Scientists discover water on planet outside solar system

Astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b. They say it is the first planet beyond earth that has the potential to support life.

Scientists from University College London (UCL) announced Wednesday that they had detected water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet eight times the mass of Earth and 110 light years away. 

The so-called super-Earth, known as K2-18b, is twice the size of Earth and is located in the Leo constellation in the Milky Way.

The scientists reported in the Nature Astronomy journal that K2-18b is in a "Goldilocks," or habitable zone with the right proximity to its sun to make water in liquid form, and thus life, possible.

Looking to answer the big question

Angelos Tsiaras, who was the lead author of the UCL study published in the latest issue of the journal, said: "K2-18b is not 'Earth 2.0' as it is significantly heavier and has a different atmospheric composition. However, it brings us closer to answering the fundamental question:

Is the Earth unique?" Tsiaras and his colleagues made the discovery while using open-source algorithms to analyze data captured by the ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

 Their analysis of starlight filtered through K2-18b's atmosphere pointed to the unmistakable molecular signature of water vapor. Scientists analyzing the Hubble data say they found hydrogen and helium in K2-18's atmosphere as well.

Heavy gravity and intense radiation

Though the discoveries would suggest the potential for sustaining life, given the planet's extreme gravity and intense UV radiation, it would still be impossible for humans to inhabit it. Still, scientists are excited. Giovanna Tinetti, who co-authored the UCL report, says, "We cannot assume that it has oceans on the surface, but it is a real possibility."

 'The first of many' Another co-author, Ingo Waldmann, says: "It is likely that this is the first of many discoveries of potentially habitable planets.

This is not only because super-Earths like K2-18b are the most common planets in our galaxy, but also because red dwarfs — smaller stars than our sun — are the most common stars."    K2-18b was discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in 2015. It is one of hundreds of planets with a mass between that of Neptune and the Earth.

 Scientists are confident that many more such planets will be discovered in the near future by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's ARIEL Space Mission, which is set to launch in 2028.

  

New planet discovered in orbit of young Milky Way star

A second planet has been discovered circling Beta Pictoris, 

a fledgling star in our own galaxy offering astronomers a rare glimpse of a planetary system in the making, according to a study published Monday.

We talking about a giant planet about 3,000 times more massive than Earth, situated 2.7 times further from its star than the Earth is from the Sun,"

 said Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astronomer at France's National Centre for Scientific Research and lead author of a study in Nature Astronomy. The new planet, β Pictoris c, completes its orbit roughly every 1,200 days. Like its big sister β Pictoris b, discovered by Lagrange and her team in 2009, it is a gassy giant.

Visible with the naked eye, Beta Pictoris—with a mass nearly twice that of the Sun—is a newborn by comparison: only 23 million years old. 

The Sun is more than 4.5 billion years old. It is also relatively nearby, just over 63 light years, and surrounded by a disk of stellar dust. This swirling halo of debris and gas was the first such configuration to be captured in image, making Beta Pictoris a celebrity star in the 1980s.

 "To better understand the early stage of formation and evolution, this is probably the best planetary system we know of," Lagrange told AFP. Observations show that the two planets are still taking shape.

  β Pictoris c was discovered by analysing 10-years worth of high-resolution data obtained with instruments at the La Silla Observatory in northern Chile,

run by the intergovernmental European Southern Observatory. In 2014, scientists said β Pictoris b spins at a breakneck speed of some 25 kilometres per second (90,000 kph or 56,000 miles per hour).

 Located in the southern constellation of Pictor—"The Painter's Easel"—Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in its constellation.

UK will lead European exoplanet mission

A telescope to study the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System will be launched by the European Space Agency in the late 2020s.

The mission, to be known as Ariel, was selected by the organisation's Science Programme Committee on Tuesday. 

 The venture will be led scientifically from the UK by University College London astrophysicist Giovanna Tinetti. "In the next decade we will see many, many planets being discovered - thousands, actually," she said. "All this is amazing,

but we want to go beyond that and start to understand the nature of those planets, how they formed, how they evolved, and ultimately to put our Solar System in the bigger picture," the principal investigator told BBC News.

  Ariel will use a metre-sized mirror and instrumentation designed to analyse, in visible and infrared light, the chemical make-up of the gases that shroud distant worlds, or exoplanets as they are known.

 This information should provide insights on how certain types of planets come to form around particular stars. Prof Tinetti explained: "We want to sample lots of planets - some that are small like the Earth or very big like Jupiter; and at different temperatures - extremely hot, warm or temperate - around very different types of stars.

We want to sample all the extremes and the more normal cases, because what we want to try to understand is the 'standard model' for planets, if such a model even exists." Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey)

  Ariel is the latest selection in Esa's Medium Class portfolio. To win the launch opportunity in 2028, the proposal had to beat competition from an X-ray telescope (Xipe) and a mission to study energetic particles around the Earth (Thor).

 A detailed technical assessment will now be conducted before the Ariel project is formally "adopted" - Esa legal-speak for "final go-ahead".

