What Would It Be Like to Live on Alien Planet Kepler-186f?

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Image Gallery: NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover

Like life, space exploration can be a process of two steps forward, one step back -- except on a cosmic scale. Mars missions, all unmanned, have had mixed success since the U.S. probe Mariner 4 made the first successful fly-by of the planet in 1965. More Mars-bound spacecraft from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Japan and the European Space Agency have failed than succeeded. But the twin Mars Expeditionary Rovers called Spirit and Opportunity performed well beyond scientists' expectations after landing in January 2004. Their discoveries included firm proof that water has existed on Mars. The next leap forward in Mars research is the Mars Science Laboratory, shown here in an artist's rendering. The rover, named Curiosity, was launched atop an Atlas V rocket on November 26, 2011 and is scheduled to begin its work on Mars when it lands there in August of 2012. It is 10 feet (3 m) long, 9 feet (2.7 m) wide and 7 feet (2.1 m) tall. The rover's mission? To search for signs the planet could -- or did -- support life. In this gallery, we'll take a look at the Curiosity mission's buildup and examine some of the stuff that will be used after its landing on Mars. In the next photo, see who won NASA's rover naming contest.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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UNEARTHED - A SHORT FILM By Dalang Films

On the edge of space, a mining ship, The Ezekiel, finds an uncharted planet that reveals signs of a possible fuel resource. Two crew members undertake a mission to the desolate rock to take samples for later analysis. The mission goes well until they unearth a dark and terrifying truth.

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Astronomers: Billions of 'super-Earths' in habitable zone of red dwarf stars

An artist's rendering of sunset on Gliese 667 Cc, a previously-discovered super-Earth.

If you're trying to count how many planets could be candidates for harboring life in our galaxy, this might blow your mind: Scientists now say there could be billions of them.

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Just like the chocolate bar, the Milky Way galaxy is 'full of bubbles' - public help Nasa pinpoint strange spheres in our galactic home

Just like the fluffy nougat in the chocolate bar, the Milky Way galaxy is full of bubbles, a new survey by 'citizen scientists' has found.

More than 35,000 astronomy fans sifted through data from the Spitzer space telescope, and found bubbles in space - blown out by young, hot stars into the gas and dust around them.

Volunteers for the project are shown a small section of Spitzer's huge infrared Milky Way image (left), which they then scan for cosmic bubbles. Using a sophisticated drawing tool, the volunteers trace the shape and thickness of the bubbles. All the user drawings can be overlaid on top of one another to form a so-called 'heat map' (middle). Features that have been identified repeatedly by many different users jump out, revealing the overall pattern of bubbles in this part of the galaxy

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NASA's Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet

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

Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.

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Astronomers See More Planets Than Stars in Galaxy

WASHINGTON (AP) — The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it's a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they're even finding them in the strangest of places. And they've only begun to count.

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

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

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Descriptions of the Star People

When I first started sculpturing the beings, I made a hybrid baby, half Zeta and half human, from remembering my experience in 1997 where I was taken on board a Mothership for a healing of a brain tumor. At that time, I was greeted by a very tall blonde man who appeared to be mid 30s and who was dressed in a pastel, multi-royal colored robe. He never introduced himself, and nor did I think to ask him his name, almost as if it didn't matter. Yet several years later when I sculptured him, people who had experienced him before identified him as Michael, also known as Archangel Michael.

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US military pays SETI to check Kepler-22b for aliens

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilisations. The cash needed to restart SETI's efforts has come in part from the US Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organisation's detection instruments for "space situational awareness".

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NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5).

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Cosmic Journeys on YOUTUBE

Cutting-edge stories about the origins of the universe, black holes, exploding stars,
the search for ET life, time and space, the solar system. Original productions from SPACERIP

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Cosmic Journeys: Mysteries of a Dark Universe

DARK ENERGY in Full HD 1080p. Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate.

Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us?

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2 probable planets found by people like you

An artist's rendition of a planet transiting in front of its star, which Planet Hunters participants may have identified. The more distant planet has not yet been detected, but is thought to exist.

With the internet, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in astrophysics to help find new worlds outside our solar system.


For the first time, new planet candidates have been identified with the help of the public’s analysis of NASA data. Anyone can join this effort, called Planet Hunters, for free and start helping real astronomers weed through data that might signal a never-before-seen planet.

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Big New ExoPlanet Haul

From EsoCast in 1080p, comes the announcement of a rash of new planet discoveries. Astronomers using ESO's leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced more than fifty newly discovered planets around other stars. Among these are many rocky planets not much heavier than the Earth. One of them in particular orbits within the habitable zone around its star.

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Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report

When they see what a mess we've made of our planet, extraterrestrials
may be forced to take drastic action. Photograph: PR

 

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

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Space Boat: A Nautical Mission to an Alien Sea

TiME This capsule designed to explore Titan's seas is one of three projects being considered to receive NASA funding next year. Graham Murdoch
 

In 2006, while flying by Saturn’s moon Titan, the radar on NASA’s Cassini orbiter discovered seas of liquid ethane and methane on the moon’s –300ºF surface, the only bodies of liquid we know of that exist anywhere but on Earth. Some of the oily seas appeared on Cassini’s radar to be larger than Lake Superior, but visibility was poor because Titan’s atmosphere is thick and hazy.

