Kepler telescope team finds 11 new solar systems

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has found 11 new planetary systems, including one with five planets all orbiting closer to their parent star than Mercury circles the Sun, scientists said on Thursday.

The discoveries boost the list of confirmed extra-solar planets to 729, including 60 credited to the Kepler team. The telescope, launched in space in March 2009, can detect slight but regular dips in the amount of light coming from stars. Scientists can then determine if the changes are caused by orbiting planets passing by, relative to Kepler's view.

Kepler scientists have another 2,300 candidate planets awaiting additional confirmation.

None of the newly discovered planetary systems are like our solar system, though Kepler-33, a star that is older and bigger than the Sun, comes close in terms of sheer numbers. It has five planets, compared to our solar system's eight, but the quintet all fly closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun.

The planets range in size from about 1.5 times the diameter of Earth to five times Earth's diameter. Scientists have not yet determined if any are solid rocky bodies like Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury or if they are filled with gas like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The Kepler team previously found one star with six confirmed planets and a second system with five planets, said planetary scientist Jack Lissauer, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Nine of the new systems contain two planets and one has three, bringing the total number of newly discovered planets to 26. All are closer to their host stars than Venus is to the Sun.

"This has tripled the number of stars which we know have more than one transiting planet, so that's the big deal here," Lissauer told Reuters.

"We're starting to think in terms of planetary systems as opposed to just planets: Do they all tend to have similar sizes? What's the spacing? Is the solar system unusual in those regards?" he said.

Kepler is monitoring more than 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

The research is published in four different papers in Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Snowy owls soar south from Arctic in rare mass migration

 Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of snowy owls 

from the Arctic winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a 

mass southern migration that a leading owl researcher called 

"unbelievable."

Thousands of the snow-white birds, which stand 2 feet tall with 5-foot wingspans, have been spotted from coast to coast, feeding in farmlands in Idaho, roosting on rooftops in Montana, gliding over golf courses in Missouri and soaring over shorelines in Massachusetts.

A certain number of the iconic owls fly south from their Arctic breeding grounds each winter but rarely do so many venture so far away even amid large-scale, periodic southern migrations known as irruptions.

"What we're seeing now -- it's unbelievable," said Denver Holt, head of the Owl Research Institute in Montana.

"This is the most significant wildlife event in decades," added Holt, who has studied snowy owls in their Arctic tundra ecosystem for two decades.

Holt and other owl experts say the phenomenon is likely linked to lemmings, a rodent that accounts for 90 percent of the diet of snowy owls during breeding months that stretch from May into September. The largely nocturnal birds also prey on a host of other animals, from voles to geese.

An especially plentiful supply of lemmings last season likely led to a population boom among owls that resulted in each breeding pair hatching as many as seven offspring. That compares to a typical clutch size of no more than two, Holt said.

Greater competition this year for food in the Far North by the booming bird population may have then driven mostly younger, male owls much farther south than normal.

Research on the animals is scarce because of the remoteness and extreme conditions of the terrain the owls occupy, including northern Russia and Scandinavia, he said.

The surge in snowy owl sightings has brought birders flocking from Texas, Arizona and Utah to the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, pouring tourist dollars into local economies and crowding parks and wildlife areas. The irruption has triggered widespread public fascination that appears to span ages and interests.

"For the last couple months, every other visitor asks if we've seen a snowy owl today," said Frances Tanaka, a volunteer for the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge northeast of Olympia, Washington.

But accounts of emaciated owls at some sites -- including a food-starved bird that dropped dead in a farmer's field in Wisconsin -- suggest the migration has a darker side. And Holt said an owl that landed at an airport in Hawaii in November was shot and killed to avoid collisions with planes.

He said snowy owl populations are believed to be in an overall decline, possibly because a changing climate has lessened the abundance of vegetation like grasses that lemmings rely on.

This winter's snowy owl outbreak, with multiple sightings as far south as Oklahoma, remains largely a mystery of nature.

A snowy white owl takes flight in this undated handout photo courtesy of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of snowy owls from the Arctic winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a mass southern migration that a leading owl researcher called "unbelievable" according to Denver Holt, head of Owl Research Institute in Montana. REUTERS/U.S. Fish&Wildlife Service/Handout

Cold Plasma Above Earth

 Cold plasma has been well-hidden. Space physicists have long lacked clues to how much of this electrically charged gas exists tens of thousands of miles above Earth and how the stuff may impact our planet’s interaction with the Sun. Now, a new method developed by Swedish researchers makes cold plasma measurable and reveals significantly more cold, charged ions in Earth’s upper altitudes than previously imagined. 