This sign-off, which should happen in the next two years, paves the way for manufacture of the flight hardware. Ariel is the third exoplanet venture chosen by Esa in recent years.

Already coming down the line is a small telescope called Cheops that should go up next year to better measure the size of these far-off worlds; and this will be followed in 2026 by Plato, a telescope that aims to find "true Earths" - planets the same size as our home world that orbit at the same distance from Sun-like stars.

 And the Americans, too, have their dedicated planet-hunters, with the newest, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess), launching in the next few weeks. But at some point, the science of exoplanets has to move beyond simply finding and counting objects; their chemical compositions and physical conditions have to be determined.

 The telescope that will start to make big inroads into this problem is the James Webb observatory, the successor to Hubble. Due in orbit next year, it will study planetary atmospheres in exquisite detail with its 6.5m-diameter mirror.

But the US space agency-led mission will probably only get to look at perhaps 150-200 exoplanets in its first five years of operation because of all the other demands on its time from astronomers. Ariel, on the other hand,

will have the single quest and that should see it characterising in the region of 500-1,000 planets during its primary years in orbit.

  Steady platform

And one aspect that would work in Ariel's favour is the absence of any moving parts in its build, commented Plato team-member Dr Don Pollaco from Warwick University, UK.

 "The issue with all of these planet experiments is that the signals you are looking for are so incredibly small that any systematics in the instrument itself will dominate the signal," he explained.

 "And the systematics are often associated with bits that move. So the great thing about Ariel is that it is fixed-format - nothing changes," he told BBC News. Ariel is likely to cost Esa about €460m (£405m) for the spacecraft chassis, the launch vehicle and operations.

As is customary for science missions like this, the agency's individual member states pick up the cost of the scientific payload. The UK will have the technical lead on the project and the instrumentation therefore will be assembled at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

 Dr Graham Turnock, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "It is thanks to the world-leading skills of our innovative space community that a UK-led consortium has been chosen to take forward the next ESA science mission.

This demonstrates what a vital role we continue to play in European collaboration on research in space. "The Ariel mission is a prime example of the scientific innovation underpinning the wider economy. It relies on the UK's science and engineering expertise, which are at the forefront of the government's Industrial Strategy."  

James Webb Space Telescope comes together

The successor to the Hubble observatory has reached a key milestone in its construction.

All the elements that make up the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been brought together for the first time. 

 It sets the stage for some critical tests that will hopefully lead to a launch to orbit sometime in 2021. JWST will use a colossal mirror and state-of-the-art instruments to try to see the glow from the very first stars to shine in the Universe. 

 It will also have the power to resolve the atmospheres of many of the new planets now being discovered beyond our Solar System, and to analyse their atmospheres for the potential for life. 

 The telescope is a joint endeavour of the American (Nasa), European (Esa) and Canadian (CSA) space agencies.  

It can be thought of as having three main parts - a telescope (mirrors and instruments); 

a big sunshield to shade its sensitive view of the sky; and a spacecraft unit that will manage the observatory's day-to-day operations in orbit. 

 These three segments have finally been bolted together at a Los Angeles factory facility belonging to the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman.  

All the components that have gone into making JWST have been repeatedly tested - at both the individual and the integrated level. That cycle of testing continues now that the three major segments are connected.

  A vital test will be a demonstration that Webb can fully deploy its sunshield. This tennis court-sized parasol is made up of five extremely thin layers of Kapton insulating film. Its job is to put the mirrors and four instruments completely in the shade when observing the cosmos. 

Stray light from our Sun would otherwise warm surfaces and swamp the faint infrared radiation coming from distant galaxies. But to be effective, the shield must roll out properly without kinks and without tears. 

 "This is an exciting time to now see all Webb's parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time," said Gregory Robinson, the Webb programme director at Nasa HQ in Washington, DC. 

 "The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing Universe."

Anyone who has followed the story of JWST knows it is running late - very late, by more than decade. The project has also gone massively over-budget. The cost after build, launch and five years of operations is estimated to be about $10bn. 

But this is a venture that astronomers fully expect to be a revelation. The current Hubble telescope, for example, is restricted in how deeply it can see into space - and therefore how far back in time it can see. 

Its 2.4m-wide mirror cannot quite collect enough photons, and its instruments are not sensitive in just the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to be able to probe the era of first star formation - more than 13.5 billion years ago. 

JWST in contrast has a 6.5m-wide mirror - seven times the light-collecting area of Hubble - and its instruments will be perfectly tuned in the infrared to pick up the light from these founding stars.  

Exoplanet discovered around neighbouring star

Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun.

Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes. The planet's mass is thought to be 3.2 times that of our own, placing it in a category of world known as a "super-Earth". It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away. The star is an extremely faint "red dwarf" that's about 3% as bright as the Sun.

  The research is published in the journal Nature. Co-author Guillem Anglada Escudé said the newly discovered world was "possibly a mostly rocky planet with a massive atmosphere. It's probably very rich in volatiles like water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide - things like this. Many of them are frozen on the surface".

