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Fr. Jose Funes S.J., director of the Vatican Observatory Vatican City, Nov 10, 2009 / 12:09 pm (CNA).- The Vatican Observatory and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences have just concluded a week-long gathering of scientists to examine the origin of life and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. “These questions offer many philosophical and theological implications,” said Fr. Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory.After bringing their Nov. 6-10 talks to a close, four of the scientists held a press conference at the Holy See's press office on Tuesday.Participating in the press conference were Fr. Jose Funes S.J., director of...

A young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to be home to a wild – and young – planetary system that shares some of the frenetic dynamics thought to have shaped the early years of our own solar system. The Spitzer observations suggest young planets circling the star are disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

IF LIFE is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts.

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles. "We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory...

When scientists search the heavens for habitable worlds beyond Earth, they don't necessarily know what to look for. A new study has found that the most probable place to find intelligent life in the galaxy is around stars with roughly the mass of the sun, and surface temperatures between 5,300 and 6,000 Kelvin (9,100 and 10,300 degrees Fahrenheit) - in fact, stars very similar to our own sun.

Finding Critics for Science Allie Winegar Duzett, November 4, 2009 There are many fields with rigorous critics; many writers make a living critiquing music, dance, art, and literature. At Accuracy in Media and other media watchdog groups, employees critique the claims of major news organizations. But one crucial field regularly goes without any public criticism: the field of science, and scientific discovery. “Science lacks for critics,” David Berlinski claimed at a recent Heritage Foundation Bloggers’ Briefing. “It is really remarkable that in the sense in which literature or dance or music has always entered public consciousness with a very rich...

NASA's Kepler mission is unlikely to detect any Earth-like exoplanets before 2011 due to an electronic glitchKepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope's electronics. The team is racing to fix the issue by changing the way data from the telescope is processed, but the delay could mean that ground-based observers now have the upper hand in the race to be the first to spot an Earth twin. "We're not going to...

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part. The ‘mission’ is part of the Mars500 programme being conducted by ESA and Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) to study human psychological, medical and physical capabilities and limitations in space through fundamental and operational research. ESA’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight is...

<p>WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.</p> <p>Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.</p>

Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS's position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter. This result also increases the number of known low-mass planets by an impressive 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.

October 15, 2009: For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the "heliosphere," it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it. Until now. NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by...

In the murky boundary between our solar system and the rest of the galaxy, scientists have spotted a bright band of surprising high-energy emissions. The results come from the first all-sky map created by NASA's new Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, which launched in October 2008. While orbiting Earth, IBEX monitors incoming neutral atoms that originate billions of miles away at the solar system's edge to learn about the interaction between the sun and the cold expanse of space. "The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region,"...

A painting from 1617 appears to show a type of telescope thought not to have been built until much later. It's hard to find an invention more emblematic of the birth of modern science than the telescope. And yet surprisingly little is known about its early development. The inventor of the telescope remains unknown to this day. Now a study of the paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter of the Baroque era who was working in Amsterdam at the beginning of the 17th century, is throwing some light on the early development of the telescope. It has...

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small. There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 10¹¹ ) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 10²² ) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets. Meanwhile, our 4.5 billion-year old Solar System exits in a universe that is estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years...

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The exoplanet Corot-7b... is extraordinarily close to its parent star, and researchers think that it's tidally locked so that one hemisphere always faces the star's blasting heat. On that side, temperatures are thought to reach about 4,220 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to vaporize rock... its atmosphere consists of what might be called vaporized rock... during storms, pebbles may condense out of the atmosphere. "As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of 'rock' the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth," Fegley explained. "But instead of a...

When will we find the first "earthlike planet" in the galaxy? According to some mainstream news reports we have found them already -- again and again and again... If an exoplanet is close to the same mass of Earth it's called "earthlike" in press releases and the news media... How about surface temperatures of more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit? Instead of an ocean of water it would have an ocean of molten rock. Why so hot? The planet has migrated so close to its star it completes an orbit in just 20 hours. It is 23 times closer to it's...

Of the roughly 350 known exoplanets (i.e., extrasolar planets), the one orbiting the star HD149026 is unique. It has a mass comparable to that of Saturn but is much smaller in size, indicating that it is made up of a denser material such as ice or rocks. It is therefore quite unlike the large class of "hot Jupiters," giant exoplanets that are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium (and that are hot because they orbit close to their parent stars)... A team of seven astronomers led by CfA scientists Heather Knutson and David Charbonneau used the IRAC camera on the...

Using the very efficient UVES high-resolution spectrograph at the ESO VLT 8.2-m KUEYEN telescope, they have convincingly detected the presence of the rare isotope Lithium-6 (6Li; [2]) in this metal-rich, solar-type dwarf star that is also known to possess a planetary system, cf. ESO Press Release 13/00. Unlike the Lithium-7 (7Li) isotope of this light element, any primordial Lithium-6 would not survive the early evolutionary stages of a metal-rich solar-type star. The Lithium-6 now seen in HD 82943 must therefore have been added later, but from where? The astronomers believe that this observation strongly suggests that the star has at...

