Alternate Realities or Parallel Universes

These are self-contained, co-existing with one’s own. Multiverses are groups of universes. This is only fantasy now, but what if there was a parallel universe born with every choice we make, and ever have made. In fact right now as I write this and as you read this it is ultimately possible that you are creating endless amounts of parallel universes within a multiverse of possibilities.

This idea is found throughout mythology as well as books, sci-fi as well as others. In dark fantasy or horror it is often the place for hiding things. In Narnia, this is the place where a whole other life is lived.

Mars Moon Phobos Likely Forged by Catastrophic Blast

One of the two moons of Mars most likely formed from rubble catapulted into space after a comet or meteorite slammed into the Red Planet, a new study finds.


The moon, Phobos, looks a lot like an asteroid: It's lumpy, potato-shaped and very small. It has an average radius of just 11 kilometers (6.8 miles).

Scientists have long wondered about the origin of Phobos — is it merely a captured asteroid, the leftovers from Mars' formation or evidence of a cosmic Martian hit-and-run with another object?

The new study found that the moon's composition and density strongly indicate that, like the leading theory for Earth's own moon, Phobos is the result of a catastrophic impact with its parent planet.

Phobos is one of two moons of Mars. The other, Deimos, is smaller than its partner.

What makes a Phobos?

Researchers used data from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft to study Phobos' composition.

By analyzing the probe's infrared observations, astronomers found that Phobos and asteroids don't seem to be made of the same stuff. Instead, the moon has many minerals also seen on Mars, suggesting a common origin for the two bodies.

The team also found so-called phyllosilicates — minerals that can form in the presence of water — on Phobos. Phyllosilicates have been detected on Mars, too.
"This is very intriguing as it implies the interaction of silicate materials with liquid water on the parent body prior to incorporation into Phobos," said study co-author Marco Giuranna of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Rome, Italy. "Alternatively, phyllosilicates may have formed in situ, but this would mean that Phobos required sufficient internal heating to enable liquid water to remain stable."

Independent observations from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft support the composition data from Mars Express, the researchers said.

The research was presented Sept. 20 at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome, Italy, and has been submitted to the journal Planetary and Space Science.

Too spongy for an asteroid

During the study, evidence piled up to rule out the captured-asteroid scenario for Phobos, researchers said.

The first sign came while they were studying the Martian moon's density to see how it matched with that of asteroids. They determined the density of Phobos to be about 1.86 grams per cubic centimeter.

"This number is significantly lower than the density of meteoritic material associated with asteroids," said Pascal Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "It implies a sponge-like structure with voids making up 25 to 45 percent of Phobos' interior."

Other evidence points toward a relatively spongy Phobos, too.

If it were denser, the moon probably wouldn't have survived the massive impact that created its Stickney Crater, Giuranna said. Stickney is about 10 km (6 miles) across — nearly half as wide as all of Phobos.

In addition, the researchers said, a highly porous asteroid — if that's what Phobos once was — probably would not have survived being captured by Mars' gravity.

Yet sponginess is consistent with the impact-formation hypothesis for Phobos, they added. Chunks of rock and rubble blown off Mars' surface would accrete somewhat haphazardly in its orbit, leaving interior pockets and voids.

Finally, the motion of both Phobos and its sister moon Deimos — which is also small, rocky and lumpy—argue against the asteroid-capture scenario, according to the researchers. Their orbits are too neat — too circular and too close to the Martian equator — for a couple of snagged space rocks, researchers said.

More missions, more data

Despite the evidence from Mars Express, more observations are still needed before scientists can conclusively determine the origin of Phobos, the researchers said.

The Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, set to launch in 2011, could help settle the question. Phobos-Grunt aims to land on Phobos, grab soil samples ("Grunt" being the Russian word for "soil") and return with them to Earth. Such samples could be compared to Martian meteorites that have landed on Earth.

Similar studies of lunar soil samples have shown that Earth and our moon are likely made of the same stuff. This determination helped scientists come up with the leading theory of our moon's formation: A long-ago catastrophic impact.

Hellish Venus

It may seem downright bizarre, but a new model of Venus' super-hot atmosphere suggests its greenhouse gases may actually be cooling the planet's interior.

These gases initially cause Venus' temperature to rise, but at a certain threshold, they can trigger dynamic processes – which researchers call "mobilization" – in the planet's crust that cool the mantle and overall surface temperature, researchers found.

Venus surface temperature, on average, is a scorching 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius).

"For some decades we've known that the large amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of Venus cause the extreme heat we observe presently," said study leader Lena Noack of the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases that led to Venus' hellish temperature were belched into the planet's atmosphere over time through erupting volcanoes.

Noack and her colleagues examined the interaction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Venus' atmosphere and conclude that the planet may have been even hotter than it is today, Noack said.

"But at a certain point this process turned on its head – the high temperatures caused a partial mobilization of the Venusian crust, leading to an efficient cooling of the mantle, and the volcanism strongly decreased," Noack said. "This resulted in lower surface temperatures, rather comparable to today's temperature on Venus, and the mobilization of the surface stopped."

Noack and co-author Doris Breuer built a one-of-a-kind Venus computer model in which the planet's hot atmosphere was paired with a 3-D model of the interior.

Unlike on Earth, Venus' high temperatures have a much bigger effect on the rocky surface, which ultimately loses its insulating qualities, the researchers said.

"It's a little bit like lifting the lid on the mantle: The interior of Venus suddenly cools very efficiently and the rate of volcanism ceases," Noack said. "Our model shows that after that 'hot' era of volcanism, the slow-down of volcanism leads to a strong decrease of the temperatures in the atmosphere."

Their models also suggested differences in the time and place in which the volcanoes resurfaced Venus over time.

So even as Venus' atmosphere cooled, there would remain a few active volcanoes which resurface some spots with lava flows, researchers said. In fact, some of these volcanoes might be active even today, according to recent results from the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission.

Venus Express launched in 2005 and arrived at the cloud-covered planet a year later. The spacecraft recently detected 'hot spots' on Venus, or areas of unusually high surface temperatures, at volcanoes that were previously thought to be extinct.

Becoming Alien: Q&A With Conceptual Space Artist Jonathon Keats

By Mike Wall

SAN FRANCISCO — Setting foot on Mars isn't in the cards for most of us, but starting this week you can soak up the Red Planet's essence for just $45.

The Local Air & Space Administration, a shoestring operation run by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, is selling mineral water infused with bits of Martian meteorite. LASA also hawks bottled moon essence for $30, and you can get some stellar water — made with carbonaceous chondrites containing bits of nanodiamond likely forged in the cores of faraway stars — for $60. [Photo of Martian mineral water.]

LASA began selling this stuff — which Keats bottled after smashing up some space rocks with a hammer — Thursday (Oct. 21), at the opening of its "Exotourism Bureau" here at San Francisco's Modernism art gallery.

For the past several weeks, LASA has also been growing cacti in asteroid soil and potatoes in the various mineral waters, thus spawning beings that are part Earthling, part alien.

LASA isn't Keats' first foray into space-science art. He has also created paintings based on signals picked up by the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico. And in a project called Speculations, he bought and sold property in the extra dimensions of space posited by string-theory physics.

SPACE.com caught up with Keats — who is a columnist at Wired Magazine and an art critic at San Francisco Magazine, as well as a novelist — to chat about space exploration, science and what it means to be alien:

To make LASA's mineral water, you actually got your hands on some space rocks. It's not a gag — you went out and bought some of these things off the Internet, right?

Yes. And that is essential in all of the work that I do. What I do is completely absurd, perhaps, looked at from the outside. Yet for that absurdity to have any depth to it, I feel that I need to take it absolutely seriously.

So when I was dealing in real estate, I had contracts that were perfectly valid in a court of law, provided that the court of law was willing to admit to the existence of extra dimensions of space. In this case I went on the Internet, and I've been purchasing from many of the same dealers who supply the world's laboratories.

Your real estate project — people actually bought some of those extra-dimensional lots?