The Sun's closest neighbours

Dr Anglada Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, added: "The closest analogue we may have in the Solar System might be the moon of Saturn called Titan, which also has a very thick atmosphere and is made of hydrocarbons. It has rain and lakes made of methane."

The planet, Barnard's Star b, is about as far away from its star as Mercury is from the Sun. It's the second closest exoplanet to Earth after Proxima Centauri b, whose discovery was announced in 2016.

The planet orbits past a boundary called the "snow line", beyond the traditional habitable zone where water can remain liquid on the surface. On distance alone, it's estimated that temperatures would be about -150C on the planet's surface. However, a massive atmosphere could potentially warm the planet, making conditions more hospitable to life.

  The researchers used the radial velocity method for their detection.

The technique can detect "wobbles" in a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

 These wobbles also affect the light coming from the star.

As it moves towards Earth its light appears shifted towards the blue part of the spectrum and, as it moves away,

it appears shifted towards the red. Earth-sized planet orbits neighbouring star Where should we look for aliens? Could Nasa's next big thing detect alien life? "This planet is particularly complicated because the orbital period (the time to complete one full orbit of the host star) is 233 days. In one year, you only see one part of the cycle, and you have to cover it over many years to be sure that it's repeating," Dr Anglada Escudé told me.

The team re-examined archived data obtained from two astronomical surveys over a 20-year period. They also added new observations with the Carmenes spectrometer in Almeria, Spain, the Eso/Harps instrument in Chile and the Harps-N instrument in the Canary Islands. It's the first time the radial velocity technique has been used to detect a planet this small so far away from its host star

We couldn't get a single experiment that would detect it unambiguously, so we had to combine all the data very carefully," said the Queen Mary University of London astronomer. "We found a lot of systematic errors from several of the instruments that were producing "ghost signals".

It was not only about getting new data but also about understanding the systematic effects. Only when we had done that did the signal become very clear and obvious."

 When the next generation of telescopes come online, scientists will be able to characterise the planet's properties. This will likely include a search for gases like oxygen and methane in the planet's atmosphere, which might be markers for biology.

 "The James Webb Space Telescope might not help in this case, because it was not designed for what's called high contrast imaging. But in the US, they are also developing WFirst - a small telescope that's also used for cosmology," said Dr Anglada Escudé. "If you take the specs of how it should perform,

it should easily image this planet. When we have the image we can then start to do spectroscopy - looking at different wavelengths, in the optical, in the infrared, looking at whether light is absorbed at different colours, meaning there are different things in the atmosphere." 

This is not the first time there have been claims of a planet around Barnard's Star. In the 1960s, the Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp, working in the US, published his evidence for a planetary companion, based on perturbations in the motion of the star. However, van de Kamp's claims proved controversial, as other scientists were not able to reproduce his finding.

 "The new planet is impossible for Peter van de Kamp to have detected. The signal would have been too small for the technique he was using," said Guillem Anglada Escudé. However, the new data contain tentative hints of a second planet orbiting Barnard's Star even further out than the Super-Earth. "The new data does show evidence for a long period object. That object... has a very low probability of being the van de Kamp planet.

But it's a long shot," said Anglada Escudé. In a separate article published in Nature, Rodrigo Diaz, from the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who was not involved with the study, said the discovery "gives us a key piece in the puzzle of planetary formation and evolution, and might be among the first low-mass exoplanets whose atmospheres are probed in detail".

 He added: "Difficult detections such as this one warrant confirmation by independent methods and research groups... a signal for the planet might be detectable in astrometric data - precision measurements of stellar positions - from the Gaia space observatory that are expected to be released in the 2020s.

" The star is named after the American astronomer E E Barnard, who measured properties of its motion in 1916.  

Where will space technology take us by 2030, and what does this mean for life on Earth?

Space technologies will one day take us to asteroids, Mars and back to the moon, and the impact of these missions will be felt back on Earth, says George Whitesides, Chief Executive Officer at

Virgin Galactic and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Space Technologies. In this interview, heexplains how the latest developments in space technologies will help bring about revolutions in wifi access, travel and beyond. What is the state of space technology today? We are at an exciting moment. What we see are several converging trends that will change how we approach space technologies, at a rate of innovation that we haven’t seen in a long time.

 The power of miniaturization, for example, is having a huge impact on satellites. It’s becoming easier to put more capabilities into smaller packages. Constellations of small satellites are allowing for both new capabilities as well as existing capabilities at much lower costs. The exploration of space is also becoming global. More nations are now within reach of space than ever before, while the influx of entrepreneurial capital is driving innovation and new technologies in the private sector. What excites me most about space technologies is that it's an opportunity for us to put the best of humanity forward into the future.

It enables international cooperation, courage, boldness and entrepreneurship. We are doing things for the benefit for the planet. We live on the spaceship Earth. Space technologies help us understand our mothership. The climate, peace and security, energy issues: these are all things space technologies can play a key role in.

  How will your Global Future Council be contributing to the conversation? We have a very impressive group of people from around the globe and a diversity of professions. We will certainly want to look at how we make space exploration sustainable, for business, government and science.