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Open Your Eyes to the Hidden Night

Open Your Eyes to the Hidden Night

What do you see? This was the anthropic question of a year-long photographic project dubbed the Photopic Sky Survey, meant to reveal the entire night sky as if it rivalled the brightness of day. In it we see tens of millions of stars, the glowing factories of newborn ones, and a rich tapestry of dust all floating on a stage of unimaginable proportions. I hope you enjoy this new view of our place in the universe as much as I have enjoyed making it.
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The Universe – Time Travel (Season 5)

The Universe Season 5 Episode 4 – Time Travel HD. One of the Universe’s most enduring mysteries is Time Travel. In this episode, we explore the possibilities.

Discover why Time Travel into the future is unavoidable in the Einsteinian world of Relativity. As for the past… the laws of physics do not tell us it’s impossible, but the bizarre consequences of going into the past and altering the future make for mind-bending science. Finally, we go for the future by traveling to the nearest star, 4.3 light years away… in only 45 days.

Our destination may be an Earth-like planet; a planet scientists are now hunting for, and may find in the next 3 to 4 years.

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Twinkle, twinkle, another star: First cosmic census estimates there are 50 BILLION planets in Milky Way

Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical - at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.

And some 500 million of those planets are in what is known as the Goldilocks zone, where the climate is thought to be not-too-hot and not-too-cold, and life could exist.
The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA's Kepler telescope, almost two years though a three-and-a-half year mission which has cost an estimated $600million.

Scroll down to watch a detailed video of the Kepler telescope's amazing findings

Starry night: New research estimates that there are some 50 billion planets in the Milky Way

Goldilocks zone: There are approximately 500 million planets
in the area where it is believed life could exist

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

MISSION FINDINGS

10.5 per cent of the stars in the sample are predicted to have Earth-size planets (that is, 50 per cent to 125 per cent as wide as Earth)
7.3 per cent should have super-Earths (125 to 200 per cent as wide as Earth)
20.8 per cent should have Neptune-sized planets (two to six times as wide as Earth)
5.2 per cent should have Jupiter-scale planets (more than six times as wide as Earth)

So far Kepler has found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone, where life could possibly exist.
Kepler's main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy.
They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Borucki and colleagues figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.
And that's a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.

For example, if Kepler were 1,000 light years from Earth and looking at our sun and noticed Venus passing by, there's only a one-in-eight chance that Earth would also be seen, astronomers said.

Powerful: NASA's Kepler spacecraft is shown - back (top) and front - and named after Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astrologist who died in 1630

Complex: A graphic showing how the Kepler telescope works

To get the estimate for the total number of planets, scientists then took the frequency observed already and applied it to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

For many years scientists figured there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but last year a Yale scientist figured the number was closer to 300 billion stars.


Either way it shows that Carl Sagan was right when he talked of billions and billions of worlds, said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who praised the research but wasn't part of it.

Covered: This Kepler Mission Star Field shows the Milky Way region of
the sky where the telescope has been pointing

And that's just our galaxy. Scientists figure there are 100 billion galaxies.

Borucki said the new calculations lead to worlds of questions about life elsewhere in the cosmos.
'The next question is why haven't they visited us?'

And the answer? 'I don't know,' Borucki said.
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A Nine-Planet Solar System Once More? NASA Telescope May Reveal New Planet, Tyche

Digitally generated image of our solar system and points beyond.

A few years ago we all thought there were nine planets. But now space is a whole lot more complicated. The hunt for the giant planet is on.
When Pluto was demoted from its planet status five years ago, we were pretty shook up. Having eight planets just isn't so catchy. Classroom wall charts around the globe were taken down and new rhymes had to be learned. Luckily, scientists have strong evidence to suggest that there is a ninth planet lurking beyond Pluto, and what's more, it's a big one.

Evidence gathered by the NASA space telescope, Wise, could prove that this gas giant is hidden in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote part of the solar system. The suspected planet has been named Tyche (pronounced ty-kee) by the two astrophysicists proposing it for "planet" status, Daniel Whitmire and John Matese from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The first batch of data on Tyche is due to be released in April. After that, the planet may reveal itself within two years, say the two scientists. "If it does, John and I will be doing cartwheels. And that's not easy at our age." Professor Whitmire said.
Once Tyche has been located, it is up to the International Astronomical Union (IAU)  whether or not it gains full "planet" status. The main problem the IAU could have with the proposal is that Tyche probably formed around another star and was later captured by the sun's gravitational field. They might even have to create a whole new category for the gas-ball giant.

Tyche is suspected to be four times the mass of Jupiter with an orbit around 15,000 times further from the Sun than Earth's, and 375 times further than Pluto's. It will probably be composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, with an atmosphere just like Jupiter's. Professor Whitmire added that the planet-in-waiting will have its own moons, like other outer planets, and its surface will be covered in colorful spots, bands and clouds.
In a few months time, we could be back to the good ol' nine-planet solar system, courtesy of the giant Tyche. Watch this space. (Via The Independent)
Clarification: According to a NASA spokesperson, it is still too early to definitively tell if Wise data confirms or rules out the object in the Oort cloud. After data is collected for a few years, the hypothesis that Tyche exists will be tested. Some language from the original post has been modified accordingly.

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