer horizons triggering the creation of more Hawking phonons each time much like a laser amplifies light.
Physicists call this effect a black hole laser The Hawking radiation exponentially grows it self-amplifies Steinhauer says.
whether the pairs of phonons are entangled another predicted feature of real black holes that may have fiery consequences.
This work is really impressive says Daniele Faccio at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in the UK who was on the team that made the fibre-optic based black hole.
It is of course clear that black holes differ from flowing BECS and showing that the effect occurs in a BEC does not prove it would occur in black holes.
However it sure increases my confidence that it does. The mathematics and the results are too similar to just be a coincidence.
#Martian methane sniffer adapted for Earth WHAT'S that gassy smell? The hypersensitive methane detector on NASA's Mars rover curiosity is being repurposed to ferret out gas leaks On earth.
The Pacific gas and electric company in San francisco and global energy giant Chevron are testing a handheld earthbound version that is 1000 times as sensitive as existing methane sniffers.
It's the same technology as on Mars she says. When it picks up trace amounts of methane it kind of sings to the operator
#World's first space detective agency launched IN THE MIDDLE of a boundary squabble with your neighbour? Want to find out who is dumping waste near your house?
You need to call the space detectives. Satellite imaging specialist Raymond Harris and space lawyer Raymond Purdy both at University college London have launched just Air & Space Evidence Ltd of London the world's first space detective agency.
The pair intend to use their combined experience of space-based photographic databases and Earth observation privacy law to ensure that people can wield authentic imagery that stands up in court.
They want everyone to have the chance to use space imagery to settle legal disputes from homeowners disputing garden boundaries to businesses fighting vehicle theft.
Insurers might find it useful in investigating fraud and councils in tackling environmental assaults such as waste incineration or illegal logging and quarrying.
And it won't cost much more than having your house surveyed Harris says. It might seem a simple matter for someone to use Google earth say
For instance people cannot be given sure a satellite was working on the day in question or that the area of land imaged is actually the land at issue.
The space detectives will use their expertise in commissioning space images to order and their familiarity with the databases of space image suppliers like Digital Globe of Longmont Colorado.
We can make a difference by ensuring space images have audit trails that stand up says Purdy.
But most of the work will involve images taken by orbiting satellites especially as recent earth observation start-ups like Planet Labs
and Skybox Imaging make inexpensive space imagery more widely available. Paul Champion a private investigator based in Cardiff UK
and a governor of the Association of British Investigators says the notion of space-based detection is fascinating.
There is a need for space detectives says Joanne Wheeler a space lawyer at Bird & Bird in London because finding the right pictures takes a lot of work.
If you know what you might want a space detective agency would be a great service.
This article appeared in print under the headline The space detectivesleader Nowhere to hide: the danger of satellite spie e
#Rainbow galaxies reveal why cosmos is full of spirals (Image: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ SMA/CARMA/IRAM/J. Ueda et al.
Each entry in this visual catalogue of psychedelic pictures captures a violent collision of galaxies revealing for the first time how galaxies like the Milky way form.
These images show the carbon monoxide gas detected in neighbouring galaxies 40 to 600 million light years from Earth in their final stages of merging.
Out of 37 galaxies observed these 30 all show gas rotating around the centre of the galaxy meaning they are disc galaxies in the making.
For the first time there is observational evidence for merging galaxies that could result in disc galaxies. This is a large and unexpected step towards understanding the mystery of the birth of disc galaxies says Junko Ueda from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Ueda and her team made the observations using data from the ALMA radio telescope. Computer simulations suggested that
when galaxies merge they usually form a single blob-shaped galaxy classed as elliptical. However most of the galaxies in the universe are shaped pancake disc galaxies such as lenticular galaxies and our own spiral Milky way.
As this rogues'gallery of galactic mergers shows a disc-shaped offspring is a common result of a collision.
Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/214/1
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011