We need to ensure the long term sustainability of the space environment. It’s particularly important now with so many new actors coming into the field. We will also be looking at how we should react to trends such as space property rights and space debris. What are the challenges for sustainability in space?

 The issue of sustainability in space is really crucial. When we talk about sustainability in space, there are a variety of issues. There is no nationally owned sector of space. It’s all shared, so the responsibility is global. This is the same thing here on Earth, when you look at international waters.

The pollution in our waters is an international problem. In space, we have a growing amount of debris that comes from old satellites, launch vehicle stages, collisions and so on. It is very hard to clean up areas of space that have been filled with debris. Radio frequency is another shared resource which is actually being handled rather well right now, but it will continue to be something we need to pay attention to.

What other key trends should we be aware of? A lot of people are looking at launch vehicles and reusability. Right now we don’t use space launch vehicles very efficiently. Imagine if we threw away an airplane after every flight. That’s how space flight works today. These are amazing, precision engineered vehicles and we essentially throw them away after one use. The prospect of getting better reusable vehicles could reduce costs substantially and have a dramatic impact on increasing space access. Small vehicles are also showing enormous potential.

Those are being tailored to smaller satellites. This all leads to what we call "disaggregation", or the idea that you can accomplish certain goals in space technologies in multiple small units rather than in a single large one. GPS is a good example of this. Multiple small satellites also reduce the chance of failure.

By simple numbers, if one satellite goes down, the system is not significantly affected as a whole. Many companies are seeking to provide global communications and broadband via space, and this approach to constellations of small satellites is going to help make that possible.

  Where do you think we’ll be by 2030? The perspective of space is truly important to the future of our planet. Before we can act on any particular policy, it is helpful to shift our worldview to a planetary perspective. It’s a crucial element in solving the challenges facing us. You'll see vehicles taking people into space, but also on high speed journeys around the planet. We might be making our first human journeys to Mars, to an asteroid and possibly a return to the moon.

 Back here on Earth we will see benefits ranging from a better understanding of the climate to ubiquitous broadband. Global access to broadband would bring billions into the global economy, spurring development. Space science will continue to make great advances. Finding new planets around other stars, perhaps showing signs of organic material, and also identifying other resources in our solar system are very possible. Perhaps, by then, we may even have found signs of actual life outside our planet.

NASA was exploring

Did you know that a NASA-sponsored algae research led to the creation of baby formula? So,

NASA was exploring the potential of algae as a recycling agent for long-duration space travel. However, the space organization later ended up finding out that the nutrient-rich algae contained Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA) and Arachidonic Acid (ARA),

which are an excellent dietary supplement for an infant’s mental and visual development. The technologies discovered by NASA to explore new horizons for humanity are now being put to everyday applications. Various inventions explicitly made to ease and improve space exploration

efforts can now be seen in our homes. The technologies behind inventions like portable vacuum cleaners, blankets, invisible braces, and many more, were first discovered by

NASA

 solely for space exploration.  Other technological advancements pioneered by space research include cardiac pumps, artificial limbs, the Internet, and the camera sensors.

SPACE TECHNOLOGY THAT INSPIRED EVERYDAY APPLICATIONS

Space organizations like NASA researched numerous technologies to improve space exploration and communication with space shuttles. When NASA made their inventions and research public, developers repurposed space technology for everyday applications. Some of these technologies include:Embedded web technology and IoTEmbedded web technology was developed by

NASA

to enable astronauts to conduct and monitor experiments on the ISS, remotely over Internet. The embedded web technology was later released in the public domain, which gave rise to the Internet of Things. IoT helps you to connect electronic devices to Internet, which enables any user to access their devices remotely. For example, Google Home is a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled speaker, which doubles up as a virtual assistant. Now, IoT is extensively used in wearables, smart homes, and smart cities. Additionally, IoT has an incredible potential to transform your business to provide improved customer experience, enhanced operational efficiency, and business model innovations.Camera sensorsThe

NASA scientist

, Eric Fossum carried out an extensive research for minimizing the size of cameras for space missions. After years of research, Eric Fossum developed Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor for space exploration. But, images captured using the CMOS sensors displayed signal noise and other issues. Hence, Fossum developed CMOS active pixel sensors using Charge Coupled Device (CCD) technology. After being released for public use,

CMOS

 active pixel sensors revolutionized the digital imaging industry. Now, CMOS active pixel sensors are typically used in various smartphone cameras and GoPro cameras.GPSNumerous space organizations have released various satellites into the Earth’s orbit. Satellites are used for multiple purposes and one of them is the GPS network. GPS networks allow you to pinpoint your location anywhere around the globe. Moreover, GPS networks are extensively used by navigation services like Google Maps. When clubbed with artificial intelligence and machine learning, GPS can help operate autonomous vehicles. With the help of sensors, the vehicles can learn to drive safely on their own. For example, an autonomous tractor can use accurate