Yes. I did better, I think, than Coldwell or any of the big firms if you look at volume. If you look at numbers, I didn't do so well. My most expensive lot was around $15 or so. But I was offering some real estate as low as 9 cents for a unit. I sold around 65 or 70 units in the first evening of sales, and there have been more sales since then, though my pressure tactics only lasted through that initial evening.

What do you hope people who buy LASA's mineral water get out of the experience?

I hope that they are able to explore these alien realms from within. I don't know what that will entail for any given person. [Moon's Water Comes in Three Flavors]

For me, what is most interesting is not so much what is out there but what the process of incorporating those alien minerals into my system means for me as a person. The fact that this does make me alien by degree — little by little, the more that I drink, the more alien I become.

For me, the optimal way in which to experience life is to have the advantage of being a little bit of an outsider, whatever it is I encounter, whatever it is that I do, because that gives me a sort of perspective on it.

The bodies in our solar system are exchanging material all the time — there are rocks from Mars on Earth, rocks from the moon on Earth. Is part of what you're trying to say that we're all interconnected in the solar system?

I like that idea you're bringing up. I think also that interconnectedness throughout time is very interesting. So for example, in the case of the stellar mineral water — I can't really offer you an excursion to our sun. It would be too hot. The water would boil off, and there would be other problems too, which you can imagine.

But I can offer you an excursion to other stars that once were. That nanodiamond which you are absorbing as you're drinking this water comes from stars that predate us and that are the materials from which we come. So there's almost a deja vu that takes place. It's almost an encounter with our ancestors.

You've actually tasted all three mineral waters. Knowing what's in them, do you manufacture a taste in your head, or do they just taste like water?

I think it's inevitable because of the nature of the material, that it does seem to have something strange about it. I can't place a flavor. It isn't like it tastes like chicken — well, I don't think so.

I guess that the carbonaceous chondrite, if you were to eat enough of it, might taste like burned chicken. I can't help but believe that each one of them has a distinct flavor to it. [Astronauts Drink Recycled Urine...and Celebrate]

But I suspect that that is as much an act of fraudulence on my own part toward myself as the sort of low-impact fraudulence undertaken every day by mineral water companies such as Evian and others toward their customer base might happen to be. I just don't know that Evian tastes any different than Calistoga, or that Calistoga is any different than Fuji. Fuji, or Fiji I think it is. I don't even know my competition, my terrestrial competition.

Have you gotten any interest from folks wanting to buy this stuff already?

I've gotten some curiosity. It's also been interesting to find how many people have asked whether I think anyone will actually drink this stuff, and when I say that I have, have looked at me as if I really am an alien, and I mean a Martian glowing green.

It seems fascinating to me that probably every single one of us as a child ate quite a lot of dirt. And probably most of us still do, at least a little bit. Yet dirt from Mars or from the moon is somehow seen to be toxic, dangerous, and I wonder why that is. I suspect that it is in some way related to the xenophobia that comes through in terms of our treatment of illegal aliens, in terms of the sort of war that you see between people of different religions in the Middle East, for example.

I hope that in some non-literal, non-polemical way, this project might also in a sense reflect on xenophobia of all different kinds, and by encouraging others to become alien in some respect that it might help to encourage a certain empathy for people who are alien in legal terms, or in terms of having different beliefs.

Did you ever think about offering customers a full alien meal, with the potatoes and the water?

That's a good idea. But maybe in that case it would make more sense to use the water as a base for wine or something like that.

I was going to ask you about that. Did you consider booze? You could call it "Moonshine." It would probably sell.

You know, I think that you should probably pursue that. You will put us out of business, and that will allow me to start working on some new projects.

It seems like you keep coming back to space science and astronomy. Is that because you want to divine our place in the universe, or are you just interested in this stuff?

The sciences continually recur in my work. Religion is another theme that comes up again and again. So too is commerce. Those are some of the fundamentals of our world. So I continually come back to science and continually poke and prod, because I am interested in what our assumptions are about the sciences.

Why space? Certainly, I am interested in it. That's just a matter of my personality. But the second reason, very briefly, is that space is out there. And because my art is almost always about getting us outside of ourselves, space is a very convenient place to go.

http://www.space.com/entertainment/keats-space-exploration-art-q-a-101022.html

Astronomers Worldwide Forge New Rules for ET Engagement

Lee Speigel Contributor

AOL News

(Oct. 8) -- Is alien disclosure just around the corner?
I can't say for sure, but lately there's been a lot of news that, if looked at collectively, could be interpreted as pointing in that direction.
It seems as if everyone from the Vatican to the military to scientists conducting the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, are getting on the ET bandwagon.

Robyn Beck, AFP / Getty Images

Dusk falls over the Very Large Array, one of the world's premier astronomical radio observatories, on the Plains of San Agustin, 50 miles west of Socorro, N.M.
Just last week, in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Study group created new guidelines for how earthlings should best handle official contact with extraterrestrials.
"The guidelines were and still are: Do good science and don't cry wolf. Make sure that what you're about to announce is, in fact, what you think it is," Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute's Center for SETI Research in California, told AOL News.
"In the case of the first protocol, it was: Don't respond until there's some consensus, a) that we should respond; and b) when we respond, who's going to speak for Earth and what are they going to say?
"We originally took that to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and it's duly filed away. When we presented that, we suggested that the U.N. might want to be proactive, and to think about the fact that this might happen."
For decades, SETI scientists, using radio and optical telescopes, have searched the heavens for proof that we're not alone in the universe. In the new SETI guidelines, the protocol for confirmation of an alien intelligence is clearly laid out:
"If the verification process confirms -- by the consensus of the other investigators involved and to a degree of certainty judged by the discoverers to be credible -- that a signal or other evidence is due to extraterrestrial intelligence, the discoverer shall report this conclusion in a full and complete, open manner to the public, the scientific community and the secretary-general of the United Nations."
Last November, Tarter was a participant at a Vatican-sponsored astrobiology conference -- a gathering of international scientists and religious leaders who considered the idea that life may exist elsewhere in the cosmos. In fact, a Jesuit astronomer, Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, had previously suggested that the idea of "brother extraterrestrials" would not conflict with Catholic doctrine.

Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
SETI astronomer Jill Tarter, who has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings in the cosmos.
"It was all about the question of life in the universe, and how we might find it, or life of a different kind -- weird life -- on this planet," said Tarter.
Tarter, whose work formed the basis of the character portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie "Contact," suggests religious groups would be fine with the idea that Earth is not the only inhabited planet around.
"People say, 'Oh, my God, it's the end of religion if you detect a signal,' and I think organized religion is a lot more flexible than that," she said. "It's been around for millennia. Our view of the universe has changed hugely, so I don't think that this would be the death knell or the singularity in organized religion."

It's also hard to escape all the recent UFO items in the news.
Two months ago, the National Archives of England released UFO-related documents, including some that revealed how former Prime Minister Winston Churchill reportedly covered up wartime accounts of UFO sightings because he feared they might create a panic among the population.

Later this month, we'll find out how the European Union will finally respond to Italian Northern League leader Mario Borghezio's request, made in June, that EU member governments disclose their UFO files and establish a European UFO commission.

Ten days ago, at the National Press Club in Washington, several former Air Force officers came together, offering testimony of their experiences with UFOs at nuclear weapons sites, both in the U.S. and abroad, going back several decades.

An upsurge of UFO reports in China this year has prompted a planetary astronomer at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to speculate that "contact between humans and extraterrestrial life will, hopefully, come this century."

Last week's announcement of the discovery of an Earth-like planet in our galactic neighborhood created a stir in the scientific community as well as the media.

While Tarter is engaged in the search for radio signals from possible distant civilizations, she acknowledges the significance of finding a planet that may harbor only primitive life forms.