Enlarge ImagePeer pressure. Magnetic domains in steel (vertical bans) arise when neighboring electrons point their magnetic poles in the same direction. Credit: Zureks, Chris Vardon/Wikimedia It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim. Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has... observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. To the astronomers' surprise, the light varied in unexpected ways, and in as little time as one week... One possible explanation is that a close companion to the star -- either a star or a developing planet -- could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star... said James Muzerolle of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland[,] "This is a unique, real-time glimpse into the...

By linking the twin, 10-meter telescopes in Hawaii, astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory discovered an extended, double-layered dust disk orbiting 51 Ophiuchi, a star that is 410 light-years from Earth. It is the first time the Keck Interferometer Nuller instrument has identified such a compact cloud around a star so far away. The new data suggest that 51 Ophiuchi is a protoplanetary system with a dust cloud that orbits extremely close to its parent star, according to University of Maryland astronomer Christopher Stark, who led the research team... The data suggest that two debris disks orbit 51 Oph....

The huge assembly standing in Northrop Grumman Corporation’s high bay looks a lot like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, but it’s a full-scale simulator of the space telescope’s key elements. Engineers are using the simulator, consisting of the telescope’s primary backplane assembly and the sunshield’s integrated validation article, to develop the Webb Telescope’s hardware design. In addition, technicians are using it to gain experience handling large elements in advance of working with the actual hardware that will fly in space.

Astronomers have confirmed that a planet orbiting a distant star has a rocky structure similar to that of Earth, a find that shortens the odds on extraterrestrial life being discovered. New observations of a planet named Corot-7b, which circles a star 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros, or the Unicorn, have shown that its density is similar to the Earth’s, indicating that it is also a solid, rocky world. The discovery is important for the prospects of discovering life elsewhere because Corot-7b is the first exoplanet — a planet beyond our solar system — orbiting another star that...

Mass and density of smallest exoplanet finally measured The longest set of HARPS measurements ever made has firmly established the nature of the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, revealing its mass as five times that of Earth's. Combined with CoRoT-7b's known radius, which is less than twice that of our terrestrial home, this tells us that the exoplanet's density is quite similar to the Earth's, suggesting a solid, rocky world. The extensive dataset also reveals the presence of another so-called super-Earth in this alien solar system. "This is science at its thrilling and amazing best," says Didier Queloz,...

...In most models, it's a three-step process: (1) dust settles into a flattened disk and collects into countless planetesimals a mile or so (1 to 10 km) across; (2) the planetesimals collide and form Moon- to Mars-size planetary embryos; and (3) the embryos smash into one another until basically all that remains are a handful of rocky inner planets and a second handful of rocky "super-Earth" cores that eventually become the giant outer planets. In other words, the solar system's building blocks grew smoothly and systematically from small bodies to large ones. But recent studies have (forgive me) punched huge...

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is launching its Fall 2009 Evening Lecture Series with talks on wandering solar system planets and searches for hazardous asteroids from Mount Lemmon... Planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra will speak on "Migrating Planets" on Tuesday, Sept. 15. [whoops] Did the solar system always look the way it is now? New studies by Malhotra and others find that the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- were more tightly clustered in the early solar system, then moved away from each other. Malhotra's models show that as the solar system evolved, Jupiter...

The first of three GigaGalaxy Zoom project images — a new 800-million-pixel panorama of the entire sky, as seen from ESO’s observing sites in Chile — has been released online. The project allows stargazers to explore and experience the Universe as it is seen with the unaided eye from the darkest and best viewing locations in the world. This 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere, reveals the cosmic landscape that surrounds our tiny blue planet. This gorgeous starscape serves as the first of three extremely high-resolution images featured in the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, launched by...

Galileo Galilei wasn't just an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and heresy suspect (not to mention father of modern observational astronomy, modern physics, science, and modern science, that last one he was named by both Hawking and Einstein). He was also a friend of the Medici, the political Italian dynasty whose patronage of scientists and artists led to the Renaissance.1 Arguably, Galileo's biggest contribution to astronomy was the development of a 30x telescope, through which he made many of his subsequent observations and discoveries (most notably the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and...

The European telescope sent far from Earth to study the oldest light in the Universe has returned its first images. The Planck observatory, launched in May, is surveying radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The light holds details about the age, contents and evolution of the cosmos. The new images show off Planck's capabilities now that it has been set up, although major science results are not expected for a couple of years. "The images show first of all that we are working and that we are able to map the sky,"...

The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet, CoRoT-7b, has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is starting to come together. A major component of the telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module structure, recently arrived at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for testing in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility.

Mars, Earth’s arid red neighbor, may have had a more active past than previously believed. UT research scientist John Holt and his team have found large reserves of ice buried under rock near the mid-latitudes of Mars, which could mean the planet was once flowing with water. “We haven’t found any evidence of liquid water on Mars yet,” said Holt, who presented his findings Friday. “But it is a possibility.”