GPS

 results to feed plant, spray fertilizer, spray pesticides, and harvest crops.Communication and InternetThe satellites that orbit the Earth, send and receive data and signals to different devices. Satellite signals are used for mobile communication and over Internet, which have revolutionized the way we connect and work. Mobile communication and Internet have made it possible to connect and communicate with anyone in any corner of the world. Furthermore, the speed of Internet is increasing exponentially and the introduction of 5G is estimated to achieve speeds greater than 1Gbps. While, Internet is used for multiple operations in any type of business, the improving speed and cheap data rate is only going to make things better. From managing bank records to handling college admissions, Internet services are widely used in every sector.Rail monitoring sensorsNASA’s Subsonic Rotary Wing Project has discovered a rotational vibration sensor called RotoSense to predict failures in helicopter transmission. RotoSense was repurposed to monitor vibrations in the axle of the train to detect flaws in rails. A Tennessee based company has repurposed RotoSense to create RailSafe, which monitors the health of wheels to identify problems and predict failures. RailSafe has made trains safer and has reduced the maintenance costs.

FUTURE OF SPACE TECHNOLOGY AND ITS EFFECTS

Space technology is growing exponentially and turning sci-fi dreams into reality. Space organizations are funding more research and development programs for space exploration. Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have also joined the race, to innovate space technology, by starting private space missions and pioneering space tourism. With steady growth in the space exploration sector, the future of space exploration is only getting brighter. Some interesting predictions about space technology include space tourism and space colonization. Private organizations such as SpaceX have already announced space missions like MarsOne that plans to colonize Mars. Blue Origin, on the other hand, is testing reusable rockets that have the potential to make space travel cheaper.Additionally, astronomers are discovering new stars, planets, galaxies, and other celestial bodies to gain a better understanding of the creation of the universe. Space technology is being constantly used for finding life and resources on other planets.With new inventions and discovery of better alternatives in space technology, existing technologies are getting cheaper and more advanced. The improvements in space technology will facilitate a better understanding of climate and faster broadband connections. Furthermore, the development of space shuttles and rockets are going to change the way we travel. Suborbital point-to-point travel solutions like Hyperloop, are considered to be possible in the future. Imagine taking off from New York, flying into space and landing in London within an hour or so, this can be possible with hypersonic travel alternatives.The advancements in space technology will revolutionize various industries. Industry sectors like manufacturing will find incredible opportunities to manufacture the parts required for space shuttles and rockets. Software companies need to hire professionals with niche and cross-functional professionals to develop software products and solutions for space exploration. Engineers and researchers must exploit artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive space exploration.Spacecraft and rockets will need large amounts of fuel for space missions. Hence, the energy sector must focus on developing renewable and alternative fuels for this purpose. Organizations can deploy big data analytics to understand and predict trends in space technology or its impact on their field of business.With new players joining the field of space technology, space research and exploration is only getting more advanced and competitive. Hence, it is essential for organizations to understand the potential of space technology and adapt to the changing industry trends to ensure a significant position in a competitive market.

Planets far beyond our galaxy discovered for the first time by astrophysicists

Astrophysicists have discovered planetsoutside our galaxy for the first time ever.

 Previously, planets have only been detected within the Milky Way. However, by measuring an astronomical phenomenon

called microlensing, scientists were able to identify a group of distant worlds using data from Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

The newly discovered planets ranged from the size of the moon to the size of Jupiter, and their galaxy is 3.8 billion light years away from our own.

We are very excited about this discovery. This is the first time anyone has discovered planets outside our galaxy," said Professor Xinyu Dai, an astrophysicist at the University of Oklahoma.

The findings were published by Professor Dai and his colleague Dr Eduardo Guerras in The Astrophysical Journal.

Analysis of microlensing, which makes use of the brightness of distant celestial objects such as stars and quasars, is the only known method capable of identifying planets at such distances.

This galaxy is located 3.8 billion light years away, and there is not the slightest chance of observing these planets directly, not even with the best telescope one can imagine in a science fiction scenario.

   However, we are able to study them, unveil their presence and even have an idea of their masses. This is very cool science."

Microlensing is an astronomical effect in which light ray emanating from a distant star or quasar is bent by the gravity of an intermediary object – such as another star or black hole – when seen from Earth.

If the source is positioned precisely behind the intermediary, that object will act as a “lens” and create a disc of light as light rays from the source pass on all sides of it. 

The brightness of these discs is affected by the presence of planets nearby the lensing star, and so this can be used to determine the presence of planets by stars that would otherwise be too far away to identify.  This effect was predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the discs of light that form are known as “Einstein discs”.

  In Professor Dai and Dr Guerras’s work, they used a telescope to study the microlensing properties of emission of a background quasar, to make measurements they identified as evidence for planets. "These small planets are the best candidate for the signature we observed in this study using the microlensing technique,” said Professor Dai.

We analysed the high frequency of the signature by modelling the data to determine the mass."

CRISIS’ AS SCIENTISTS ADMIT THEY DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW FAST THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING

The universe is expanding faster than scientists thought, potentially re-writing our model of the universe. For years, researchers have been debating just how quickly the cosmos is growing. Repeated measurements come out with a variety of different answers, puzzling the researchers who take them.