"The universe is appearing to be more bio-friendly as we get closer to having a real Earth analog," she said. "It's really nice to see something that's about Earth-sized in an orbit that might, in fact, allow there to be a temperate and water-filled area on the planet."
And this week, British researchers hope to find alien life forms closer to home, in Earth's upper atmosphere, a prospect Tarter finds intriguing.
"There could be, in fact, another shadow biosphere on Earth where there's a different form of metabolism that might not use DNA, or might use different bio-solvents -- it's actually not completely out of the question."
Tarter suggests that life might even be found in non-Earthlike habitable zones, in places where "extremophile" organisms may thrive -- life forms that may actually require hazardous conditions.

Sponsored Links "As we've looked at extremophiles and looked at our own solar system better, we appreciate that," she said. "There might be life under the ice of [Jupiter's moon] Europa, and that could happen in other planetary systems. The nice thing is that we're getting close enough to it being science -- that we can actually go after the details and not just have to tell a story. It's really exciting."
So, does all of this -- SETI, Vatican, UFOs, high-atmosphere microbes -- or any of this signal a coming extraterrestrial disclosure?
Maybe I'm just tying a string of alien beads together that are leading nowhere, but I can't help wondering

Water Ice Common on Asteroids, Discovery Suggests

Scientists have discovered water ice on an asteroid for the second time, suggesting that it is more common on space rocks in our solar system than previously thought.

Two research teams have found evidence of water ice and organic molecules on the asteroid 65 Cybele, just six months after discovering the same stuff on a different space rock — asteroid 24 Themis — for the first time. The results suggest that asteroids may have delivered much of these essential materials for life to the early Earth, the researchers said.

"This discovery suggests that this region of our solar system contains more water ice than anticipated," said Humberto Campins, of the University of Central Florida, in a statement. "And it supports the theory that asteroids may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water and the building blocks for life to form and evolve here."

A very thin layer

The researchers analyzed the sunlight bouncing off 65 Cybele, which has a diameter of about 180 miles (290 kilometers) and circles the sun in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The teams used two different NASA instruments: the Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The telescopes picked up the telltale signatures of water ice and complex organic solids on the space rock's surface, researchers said.

They didn't find great sheets of ice — the asteroid's ice layer is probably less than one micron thick, Campins told reporters today (Oct. 8) during the 42nd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, Calif.

The ice layer is probably also very unstable, Campins said, so it has probably only coated the space rock for a few thousand years or so. The research team isn't sure where it came from, but one possibility is the asteroid's subsurface.

If the ice did indeed migrate up from 65 Cybele's interior, the water could be primordial, Campins said — leftovers from the early stages of our solar system's formation. But that's just speculation at this point.

"We have a detection, and we're starting to figure out what the physical characteristics and abundance of this ice are," Campins said.
Changing our view of asteroids

The discovery of water ice on 24 Themis — announced in April 2010 by the same two research teams — changed many scientists' perspectives on asteroids. [5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids]

Asteroid 24 Themis resides in the same region of the asteroid belt as 65 Cybele. Many scientists had thought asteroids in this part of the belt were too close to the sun to carry water ice.

These asteroids may have been ice-covered long ago during the solar system's youth, the thinking went, but their surface water should have evaporated by now.

Finding water ice on such space rocks now, 4.6 billion years after the solar system's birth, suggests that asteroids may have delivered much of the water that fills Earth's oceans — and perhaps some of the complex organic molecules that served as the building blocks of life here, scientists have said.

Filling the oceans?

Earth has experienced a violent history, having been bombarded by space rocks throughout much of its life. In particular, a large rock is thought to have crashed into Earth some 4.5 billion years ago, knocking off a giant chunk of material that eventually became our moon.

At that point, the collision would have heated things up so much that any water on Earth would have been vaporized. So, how did the oceans form?

Comets hold a great deal of water ice, but they are not ideal candidates for filling up Earth's early oceans. Comet water tends to be of a different nature — its atoms are in a different configuration — than most of the water on Earth, scientists have said.

The new results strengthen the case for asteroids as water-bearers for the early Earth. In the solar system's early days, asteroids likely slammed into Earth far more frequently than they do today, researchers have said. If many asteroids were even just a little icy, the Earth could have received quite a drenching, they added.

The discovery may also be a boon to NASA's new space exploration program, which is aiming to send astronauts to visit a near-Earth asteroid by 2025.

Finding E.T. May Become Harder If Aliens Go Digital

By Zoë Macintosh

SPACE.com Staff

Scientists may have an extra challenge when it comes to detecting alien civilizations: a time limit.

A new study suggests that intelligent aliens, if their technological progression is similar to that of humanity's, are likely to have moved away from noisy radio transmissions to harder-to-hear digital signals within a 100-year time frame. That offers Earth just a narrow window in which to pick up any signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

"Based on the results that we looked at, if we assume that the civilizations are humanlike with similar technological progress to us, we calculate the probability of making contact is roughly one in 10 million," the study's lead author, Duncan Forgan, told SPACE.com.

The time it takes a planet to go "radio quiet" dramatically restricts the types of signal it sends into space and our chances for eavesdropping on them, said Forgan, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Edinborough in Scotland. [Poll - Is Earth Ready to Meet an Alien Civilization?]

Forgan and his team applied their technology-development time scale to a simulation of the galaxy, based on the assumption that the pace of an alien civilization's technological progress would be similar to that on Earth. Based on this simulation, the researchers determined the 1-in-10 million odds of humans accidentally stumbling across a transmission from aliens.

The researchers, whose study will appear in an upcoming edition of the International Journal of Astrobiology, focused their work on the expected eavesdropping capabilities of the Square-Kilometer Telescope, a radio telescope slated to be completed by 2023.

A radio century

In the early 20th century, the only options for communicating quickly over long distances were by telegram or wireless radio. As radio technology improved, so did the quality of its broadcasts and receivers.

"In the past, the detector would only take up a chunk of that energy, and the rest would go out into the universe," Forgan said. "Now, instead of firing off a huge amount of energy and picking up a trace, we send out a very small amount and soak up almost all of it, so the amount of lost energy is much lower."

Traditional radio communication is being replaced by innovations in the use of light to send digital signals through fiber-optic cable and the emergence of the Internet. The transition from analog to digital broadcasts, which in the last few decades recoded radio signals into formats that preserved their clarity over long distances, have further cut down on Earth's signal leakage into the universe.

The Drake equation

To determine the Square-Kilometer Telescope's chances of picking up a radio broadcast from intelligent extraterrestrials, scientists used simulations similar in structure to that of the famous Drake Equation.

While that formula (created by astronomer Frank Drake) spat out a single number for the amount of contactable civilizations by stringing together seven factors deemed critical to the formation of intelligent life, the program used probabilities to create a spatial distribution of a galaxy's stars and planets.

"What we're doing is approaching it from a different angle," Forgan said. "Instead of squeezing huge amounts of astronomical data into several numbers, we're going to use as much of it as possible."

The scientists attempted to create a statistically accurate picture of our galaxy by using data on typical star masses, locations, number and masses of planets, and their habitability. According to their simulations, civilizations on par with the technological development of humans could be separated by distances of at least 1,000 light-years or so.

One type of simulation examined a scenario in which all intelligent alien life became radio quiet — a realistic scenario, Forgan said, because signal leakage lessens steadily as technology improves. Another type looked at civilizations that Earth could see during the planet's entire lifetime.

"When you do that, the possibilities improve immensely; it goes from being a remote impossibility to being much, much higher," Forgan said.

The concept of radio quiet doesn't affect the change in distance, but it affects the time scale during which you can hear the signal, he added.

"If your target is broadcasting for 1,000 years, then this gives you more time to find it before the signal switches off than if they were only broadcasting for 100 years," Forgan said. "The 'radio quiet' concept reduces the time scale to a very low number, which means your chances of hearing it are very small."

What this means is that searching only for radio leakages could cause scientists to miss "quite a lot" of civilizations, Forgan said.

"These results aren't as new as you may think, but they are exciting because it shows that even the most powerful radio telescopes in the world will still struggle to find E.T. unless we design the search carefully," Forgan said.