Scientists in the US are trying to map the twisting "tubes" so they can be used to cut the cost of space travel. Each one acts like a gravitational version of the Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of forces between planets and moons. Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways can look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them. The pathways connect sites called Lagrangian points where gravitational forces balance out. Professor Shane Ross, from Virginia Tech university, said: "The idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that...

...The Terrestrial Planet Finder is a mission which primary target is to search after Earth-like planets and currently under study by NASA. At the moment are two complementary concepts for this mission. The visible-light Coronograph and a formation-flying infrared Interferometer."There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and...

...the iconic orbiting observatory is working just fine after its May upgrade which saw it get new batteries, gyroscopes and and a thorough overhaul of its instruments. It also got a new camera and a new spectrograph from the astronauts who spent five days under Hubble's hood. The upgrade, almost certain to be Hubble's last, should keep it producing tip-top images until 2014... Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that the telescope is "significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade." According to NASA, future observations will range from "studying the population...

THE discovery of extrasolar super-Earths - rocky planets about five to ten times the mass of Earth - has raised hopes that some may harbour life. Perhaps it's a vain hope though, since it now seems that Earth is just the right size to sustain lif

While astronomers keenly await the discovery of Earth-like planets around other stars, the possibility of habitable moons should not be ruled out either, say scientists at University College London. NASA's Kepler spacecraft launched earlier this year with the hunt for Earth-like planets the primary goal of the mission. It will make detections using the transit method – by looking for the characteristic dips in stellar brightness as a planet passes in front of its parent star.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Thousands of newly released images from more than 1,500 telescopic observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a wide range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the orbiter recorded these images from the month of April through early August of this year. The camera team at the University of Arizona, Tucson, releases several featured images each week and periodically releases much larger sets of new images, such as the batch posted today. The new images are available at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/releases/sept_09.php . Each...

PANAJI, India (AFP) – India's first lunar mission has captured images of the landing site of the Apollo 15 craft, debunking theories that the US mission was a hoax, the country's state-run space agency said Wednesday. "The images captured by a hyper-spectral camera fitted as a part of Chandrayaan-I... has reconfirmed the veracity of the Apollo 15 mission," said Prakash Chauhan, from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). NASA's 12-day Apollo 15 mission in 1971 was the first designed to explore the surface of the moon in great detail and over a long period. But it and others in the...

According to Winn's conclusions, HAT-P-7b either revolves around its star at a tilt of about 180°, or it orbits the star's poles, at a 90° tilt. In any case, it was found to have a wildly tilted orbit, when compared to its star's equator. "We don't know if it's a slowly rotating star that we're seeing edge-on, or a really rapidly rotating star that we're seeing pole-on. It could be like the solar system – but reversed, or it could be going pole over pole. Either way it's cool," Winn says. Further observations from Kepler could solve this mystery, as...

In March, NASA launched its Kepler telescope with the hopes of discovering an Earth-like planet that could be hospitable to extraterrestrial life. However, one team of scientists has gone as far to say that the orbiting telescope will likely discover habitable "exomoons" as well. Writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr David Kipping and colleagues of University College London created a detailed method that scientists would need to follow while looking for exomoons. However, many experts were unable to tell if the technology needed to detect these exomoons even existed. Kipping's team created a model of...

The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. No human is thought to have ever been there but it is expected to yield images of the heavens three times sharper than any ever taken from the ground. The joint US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy – cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence. The researchers pinpointed a site, known...

Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust and is used to make bikes, cars and food cans. Now, thanks to research conducted at the University of Nancy, France, the metal may also be able to shed light on the processes that occurred during the formation of the solar system.Models of the evolution of the early solar system rely on knowing the precise times at which the oldest particles in the solar system formed. Some of the oldest particles clumped together to form chondrites - primitive meteorites - and these grain-like building blocks are known as calcium-aluminium rich...

WASHINGTON — Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet. The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star. The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star. It is a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal...

Just over 400 years ago, Galileo--then chair of mathematics at Italy's University of Padua--got word that Dutch glass makers had invented a device that allowed viewers to see very distant objects as if they were nearby. The mathematician soon acquired a Dutch instrument, and on August 25, 1609, he presented an improved, more powerful telescope of his own design to the senate of the city-state of Venice. The government officials were so impressed with Galileo's telescope that they rewarded the professor with a higher salary and tenure for life at his university. At the time, Galileo was touting the telescope...

A conference like the recent on in Aosta offers plenty of opportunity to listen in on fascinating conversations, one of which had to do with what would happen if we found a brown dwarf closer to the Earth than the Centauri stars. The general consensus was that such a find would be a powerful stimulus to the public imagination and would probably result in renewed interest in getting to and exploring such a place. A boon, in short, for all our interstellar efforts, an awakening to a new set of possibilities.But if there were a brown dwarf that close,...

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own. Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way's mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That's...

Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence that life could exist beyond Earth, with research published showing that comet dust contained traces of a compound vital to human existence. Researchers probing dust and gas collected from the Wild 2 comet by NASA's Stardust spacecraft in 2004 found traces of the amino acid glycine, lending credence to idea that there is life elsewhere in the universe. "The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said...