  Now the latest measurement has once again suggested that our understanding of the expansion of the universe is wrong. It used new methods to prove that the speed – known as the Hubble constant – is perhaps even more unusual than we had expected.

The astronomers kept the results of the study secret even from themselves during the research, to ensure that they would not be swayed by just how strange their measurements could prove.

In order to understand the expansion rate of the universe, astronomers led by University of California, Davis used Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope alongside technologies on the ground. It was the first time that the latter equipment – the WM Keck Observatory’s Adaptive Optics (AO) system – has been used to mesure the Hubble constant.

When I first started working on this problem more than 20 years ago, the available instrumentation limited the amount of useful data that you could get out of the observations,” said co-author Chris Fassnacht, Professor of Physics at UC Davis. “In this project, we are using Keck Observatory’s AO for the first time in the full analysis. I have felt for many years that AO observations could contribute a lot to this effort.”

The results have been published in the latest issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. To ensure that the results were reliable, the researchers went into the research blind: ensuring that they kept the final conclusions hidden as they worked to ensure their measurement was as accurate as possible. That meant that the researchers could avoid the worry that they would unconsciously adjust the findings to ensure that they lined up with expectations.

  When we thought that we had taken care of all possible problems with the analysis, we unblind the answer with the rule that we have to publish whatever value that we find, even if it’s crazy. It’s always a tense and exciting moment,” said lead author Geoff Chen, a graduate student at the UC Davis Physics Department. When they finally looked at the result, they found that the numbers showed the universe is expanding more quickly than they had thought.

That in turn could complicate our understanding of the universe under the standard model of cosmology. Researchers generally think that the expansion of the universe was very quick when it first formed, then slowed down as dark matter pulled on it, and is now getting faster because of dark energy.

That was created by looking at very distant objects, looking into the cosmic microwave background or the radiation that is leftover from the Big Bang whent he universe began. But the new study looks at more local objects. Numerous studies have found that there is an unexplained difference between the speed measured from those local objects and the results found when examining distant ones

  Therein lies the crisis in cosmology,” says Fassnacht. “While the Hubble Constant is constant everywhere in space at a given time, it is not constant in time. So, when we are comparing the Hubble Constants that come out of various techniques, we are comparing the early universe (using distant observations) vs. the late, more modern part of the universe (using local, nearby observations).”

That suggests either that there is a problem with our understanding of the Cosmic Microwave Background – which researchers think is unlikely – or that there is something profound and fundamental wrong with our understanding of physics.

ASTRONOMERS USE HUGE CLUSTER OF GALAXIES TO 'PEER BACK IN TIME'

Astronomers have used a massive cluster of galaxies to "peer back in time", looking at events that took place nearly 10 billion years ago. Using the pioneering technique, scientists were able to see the spectacular birth of a tiny dwarf galaxy, right as it began.

  It is the first time that astronomers have used the huge galactic giants to zoom in on very extreme but very distant phenomena.

It allowed them to see what they think is the tiny blue speck of the birth of a galaxy which is only 1/10,000 the size of our Milky Way. It was seen churning out its first ever stars: supermassive objects that are only at the very beginning of their lives.

“It’s this little blue smudge, meaning it’s a very small galaxy that contains a lot of super-hot, very massive young stars that formed recently,” says Matthew Bayliss, a research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “This galaxy is similar to the very first galaxies that formed in the universe … the kind of which no one has ever seen in X-ray in the distant universe before.”

Scientists now hope they can use the same technique to see other extreme and energetic events so far away that they happened right at the very beginning of the universe.

“With this technique, we could, in the future, zoom in on a distant galaxy and age-date different parts of it – to say, this part has stars that formed 200 million years ago, versus another part that formed 50 million years ago, and pick them apart in a way you cannot otherwise do,” said Bayliss.

The technique relies on one of the strangest characteristics of such huge galaxy clusters: they are the most massive objects in the universe, so huge and powerful that they distort the very fabric of space-time. As they do, the universe and its light is bent.

That can be used something like a magnifying glass, because of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Using complex processing, scientists can examine the light and use it to see "magnified" images.

Researchers have been able to use this before to study objects at optical wavelengths. But the new research is a breakthrough because they have never before usedit to examine the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is so difficult that some thought it might be impossible.

If you’re trying to see an X-ray source behind a cluster, it’s like trying to see a candle next to a really bright light," said Bayliss. “So we knew this was a challenging measurement to make.”

To get around that problem, researchers used Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of the most powerful X-ray telescopes in the world. With that, they were able to start looking deeper and deeper into the universe – including at such infant galaxies.

We’re catching this galaxy at a very useful stage, where it’s got these really young stars,” Bayliss says. “Every galaxy had to start out in this phase, but we don’t see a lot of these kinds of galaxies in our own neighborhood. Now we can go back in time, look in the distant universe, find galaxies in this early phase of their life, and start to study how star formation is different there.”