Previous studies on the observation limits of the Square-Kilometer Telescope showed it could detect extraterrestrial signals from up to about 300 light-years away within two months, assuming that the other civilization's broadcasts were at least as strong as the military radar used by Earth's governments.

Will we ever detect life?

Scientists continue to use radio waves to search for life because of the scarcity of natural sources of radio waves in the universe, and the fact that they are less easily lost by absorption than other forms of electromagnetic radiation, which includes light.

Even the smallest snippet from an alien broadcast could count as evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence.

"An artificial signal will have patterns in it that usually do not appear in nature, even if distorted," Forgan said.

Alternate search targets include technologies that possess a distinct radiation signature, such as the exotic matter created inside a particle accelerator, and technologies that have not been invented yet on Earth, such as communication by lasers or neutrinos.

Neutrinos are very light particles that constantly stream through our bodies and the Earth. (If anyone found a way to capture neutrino emissions in a device, Forgan said, the technology surely would replace Megahertz light waves for cell phones, because the signals would never be obstructed by a building.)

But doesn't mean humanity should give up on radio: Rather than look at the steady drip of leakage that results from our televisions, radio or radar, we could look for alien civilizations that are making a general effort to communicate with us, Forgan said.

That approach, he admitted, is likely to mean a long wait for any cosmic callbacks.

"If we send a signal right now, it will take four years to reach the nearest star," Forgan said. "It's much more likely we will receive a return message in hundreds or thousands of years.

"On the other hand, other civilizations may have a different outlook. They may be desperate to make communication with other civilizations."

A Million Questions About Habitable Planet Gliese 581g (Okay, 12)

By Jeremy Hsu

A newfound Earth-sized planet discovered in the habitable zone of a nearby star looks very promising for the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but many unknowns remain.

The planet, Gliese 581g, is one of two new worlds discovered orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which now has a family of planets that totals six. [Tour the six Gliese 581 planets.]
Here is SPACE.com's look at what scientists know so far about the intriguing world, as well as a few questions that don't quite have answers yet. Consider it a new entry into Earth's own hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy:

How do I say the planet's name?
Gliese 581g may look like it should rhyme with "Grease," but it is actually pronounced as two-syllables as (Glee-zuh). The name comes from the German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese, who catalogued the planet's parent star Gleise 581 as part of a star survey first published in 1957.
Where is Gliese 581g?
The planet Gliese 581g orbits the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which sits 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).
How far is it from the parent star?
Early estimates suggest Gliese 581g is 0.15 astronomical units from its star. One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and sun, which is approximately 93 million miles (150 million km). That distance means the planet is close enough to its star so that it can complete an orbit in a little less than 37 days.
One of its sibling planets was closer to the hot edge of the habitable zone around the star Gliese 581, and one was farther out the colder edge of the habitable zone. Gliese 581g is located just right between the two. [Graphic: Gliese 581 solar system orbits]

What is a habitable zone?

Think of a star's habitable zone as the swath of space surrounding a star where conditions for life as we know it are possible. Closer in, a planet roasts. Farther out, it freezes.

Planets within that habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, have a range of surface temperatures that allow for readily available liquid water and other conditions that may support the rise of life. This cosmic sweet spot can vary, because it depends upon the type of star and the point in time for any given star's lifespan.

For instance, our sun's current habitable zone is farther out than that of the star Gliese 581, a red dwarf about 50 times dimmer than our sun.

The cooler red dwarf allows the Gliese 581 planets to orbit much closer and still remain in the habitable zone.

A planet within the habitable zone does not have a guaranteed chance of originating life, because biology also depends upon the planet's size and a host of conditions, including chemical makeup. But what little researchers know about Gliese 581g makes it a highly promising candidate.

How big is Gliese 581g in relation to Earth?

The planet is lumped into the "nearly Earth-sized" category. It is between three and four times the mass of our Earth — bigger, but small enough to be rocky rather than gaseous. Its radius is anywhere between 1.3 and two times the size of Earth.

How much would I weigh on Gliese 581g?

An Earth-sized planet with three times the mass of our planet would pull down on your body with three times the force of Earth's standard gravity. That means if you weighed 120 pounds on Earth, you would weigh about 120 x 3 pounds on an Earth-sized planet with three times the mass, or 360 pounds.

But Gliese 581g also has a somewhat larger radius, so that also factors into the equation. A 120 pound person would weigh about 213 pounds on Gliese 581g at the lower end of the size and mass estimates. This all remains theoretical until astronomers can pin down the actual size and mass.

What's it like on the surface?

There is no solid evidence at the moment that suggests what surface conditions might be like, or even if liquid water and an atmosphere are actually present.

What researchers know is that the planet exists at the right distance from its star to have liquid water. It's also at the right distance to have an atmosphere which can protect that water, if exists on the surface.

But one of the planet's discoverers, astronomer Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, pointed out that "it's pretty hard to imagine that water wouldn't be there."

He likened it to the examples of the Earth, its moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He also noted that the Orion Nebula is making enough water every 24 seconds to fill all the oceans of the Earth.

Researchers also know that the planet is tidally locked to its star. That means one side experiences eternal daylight, and the other side experiences unending darkness. Such a locked configuration helps to stabilize the planet's surface climate, Vogt said.

3-D global circulation models have shown that the temperature differences on the day and night sides of the planet would not be enough for water to either freeze or boil off. They also suggest that the atmospheric circulation and wind patterns would be relatively benign.

Does it have moons?

There's one called Pandora ... just kidding! There's no info on any moons around Gliese 581g, or around any other planets in its solar system yet. But astronomers have long assumed that alien planets could have moons, and that some of the moons might harbor life.

How long would it take to get there?

This question depends upon how fast you travel. Given our current lack of Star Trek's warp drives, any interstellar expedition would have to travel far slower than the speed of light.

A spaceship traveling at a one-tenth of the speed of light would reach Gliese 581g within about 220 years, Vogt said. That would allow the spaceship to begin getting close-up pictures and a sense of the planet's atmosphere.

That time scale is not promising for existing human lifespans, but robotic explorers could more easily take up the challenge. However, the fastest spaceships built so far don't come anywhere near even that one-tenth light-speed mark.

What kind of life would we expect to find?

Any discussion about alien life on Gliese 581g is purely speculative at this point, according to co-discoverer Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Washington, D.C.

Butler took a more cautionary approach as opposed to Vogt, who said his gut feeling told him "the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent."

Still, even Butler noted that anywhere you find water on Earth, you find life. He suggested that a similar condition should hold for almost anywhere in the universe, including Gliese 581g if it does hold water.

Why doesn't the planet have a real name?

The planet is called Gliese 581g because its star, Gliese 581, is designated "a," and the four previously discovered planets in the system are called b, c, d and e.

But Vogt said that he has unofficially begun calling the planet "Zarmina's World," in honor of his wife.

What would aliens living on Gliese 581 see if they looked toward our sun?

You remember that we don't have evidence of alien life on the planet yet, right?

But assuming they exist, aliens could spot our own sun as star in their sky without requiring any telescopes or binoculars.

If the alien astronomers had our current level of technology, they would be also able to easily detect Neptune, and possibly Jupiter and Saturn.

Hubble Telescope Captures Heavenly Vision of Lagoon Nebula

By SPACE.com Staff

A majestic new image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals billowing waves of glowing gas and dust at the heart of a bright and active star-forming nebula in deep space.

The delicate-looking clouds in the Lagoon Nebula are sculpted by the intense radiation from hot young stars. [New Photo of the Lagoon Nebula]

The whirls of hydrogen gas are slowly collapsing to form stars, whose bright ultraviolet rays illuminate the surrounding gas in a distinctive shade of red.

The wispy tendrils and crashing wave-like features are caused by ultraviolet radiation's ability to erode and disperse the gas and dust into the distinctive shapes that are visible in the image.

Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys captured the dramatic view of the Lagoon Nebula.

The Lagoon Nebula is located more than 4,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer). It is a vast stellar nursery that stretches about 100 light-years wide. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

This hotbed of star formation earned its name because of a wide, lagoon-shaped dust lane that crosses the glowing gas of the nebula. The structure is prominent in wide-field images, but cannot be seen in this new close-up.