Life on Mars could be found within two years but world is ‘not prepared’, Nasa’s chief scientist says

Nasa is close to finding life on Mars but the world is not ready for the “revolutionary” implications of the discovery, the space agency’s chief scientist has said. Dr Jim Green has warned that two rovers from

Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) could find evidence of life within months of arriving on Mars in March 2021.

  The ExoMars Rover, which has been dubbed “Rosalind” in memory of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, will search for extra-terrestrial life by drilling 6.5 feet down into Mars’ core to take samples.

Those samples will then be crushed up and examined for organic matter in a mobile laboratory. Dr Green compared the potential discovery to when the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun in the 16th century.

  Nasa’s rover Mars 2020 will drill into rock formations on the planet before sending test-tubes of rock samples back to Earth – the first time material from Mars will have been brought onto this planet.

Dr Green added that the discovery of life on Mars will give scientists a new set of questions to explore. “What happens next is a whole new set of scientific questions. Is that life like us? How are we related?” he said. “Can life move from planet-to-planet or do we have a spark and just the right environment and that spark generates life – like us or do not like us – based on the chemical environment that it is in?”

  Recent research has shown that planets which were previously thought to be uninhabitable may have once had suitable conditions for life. Earlier this year, scientists discovered that there may be a vast and active system of water running underneath the surface of Mars.

A study released this month also claimed that Venus may have been habitable for 2 to 3 billion years before its atmosphere became incredibly dense and hot about 700 million years ago. Recent research suggests that civilisations could exist on other planets, according to Dr Green.  

SCIENTISTS FIND ANSWER TO VAST PUZZLE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE IN THE MIDDLE OF TWO COLLIDING STARS

Scientists have found the answer to a decades-long mystery, in the middle of two colliding stars.

For the first ever time, a newly made heavy element called strontium was detected in space after two neutron stars crashed into each other.

 The discovery definitively confirms that heavier elements in the universe can be made in the mergers of neutron stars, at last helping answer the puzzle of how chemical elements form.

Since the middle of the last century, researchers have understood how physical processes create the elements that make up the world around us. They went on to find the places in the universe where these are found – with the exception of one.

 "This is the final stage of a decades-long chase to pin down the origin of the elements," said the study's lead author Darach Watson from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark

The element that researchers saw being formed, strontium, is found naturally in the soil. It is probably best known for providing the salts that allow fireworks to include red colours

How to use the Orion constellation to find Sirius the dog star

THIS week, we are going to be star-hopping. We will identify the most recognisable

constellation visible around now – Orion – and use it to find Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

 You don’t need any equipment, and as Orion is one of the brightest constellations, light pollution shouldn’t be a problem either.

 Sirius can be seen in summer in the southern hemisphere, rising early in the morning before the sun, and in the evening when it sets after the sun. At the moment in the northern hemisphere,

Sirius will rise above the horizon at about

SpaceX plans to put more than 40,000 satellites in space

 Menu   SpaceX plans to put more than 40,000 satellites in space SPACE 17 October 2019 By Mark Harris 60 Starlink satellites stacked for launch at

SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida SpaceX SpaceX has filed documents with telecommunications authorities that show it has plans to launch 30,000 small satellites – that is roughly triple the number put into orbit by humans in history so far. The documents were filed last week with the International

Telecommunication Union, a UN agency that coordinates the launch of satellites. The filings show that the space firm owned by Elon Musk plans to launch 20 sets of 1500 satellites. The plans will need approval from other bodies and it may be several years before the satellites can be launched. SpaceX already has permission to put nearly 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, and 60 of these are already up there. It plans to use these to create a wireless internet service called Starlink.

The firm says the new satellites are to meet future internet demand, but they will also be well situated for Earth observation. As they will be between 330 and 580 kilometres above Earth,

they could be used for taking high-resolution pictures or video of the surface. Such orbits pose little risk of creating long-term orbital debris because the atmosphere there is thick enough to drag satellites or pieces of space junk down where they will burn up. SpaceX is also making the satellites black to reduce their impact on astronomical observations. However,

the number of satellites being proposed is unprecedented. “With that many satellites, there does need to be a very, very close look at the collision risk, disposal and re-entry risks,” says Hugh Lewis at the University of Southampton, UK. “SpaceX will have learned a lot from their first generation of 60 Starlinks, but the more satellites you have in a given volume of space,

the more close approaches you will have.” SpaceX told New Scientist that demand for fast, reliable internet is escalating and that it is “taking steps to responsibly scale Starlink’s total network capacity and data density to meet the growth in users’ anticipated needs”.

Moving to Mars – this show will help you become a real Martian

STEP into Moving to Mars, an exhibition of Mars mission and colony design at London’s Design Museum, and you are confronted, immediately, with some very good reasons not to move there. Minatory glowing wall-texts announce that Mars wasn’t 

made for you; that there is no life and precious little water; that, clad in a spacesuit, you will never touch, taste or smell the planet you now call “home”. As Lisa Grossman wrote for New Scientist a couple of years ago, “What’s different about Mars is that there is nothing to do there except try not to die”. 