In recent years, astronomers probing the secrets of the Lagoon Nebula have found the first unambiguous proof that star formation by accretion of matter from the gas cloud is ongoing in this region.

Young stars that are still surrounded by an accretion disk will occasionally shoot out long wisps of matter from their poles.

Evidence of these jets, which are called Herbig-Haro objects, have been found in the Lagoon Nebula in the last five years, which provides strong support for astronomers' theories about star formation in such hydrogen-rich regions.

The Lagoon Nebula has been observed by astronomers for centuries, so the new Hubble photo is the latest in a long line of observations. In the 18th century, French astronomer Charles Messier included the object in his famous astronomical catalogue, dubbing the nebula with an alternate name: Messier 8.

Odds of Life on Newfound Earth-Size Planet '100 Percent,' Astronomer Says

By Jeanna Bryner


An Earth-size planet has been spotted orbiting a nearby star at a distance that would makes it not too hot and not too cold — comfortable enough for life to exist, researchers announced today (Sept. 29).
If confirmed, the exoplanet, named Gliese 581g, would be the first Earth-like world found residing in a star's habitable zone — a region where a planet's temperature could sustain liquid water on its surface

And the planet's discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there.
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. "I have almost no doubt about it."
His colleague, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Washington, D.C., wasn't willing to put a number on the odds of life, though he admitted he's optimistic.

"It's both an incremental and monumental discovery," Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told SPACE.com. Incremental because the method used to find Gliese 581g already has found several planets (all super-Earths, more massive than our own world) outside their stars' habitable zone, along with non-Earth-like planets within the habitable zone.

"It really is monumental if you accept this as the first Earth-like planet ever found in the star's habitable zone," said Seager, who was not directly involved in the discovery.

Vogt, Butler and their colleagues will detail the planet finding in the Astrophysical Journal.

The newfound planet joins more than 400 other alien worlds known to date. Most are huge gas giants, though several are just a few times the mass of Earth.

Stellar tugs

Gliese 581g is one of two new worlds the team discovered orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, bumping that nearby star's family of planets to six. The other newfound planet, Gliese 581f, is outside the habitable zone, researchers said.

The star is located 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

Red dwarf stars are about 50 times dimmer than our sun. Since these stars are so much cooler, their planets can orbit much closer to them and still remain in the habitable zone.

Estimates suggest Gliese 581g is 0.15 astronomical units from its star, close enough to its star to be able to complete an orbit in just under 37 days. One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and sun, which is approximately 93 million miles (150 million km).
The Gliese 581 planet system now vaguely resembles our own, with six worlds orbiting their star in nearly circular paths.

With support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, the scientists — members of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet

Survey — collected 11 years of radial velocity data on the star. This method looks at a star's tiny movements due to the gravitational tug from orbiting bodies.

The subtle tugs let researchers estimate the planet's mass and orbital period, how long it takes to circle its star.

Gliese 581g has a mass three to four times Earth's, the researchers estimated. From the mass and size, they said the world is probably a rocky planet with enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere.

Just as Mercury is locked facing the sun, the planet is tidally locked to its star, so that one side basks in perpetual daylight, while the other side remains in darkness. This locked configuration helps to stabilize the planet's surface climate, Vogt said.

"Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt said, suggesting that life forms that like it hot would just scoot toward the light side of that line while forms with polar-bear-like preferences would move toward the dark side.

Between blazing heat on the star-facing side and freezing cold on the dark side, the average surface temperature may range from 24 degrees below zero to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 to minus 12 degrees Celsius), the researchers said.

Are you sure?

Supposedly habitable worlds have been found and later discredited, so what makes this one such a breakthrough?

There's still a chance that further observations will dismiss this planet, also. But over the years, the radial velocity method has become more precise, the researchers point out in their journal article.

In addition, the researchers didn't make some of the unrealistic assumptions made in the past, Seager said.

For instance, another planet orbiting Gliese 581 (the planet Gliese 581c) also had been considered to have temperatures suitable for life, but in making those calculations, the researchers had come up with an "unrealistic" estimate for the amount of energy the planet reflected, Seager pointed out. That type of estimate wasn't made for this discovery.

"We're looking at this one as basically the tip of the iceberg, and we're expecting more to be found," Seager said.

One way to make this a reality, according to study researchers, would be "to build dedicated 6- to 8-meter-class Automated Planet Finder telescopes, one in each hemisphere," they wrote.

The telescopes — or "light buckets" as Seager referred to them — would be dedicated to spying on the nearby stars thought to potentially host Earth-like planets in their habitable zones. The result would be inexpensive and probably would reveal many other nearby potentially habitable planets, the researchers wrote.

Beyond the roughly 100 nearest stars to Earth, there are billions upon billions of stars in the Milky Way, and with that in mind, the researchers suggest tens of billions of potentially habitable planets may exist, waiting to be found.

Planets like Gliese 581g that are tidally locked and orbit the habitable zone of red dwarfs have a high probability of harboring life, the researchers suggest.

Earth once supported harsh conditions, the researchers point out. And since red dwarfs are relatively "immortal" living hundreds of billions of years (many times the current age of the universe), combined with the fact that conditions stay so stable on a tidally locked planet, there's a good chance that if life were to get a toe-hold it would be able to adapt to those conditions and possibly take off, Butler said.

Celestial Fireworks

By NASA

Like an Independence Day fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust -- the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an unobstructed view of the cluster. Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time but differ in size, mass, temperature, and color. The course of a star's life is determined by its mass, so a cluster of a given age will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving an opportunity for detailed analyses of stellar life cycles. NGC 3603 also contains some of the most massive stars known. These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions. Star clusters like NGC 3603 provide important clues to understanding the origin of massive star formation in the early, distant universe. Astronomers also use massive clusters to study distant starbursts that occur when galaxies collide, igniting a flurry of star formation. The proximity of NGC 3603 makes it an excellent lab for studying such distant and momentous events. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young

(Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Springtime for Northern Titan: Seven Years of Clearer Skies

By SPACE.com Staff

The clouds are clearing on Titan as spring takes hold in its northern hemisphere, signaling a shift in the weather patterns on Saturn's largest moon, a new study finds.
Titan is poised for a mostly sunny spring, one that will last seven Earth years, researchers have found. Seasons on Titan last so long because it takes the moon and Saturn about 30 years to orbit the sun. [New photo of Titan clouds.]

Scientists analyzed data from the last six years of observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft to piece together how Titan's weather cycle works. They found that conditions have changed since August 2009 — when the sun was directly over Titan's equator during its latest equinox.

"The clouds at the south pole completely disappeared just before the equinox, and the clouds in the north are thinning out," study leader Sebastien Rodriguez of the Universite Paris Diderot said in a statement. "We are expecting to see cloud activity reverse from one hemisphere to another in the coming decade as southern winter approaches."

Rodriguez and his colleagues said their findings match predictions by computer models. They presented their results at the European Planetary Science Congress 2010 in Rome on Sept. 22.

On Titan, it rains methane

Titan and its weather have intrigued scientists for decades. Some think Earth resembled Titan before life took hold — only not nearly as cold. Titan's surface averages 290 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius).

Titan has a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and its surface features have been carved by the action of liquid hydrocarbons like methane, which is the chief component of natural gas here on Earth. Methane rain drizzles from Titan's clouds, pooling in frigid liquid lakes.

To better understand Titan's weather, Rodriguez and his team used data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft since July 2004. They studied about 2,000 cloud images Cassini snapped between then and this past April, when Titan's seven-year spring began in the northern hemisphere.

In Cassini's early images, clouds gather at Titan's north and south poles, as well as in a narrow belt in the southern hemisphere. But in recent images, with the northern spring taking hold, cloud cover has decreased substantially at both poles.

Seasons change on Titan

These findings match predictions by computer models developed by other researchers in the past. Rodriguez and his team combined those models with the actual Titan observations to understand Titan's evolving cloud patterns.

Different cloud-formation mechanisms are likely at work in the different hemispheres, the researchers said.

During the northern winter, ethane and aerosols probably stream down from high in Titan's stratosphere, generating clouds near the north pole. These clouds are made of ethane, and they form at altitudes of 19 to 31 miles (30-50 km).

In the southern summer, on the other hand, methane-rich air wells up from Titan's surface. This action forms methane clouds at middle to high latitudes, the scientists said.

As Titan's seasons turn, these cloud-formation actions and patterns may flip from one hemisphere to the other, the researchers said.

They can see for themselves.

In February the Cassini mission was extended to May 2017, meaning Rodriguez and his team can get cloud-cover data all the way from mid-winter to mid-summer in Titan's northern hemisphere.

"We have learned a lot about Titan's climate since Cassini arrived at Saturn, but there is still a great deal to learn," Rodriguez said. "With the new mission extension, we will have the opportunity to answer some of the key questions about the meteorology of this fascinating moon."

Spectacular Aurora on Saturn Shines in New Video

Earth isn't the only planet in the solar system with a dazzling northern lights show. A new video from Saturn shows spectacular aurora on the ringed planet, revealing new details about how the phenomenon works.
The Saturn aurora movie was made from images collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) instrument. [Video of Saturn auroras.]

"Cassini's instruments have been imaging the aurora in magnificent detail, but to understand the overall nature of the auroral region we need to make a huge number of observations -- which can be difficult because Cassini observation time is in high demand," said study leader Tom Stallard of the U.K.'s University of Leicester in a statement. "However, there are VIMS observations of numerous other scientific targets that also include auroral information. Sometimes the aurora can be clearly seen, sometimes we have to add multiple images together to produce a signal."


As a whole, the collection of observations should help build up a better understanding of how auroras happen across the solar system, he said.


Stallard will present preliminary results from his study at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on Friday (Sept. 24).

In the new Cassini video, the aurora can clearly be seen to vary significantly over the course of a Saturnian day, which lasts around 10 hours and 47 minutes. On the noon and midnight sides (to the left and right respectively) the aurora can be seen to brighten significantly for periods of several hours, suggesting the brightening is connected with the direction of the sun.

Other features can be seen rotating along with the underlying planet, reappearing at the same time and the same place on the second day. This suggests that they are directly controlled by the direction of Saturn's magnetic field, researchers said.

As with Earth's northern and southern lights, the auroras on Saturn are created when solar wind particles are channeled into the planet's magnetic field toward its poles. There, they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light.

However, aurora features on Saturn can also be caused by electromagnetic waves generated when its moons move through the plasma that fills the planet's magnetosphere.

To date, Stallard and his colleagues have investigated some 1,000 images from the 7,000 that Cassini's VIMS instrument has recorded of Saturn's auroral region.

"Saturn's aurorae are very complex and we are only just beginning to understand all the factors involved," Stallard said. "This study will provide a broader view of the wide variety of different auroral features that can be seen, and will allow us to better understand what controls these changes in appearance."

Like Moths to a Flame, Alien Planets Can Flock to Nearest Star

By Denise Chow
A newfound alien solar system with planets the size of Saturn circling close to their star is helping astronomers learn how some giant worlds snuggle up to their stellar parents like moths to a flame.
NASA's Kepler space observatory recently confirmed the presence of the two Saturn-sized planets that orbit a star about 2,300 light-years away from Earth. A third, much smaller planet may also orbit the star, circling so close that one year on the alien world would last just 1.6 Earth days.
While the discovery of the Kepler-9 planetary system is a major find, it is also a starting point for astronomers to learn how the planet arrangement formed in the first place. [Gallery - Strangest Alien Planets]

Scientists think these planets originated much farther from their parent star and gradually migrated inward over time. All three objects could fit inside the orbit of Mercury today.


"It's safe to say that they did migrate because they ended up in this very special set of orbits," said Alycia Weinberger, an astronomer in the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C., when the planets were announced in late August."

"The likely candidate for how that migration happened is interaction between these planets and the original disk of material – the gas out of which they formed. It will now take some work to try to figure out exactly how that was likely to happen in this system," Weinberger said.

Timing planet paths

Understanding the process of planetary migration will help astronomers understand the initial conditions that led to the final configuration of the Kepler-9 system, and other planetary systems discovered in the future.

As a planetary system is being formed, "planets can change locations or migrate due to interactions with the raw materials with which they are built," Weinberger said.

A study led by Matthew Holman, associate director of the theoretical astrophysics division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., determined that the two Saturn-sized planets, named Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c, have somewhat atypical orbits.

It takes Kepler-9b about 19.2 days to complete one orbit. The other Saturn-sized world, Kepler-9c, makes one orbit every 38.9 days, taking almost twice as long to complete the circuit.

"There is a near 2-to-1 orbital resonance, which means the planets have orbital periods in a 2-to-1 ratio," Holman told SPACE.com. "At this configuration, we can see that they strongly interact and we can see large variations in the orbits of the planets."

What planetary migration tells us

Studying how planetary migration occurs, and how much a planet has moved, can tell researchers a lot about the history of how such worlds and their local solar system formed.

Kepler-9b and 9c were found to have a lot of gravitational interaction, and they are located so close to their parent star that their orbits would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our own solar system, said Holman.

The two planets most likely migrated to their observed locations, said Weinberger, because being so close to the star would have made it extremely difficult to develop and survive in the first place.

Observations combined with theoretical work will then be able to pinpoint how far apart the planets originated, how long it took them to form and how long their migration lasted.

"Kepler was designed and built to answer fundamental questions," Weinberger said. "We want to know what types of planetary systems there are; what is common amongst the various systems; whether there are any special conditions that result in Earth-like planets; whether the whole system of planet formation is robust and common

Building Blocks for Life on Mars Possibly Seen By Viking Probes, Study Suggests

Samples of Mars dirt collected by NASA's Viking Mars landers back in the 1970s may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life as we know it, a new study suggests.


During their missions, the two Viking landers vaporized Martian dirt and scrutinized the samples for signs of organic - or carbon-based - molecules that could serve as the raw ingredients for life. At the time, all they found were chlorine compounds attributed to contamination, but the new research suggests the Viking probes' heat-treatment may have generated these chlorine compounds from naturally occurring Martian organics, destroying them in the process.

"This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question," study co-author Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a statement.

Organic molecules can come from non-biological or biological sources. Meteorites raining on Mars and Earth for the past 5 billion years contain organics, so even if Mars has never supported life, scientists before the Viking missions expected Martian dirt to contain at least some organics, researchers have said.


New evidence from Phoenix

The new study follows a 2008 discovery made by the Phoenix Mars Lander. In its roughly five months on Mars, Phoenix found a chlorine-containing chemical called perchlorate in the Martian dirt.

In the lab, the research team for the new study added perchlorate to some desert dirt from Chile that was known to contain organics. Then they heated the soil up, mimicking the Viking landers' organics-detection test. They found the same two organic chlorine compounds the Vikings did: chloromethane and dichloromethane.

What's the connection between these three chemicals? Perchlorate becomes a strong oxidant when heated, breaking down naturally occurring organics into chloromethane and dichloromethane.

"Our results suggest that not only organics, but also perchlorate, may have been present in the soil at both Viking landing sites," the study's lead author, Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said in a statement.

"[Perchlorate] could sit there in the Martian soil with organics around it for billions of years and not break them down, but when you heat the soil to check for organics, the perchlorate destroys them rapidly," McKay said.

Challenging old theories

The new study, in the current issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, may inspire scientists to reconsider the results of the Viking mission.

The Viking landers performed several different tests on Martian surface material in 1976. They found no compelling evidence for life, or even for the existence of organic molecules.

But subsequent studies have questioned what these tests actually showed. Researchers replicating Viking's methods on Earth, for example, failed to detect signs of life in Earth soil teeming with microbes.

More than three decades ago, the two Viking landers scooped up some Martian dirt and heated it to 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit). The chlorine compounds they found were interpreted at the time as contaminants from cleaning fluids.