 It is an odd beginning for such a celebratory exhibition, but it provides a valuable, dark backdrop against which the rest of the show can sparkle – a show that is, as its chief curator Justin McGuirk remarks, “not about Mars; this is an exhibition about people”.

Moving along, there is a quick yet lucid dash through what the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls “the history of Mars in the human mind”. A Babylonian clay tablet and a Greek vase speak to early ideas about the planets. A poster for the original Total Recall film reminds us of Mars’s psychological menace. 

The bulk of the show focuses on our current plans for the Red Planet. There are real spacesuits and copies of rovers, models of 3D-printed Martian settlements and prototypes of suitable clothing and furniture. Mission architectures and engineering sketches line the walls. Real hammers meant for the International Space Station (hollow and loaded with ball bearings to increase their utility in zero gravity) are wall-mounted beside a nifty low-gravity table that has yet to leave, and may indeed never leave earth.

This, of course, is the great strength of approaching science through design: reality and speculation can be given equal visual weight, drawing us into an informed conversation about what it is we actually want from a future on Mars. 

Halfway round the show, I relaxed in a fully realised Martian living pod made by international design firm Hassell and its engineering partners Eckersley O’Callaghan. (Their full project is visualised above.) They’re taking part in NASA’s 

3D-Printed Habitat Challenge – the agency’s programme to develop habitat ideas for deep-space exploration – and it combines economy, recycling, efficiency and comfort in surprising ways. Xavier De Kestelier, Hassell’s head of design technology and innovation, was particularly proud of the chairs, made of recycled packaging: 

“The more you eat, the more you sit!” So much for Martian living. The profound limitations of that life were brought home by a hydroponic system from vertical farming firm Growstack. Its trays of delicious cress and lettuce reminded me, rather sharply, that for all the hype, we are a very long way from being able to feed ourselves away from our home world. We are still at the point where a single sunflower and a single zinnia blossoming aboard the ISS – the former in 2012, the latter in 2016 – 

make headlines. The Growstack exhibit and other materials about Martian horticulture also mark a cultural shift from the strategic, militarised thinking that characterised cold-war space exploration towards more humane, more practical questions about how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary, severe environment. The playfulness of “Martian thinking” is quite properly reflected in this lively and family-orientated exhibition. The point, made very well here, is that this play, this freedom from strictures and established lines of thought, is essential to good design. Space forces you to work from first principles. It compels you to think about mass, transport, utility and reusability. Leaving the show, 

I was drawn up short by what looked like some cycling gear. Anna Talvi, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, has constructed her flesh-hugging clothing to act as a sort of “wearable gym” to counter the muscle-wasting and bone loss caused by living in low gravity. She has also tried to tackle the serious psychological challenges of space exploration by permeating her fabrics with comforting scents. Her X.Earth perfumed gloves “will bring you back to your Earth-memory place”, with the smell of freshly cut grass, say, or your favourite horse. Those gloves, even more than that hydroponically grown lettuce, brought home to me the sheer ghastliness of space exploration. 

It is no accident that this year’s most ambitious science fiction movies, Aniara and Ad Astra, both focus on the mental and spiritual damage we would face were we ever to swap our home planet for a life of manufactured monotony. There is a new realism creeping into our ideas of living off-world, along with a resurgence of optimism and possibility. This is good. We need light and shade as we plan our next great adventure. How else can we ever hope to become Martian? 

wormholes really exist

 PrintWhatsappRedditPocketFlipboardPinterestLinkedin SPACE Do wormholes really exist? Scientists hatch a plan to find out.

 New study suggests it may be possible to spot the space-time tunnels by observing nearby stars. Wormholes require extreme warping of space-time, which in turn depends on very powerful gravitational forces.coffeekai / Getty Images/NASA/iStockphoto

Weird star wiggles could betray the presence of wormholes, if these fabled space-time tunnels do indeed exist, a new study suggests. Wormholes are sci-fi staples; over the years, many stories, books and movies have sent their protagonists zipping between widely separated locales via these cosmic shortcuts. Wormholes are possible,

according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, but nobody has ever spotted one. The new study provides a possible way to make the first tentative detection: look for slight but strange movements of stars. Related: Physicists Reveal Step-by-Step Instructions for Building a Wormhole "If you have two stars,

one on each side of the wormhole, the star on our side should feel the gravitational influence of the star that's on the other side," study co-author Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist and professor of physics at the University at Buffalo in New York, said in a statement.

"The gravitational flux will go through the wormhole." Wormholes require extreme warping of space-time, which in turn depends on very powerful gravitational forces.

So, a good place to hunt for these theoretical tunnel is near the supermassive black holes that lurk at the cores of galaxies — such as Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the four-million-solar-mass behemoth in our own Milky Way, Stojkovic said.

 "So if you map the expected orbit of a star around Sagittarius A*, you should see deviations from that orbit if there is a wormhole there with a star on the other side," he said. Current observing techniques likely aren't sensitive enough to make such a detection at the moment,

he added. But it may be possible to do so in the next decade or two with advances in instrumentation as well as long-term monitoring of appropriate target stars, such as S2, which circles near Sagittarius A