"The lack of organics was a big surprise from the Vikings," McKay said. "But for 30 years we were looking at a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing. Phoenix has provided the missing piece: perchlorate. The perchlorate discovery by Phoenix was one of the most important results from Mars since Viking."

Trying to resolve the question

Upcoming Mars missions and further work on meteorites from Mars could help resolve whether Viking actually found evidence of organics on the Red Planet.



Curiosity, a rover that NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will deliver to Mars in 2012, will range far and wide, analyzing a broad range of rocks and dirt samples. Its instruments will check for organics in Martian dirt and powdered rocks by baking samples to even higher temperatures than Viking did and by using an alternative liquid-extraction method at much lower heat.

Combining these techniques on a range of samples may help test the new study's idea that heated-up perchlorates could have destroyed organics in the Viking tests.

The European-led ExoMars mission, set to launch in 2018, will include a rover with the ability to dig about 6.5 feet (2 meters) below the Martian surface. The chances of finding complex molecules, including evidence of life such as proteins, are better underground, where molecules are protected from harsh ultraviolet radiation.

Starburst Galaxy Unleashes Gassy 'Superwind'

A striking galaxy buzzing with energetic star formation takes center stage in a new photograph that showcases an unusual "superwind" of out-flowing gas, researchers say.

The starburst galaxy NGC 4666, located about 80 million light-years away from Earth, is a hotbed of intense star formation, which is thought to be caused by gravitational interactions between NGC 4666 and its neighboring galaxies, one of which is visible in the lower left of the new photo. [See the galaxy NGC 4666 photo]

Gravitational interactions between galaxies often trigger the type of rigorous star formation seen in NGC 4666.

Strong winds from the massive stars inside NGC 4666, combined with supernova explosions, drive a robust flow of gas – a so-called "superwind" – from the galaxy into space, according to the European Southern Observatory where astronomers took the new photo.

The superwind originates in the bright central region of the galaxy and extends for tens of thousands of light-years. Astronomers think the cosmic wind could be blowing at speeds of up to a few thousands of kilometers every second, said astronomer Jörg Dietrich of the University of Michigan. The new photo of the galaxy was part of follow-up observations for an earlier study by Dietrich and his colleagues.

"Observing superwinds directly is difficult because the gas in them is very tenuous," Dietrich told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "However, these winds push denser and colder gas out, which is easier to observe."

The gas is very hot and emits radiation mostly in the form of X-rays and in the radio part of the spectrum, which cannot be seen in visible light images.

This new image of NGC 4666 was made in visible light with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, which is part of the European Southern Observatory.

The galaxy had previously been observed in X-rays by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope, and this image was taken to allow further study of other objects that had been detected in the earlier X-ray observations.

One such object is a faint galaxy cluster that can be seen close to the bottom edge of the image, to the right of center. This cluster, serendipitously found from the XMM-Newton observations, is much farther away from Earth than NGC 4666, at a distance of about 3 billion light-years.

In studying astronomical objects, researchers must observe them at several wavelengths, as light at different wavelengths can show different physical processes that are taking place.

Guts of Exploded Star Revealed

A wave of "star guts" ejected into space from the supernova explosion of a massive dying star has been spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new supernova image allows astronomers to measure the velocity and composition of the former star's debris, which scientists are calling cosmic "guts," as it interacts with the surrounding environment. [Photo of the supernova star guts.]

The new study, led by Kevin France, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at the University of Colorado in Boulder, targeted the remnants of Supernova 1987A, which was first discovered in 1987.

France and his colleagues observed the interaction between the stellar explosion and the circumstellar material around the former star – forming what looks like a "string of pearls." A new video of SN1987A illustrates the odd formation.

The glowing ring of gas that measures 6 trillion miles (9.6 trillion km) in diameter encircles the supernova remnant and is energized by X-rays. These "pearls" of circumstellar material are made up of material that was emitted before the star exploded, as it was preparing to die.

The shock waves from the supernova have been brightening some 30 to 40 pearls in the ring. As the stellar debris interacts with the circumstellar material over time, the pearls will eventually form a continuous glowing circle around the remnant.

SN1987A is about 150,000 light-years away from Earth on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way.

The age of the original star that set off the explosion remains unclear, but is estimated to be between 5 million and 10 million years.

Analyzing supernovas is important because their intense energy may also trigger much larger cosmic interactions, and could be responsible for regulating the physical state and long-term evolution of galaxies, France said.

"In the big picture, we are seeing the effect a supernova can have in the surrounding galaxy, including how the energy deposited by these stellar explosions changes the dynamics and chemistry of the environment," said he added. "We can use this new data to understand how supernova processes regulate the evolution of galaxies."

The Incredible Shrinking Moon

(Simply stated, the moon is shrinking.

According to a recent scientific study, including images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or the LRO, the lunar surface has revealed a series of geologic faults that weren't seen before.
These small faults, which are caused by internal cooling of the moon, have been discovered all over the moon, said Thomas Watters, a planetary geologist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

"We know it's shrinking by looking at these landforms called lobate scarps that kind of look like stairsteps in the landscape," Watters told AOL News. "They're caused by thrust faults, which are generated when the lunar crust material is pushed together and pushed up, forming a cliff or scarp."

What excites scientists is that the LRO camera's high-resolution images reveal details down to a half meter to 2 meters per pixel resolution, and this is how Watters and his colleagues have been able to detect the scarps all over the moon.

But the biggest discovery about these structures, Watters added, points to the fact that the moon is still active.

"These faults could be so young that they may be indicating very, very recent tectonic and, therefore, geologic activity on the moon. One of the general conceptions out there is that the moon is this geologically dead body, and that's really not the case," he said.

Exactly how much lunar shrinkage are we talking about? And since the moon is directly involved with the rising and falling of global sea levels, should we be getting into panic mode down here on Earth at the idea of a smaller moon?

"Overall, it's only about 100 meters in the past billion years, so it's not a whole lot of contraction -- it's not something you're ever going to notice from Earth," Watters said. "But because the scarps are widespread, they definitely indicate the moon's crust has been shrinking.

"The mass of the moon hasn't changed; the overall size of the moon has changed slightly and become slightly smaller. Therefore, the tidal effects on Earth are exactly the same."

These lunar scarp structures were initially discovered in images photographed by several Apollo missions during the 1970s. But the LRO cameras now reveal how widespread the scarps are on the moon.

In the cosmic scheme of things, Watters wants to reassure us that there's no cause for alarm to Earthlings.

"No, absolutely not. The moon is not shrinking away. There's no fear that if you don't get out there and see the moon today, in the next cycle, it won't be there."

The complete details of Watters' study can be found in today's edition of the journal Science.

Amazingly Fast Eruption on the Sun Photographed

One of the fastest big solar eruptions in years has been observed streaking away from the sun at more than 2.2 million mph by two NASA spacecraft.

The flare occurred Aug. 1 and created a massive sun eruption called a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth's magnetic field Tuesday, creating dazzling aurora displays. NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft recorded the eruption and beamed images of the sun storm back to Earth. [Photo of the sun eruption.]

The material ejected from the sun was seen speeding toward Earth at more than 1,000 kilometers per second, or just over 2.2 million mph (3.6 million kph). Another wave from the event was expected to hit Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday. NASA's two STEREO spacecraft, which monitor the sun's weather in 3-D, also recorded a video of the sun eruption.

"These kinds of eruptions are one of the first signs that the sun is waking up and heading toward another solar maximum expected in the 2013 time frame," NASA officials said in a statement. The sun goes through a regular 11-year activity cycle. The last solar maximum occurred in 2001 and its recent extreme solar minimum was particularly weak and long-lasting, the space agency added.

Coronal mass ejections are eruptions of charged particles from the sun that stream out over several hours. They can contain several billion tons of plasma and expand away from the sun at speeds of up to 1 million mph (1.6 million kph). At such speeds, they can cross the 93 million-mile (150 million-km) gulf between the Earth and sun in two to four days.

The material belched from the sun during the Aug. 1 flare is not expected to cause any disturbances on Earth other than creating spectacular auroras. Auroras are created when charged particles are caught by Earth's magnetic field and interact with the atmosphere above the poles.

The Aug. 1 solar flare was a moderate C-class flare. The coronal mass ejection it set off created a strong so-called geomagnetic storm that lasted nearly 12 hours – enough time for auroras to spread from Europe to North America, NASA officials said in a statement.

Stronger solar storms could cause adverse impacts to space-based assets and technological infrastructure on Earth.

Solar Tsunami? Look Up Tonight for a Grand Show

A solar storm could make tonight a great night for stargazing.

The sun's surface erupted early Sunday and sent tons of plasma into space, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It's headed toward Earth, which could be in for a beautiful light show.

"This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th," astronomer Leon Golub of the astrophysics center, said in a statement. "It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."

Some publications have dubbed it a "solar tsunami."

Solar Dynamics Observatory / NASA

A pair of huge eruptions from the sun, such as this one spotted in April, has created a mass of plasma that that is now racing toward the earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, was captured by a NASA camera. Depending on its path, it could make the northern lights, or aurora borealis, visible tonight.

"When a coronal mass ejection reaches Earth, it interacts with our planet's magnetic field, potentially creating a geomagnetic storm," Golub said. Solar particles "collide with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, which then glow like miniature neon signs."

Residents of the northern U.S. and other nations should look to the north tonight and early Wednesday to see rippling "curtains" of green and red light, Golub said. While aurorae can usually only be seen at high latitudes, they also can be on display at more southern points during a geomagnetic storm, Golub said.
Cities, because of their bright lights, aren't good places to see the show, Golub told The Boston Globe.
Scientists will get an idea of when the lights can be seen after the eruption passes by a satellite, the Globe said. They will know about an hour ahead of time.

Nuclear Bombs Could Save Earth from Asteroids

"The nuclear bomb is the strongest bomb we know," said Dearborn, who presented his study last month at the 216th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Miami, Fl. "It's about 3 million times more efficient than chemical bombs. The question is how to use that energy."


The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a research facility founded by the University of California, has programs that design and test nuclear weapons. [Top 10 Weapons in History]
Nuclear bangs in space

Dearborn believes that powerful nuclear explosives could be used to change the orbit of an asteroid heading for Earth, causing it to miss our planet and avoid a potentially devastating impact.
But, that nuclear option is most effective in circumstances where there are only a few years notice, said David Morrison, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and senior scientist for Astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who has done extensive research on asteroid and comet impact hazards.
"If we have an asteroid that is really large, and we don't have more than a few years notice, nuclear is probably all we can do," Morrison told SPACE.com. "If it's a mile or smaller and we have 10 to 20 years warning, we probably won't go nuclear."
In such cases, scientists could opt to impact the asteroid with a ballistic rocket, sending the cosmic interloper off course.
At the moment, there is probably very little difference in terms of accuracy for both the nuclear method and ballistic method, said Morrison. But if using ballistic rockets to divert asteroids can be tested, it is possible that this technique could be more precise.
"If we test the ballistic impact, as people have proposed doing, then we can make it much more accurate than a nuke," he said.
But will it really work?
In fact, the ability to test these methods is one of the main sources of contention.
"One of the problems with the nuclear alternative is that I don't think anyone will ever let us test it," Morrison explained. "I think it would arouse considerable opposition from the public, because people are very nuclear averse. That's the thing about David Dearborn and I – we don't disagree about the facts at all. I'm just a little less anxious to embed the public relations problem."
Some of the issues that have affected previous ideas on how to divert asteroids have been due to the extremely low levels of gravity present on asteroids.
"If you were to watch an asteroid go by in space, it would look like a tumbling dog bone," Dearborn said. "On a one kilometer (0.62 mile) asteroid, a 200-pound person would weigh about 1/10th of an ounce. So, proposals that people have made for how to divert them have encountered problems with how you give a push to an asteroid."
NASA is now aiming to send astronauts to visit an asteroid by 2025 to get a first-hand look at them. The mission is part of the space agency's new space exploration plan proposed by President Barack Obama.
Additionally, a European spacecraft, Rosetta, will be gliding past asteroid Lutetia on July 10 to get some close-up views of the space rock. Scientists are hoping that the observations from the flyby will contribute to the relatively small body of knowledge about asteroids.
Blowing up asteroids
According to Dearborn, blowing up an asteroid – or fragmenting it – using powerful nuclear explosives could be the most effective way of diverting it.
For one, nuclear fusion is vastly more efficient per unit of mass, compared to chemical fuel. So, from a practicality standpoint, it would be easier to transport this type of energy into deep space for an asteroid-diverting mission.
"You can carry an awful lot of energy for a very small amount of mass," Dearborn said. "As long as payload – the ability to lift things and get them to deep space – is significant, this is a way of transporting enough energy to do the job."
The sheer power of nuclear explosives also makes it a good candidate for such a task.
Dearborn discussed a previous proposal to use a powerful laser beam to repeatedly zap an asteroid in order to alter its course. While this could be a feasible option, Dearborn said, the timescale needed to carry out such an operation using current technology is too large.
For example, using a beam from the National Ignition Facility to deliver enough energy would require 5 million pulses which would have to be delivered over the course of approximately 6,000 years.
To effectively fragment and divert an asteroid, its orbit must be pushed by at least a centimeter per second. To do this, about five to 10 kilotons of energy input is needed, regardless of the method.
"The nice thing about any kind of intervention is that you only have to make it miss the Earth," Dearborn said. "A very small change in its orbital period will do that."
But wait, there's more
Still, the problem does not end with simply blowing up an asteroid.

Fragmenting an asteroid creates a debris field, and it is important to account for these remains in such a way that only a fraction of the debris is able to pass through the Earth's atmosphere.

Dearborn created simulations to examine the amount of energy and time needed to most effectively divert an asteroid and disperse its debris field in such a way as to minimize collisions with Earth.
He found that intersecting a 270-meter body asteroid with a 300 kiloton energy source at the surface could safely be done 15 days out from impact.
"If you can intersect it 15 days out, which is beyond the orbit of the moon, that would be fine," Dearborn said. "It was enough that 97 percent of that material missed Earth."
Furthermore, if the explosion occurs far enough into space, debris should be less of a concern, said Morrison.
"If you're going to do this 100 million miles away from Earth, it shouldn't be too much of a problem," Morrison said. "There'll be a little bit of debris, but by the time it gets close to us, it would be pretty dispersed."
Asteroid sentinels on alert
Dearborn is continuing to experiment with models and simulations that attempt to determine the amount of time needed to act for different size asteroids.
And while Dearborn states that a truly disastrous impact with Earth is possible, the chances of such an occurrence remain slim.
"There will be another large impact resulting in global catastrophe any mega-year now," he said. "But, a million years is a really long time."
The Spaceguard Survey Report from NASA's Ames Space Science Division, which was an effort to study near-Earth objects, has done extremely well in locating large objects that could cause mass extinction.
"We've found more than 90 percent of those," Morrison said. "In a few more years, we'll be able to say that there's nothing out there to cause a global catastrophe. But, there'll be a million that will be big enough to wipe out an entire city. It'll take a long time, if ever, to find them and figure out their orbits."
Technological advancements in ground-based and space telescopes should assist scientists in their study of near-Earth objects and other potential hazards, but the threat will likely be omnipresent, since smaller objects will always be more difficult to track down.
"The bottom line is, we could be hit by one of those small ones at any time, with no warning at all," Morrison said. "Right now, I can say almost nothing about the probability of one of those small objects hitting us, because we simply haven't found all of them."
Still, in the event that an asteroid crashes toward Earth, particularly with only a few years warning, nuclear explosives may be our best option, both scientists agree.

"With current technology and enough time, we should be able to divert large bodies," Dearborn said. "Right now, it is the only technology that we have that has the energy to move large bodies.

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