At these lofty elevations, storms of high-energy charged particles -- space weather -- roil the atmosphere, creatingauroras, buffeting satellites, and sometimes wreaking havoc with electronic devices and electric grids on Earth. The new evidence of abundant cold (i.e. low-energy) ions may change our understanding of this tumultuous space weather and lead to more accurate forecasting of it, scientists say. The finding might also shed light on what’s happening around other planets and moons -- for instance, helping explain why the once robust atmosphere of Mars is so wispy today. 

“The more you look for low-energy ions, the more you find,” said Mats Andre, a professor of space physics at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala, Sweden, and leader of the research team. “We didn’t know how much was out there. It’s more than even I thought.” 

The low-energy ions are created in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere where solar energy can sweep electrons away from molecules, leaving atoms of elements like hydrogen and oxygen with positive charges. Actually detecting these ions at high altitudes has been extremely difficult. 

Now that has changed, making it apparent that low-energy ions abound in the distant reaches where Earth’s atmosphere gives way to outer space. Researchers knew the ions were present at altitudes of about 100 kilometers (60 miles), but Andre and his colleague Chris Cully looked much higher, between 20,000 and 100,000 km (12,400 to 60,000 mi). While the concentration of the previously hidden cold ions varies, about 50 to 70 percent of the time the particles make up most of the mass of great swaths of space, according to the researchers’ satellite measurements and calculations. And, in some high-altitude zones, low-energy ions dominate nearly all of the time. Even at altitudes around 100,000 km -- about a third of the distance to the Moon -- the team detected these previously elusive low-energy ions. 

A scientist examines one of the European Space Agency's four Cluster satellites, used in a recent Geophysical Research Letters study to measure low-energy ions. Credit: European Space Agency

Finding so many relatively cool ions in those regions is surprising, Andre said, because there’s so much energy blasting into Earth’s high altitudes from the solar wind -- a rushing flow of hot plasma streaming from the Sun, which stirs up space-weather storms. 

This hot plasma is about 1,000 times hotter than what Andre considers cold plasma -- but even cold is a relative term. The low-energy ions have an energy that would correspond to about 500,000 degrees Celsius (about one million degrees Fahrenheit) at typical gas densities found on Earth. But because the density of the ions in space is so low, satellites and spacecraft can orbit without bursting into flames. 

The researchers’ new findings have been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of theAmerican Geophysical Union. 

For decades, space physicists have struggled to accurately detect low-energy ions and determine how much of the material is leaving our atmosphere. The satellite Andre works on, one of four European Space Agency CLUSTER spacecraft, is equipped with a detector with thin wire arms that measures the electric field between them as the satellite rotates. But, when the scientists gathered data from their detectors, two mysterious trends appeared. Strong electric fields turned up in unexpected regions of space. And as the spacecraft rotated, measurements of the electric field didn’t fluctuate in the smoothly changing manner that Andre expected. 

“To a scientist, it looked pretty ugly,” Andre said. “We tried to figure out what was wrong with the instrument. Then we realized there’s nothing wrong with the instrument.” Unexpectedly, they found that cold plasma was altering the structure of electrical fields around the satellite. Once they understood that, they could use their field measurements to reveal the presence of the once-hidden ions. 

It’s a clever way of turning the limitations of a spacecraft-based detector into assets, said Thomas Moore, senior project scientist for NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He was not involved in the new research. 

As scientists use the new measurement method to map cold plasma around Earth, they could discover more about how hot and cold plasmas interact during space storms and other events, deepening researchers’ understanding of space weather, Andre said. 

The new measurements indicate that about a kilogram (two pounds) of cold plasma escapes from Earth’s atmosphere every second, Andre said. Knowing that rate of loss for Earth may help scientists better reconstruct what became of the atmosphere of Mars, which is thought to once have been denser and more similar to Earth’s. The new cold plasma results might also help researchers explain atmospheric traits of other planets and moons, Andre suggested. 

An artist's rendition of Magnetospheric Multiscale mission as it sweeps through a magnetic reconnection event caused when the solar wind meets Earth's magnetic fields. Credit: SWRI

And closer to home, if scientists could develop more accurate space weather forecasts, they could save satellites from being blinded or destroyed, and better warn space station astronauts and airlines of danger from high-energy radiation. While low-energy ions are not responsible for the damage caused by space weather, they do influence that weather. Andre compared the swaths of ions to, say, a low-pressure area in our familiar, down-to-Earth weather -- as opposed to a harmful storm. It is a key player, even if it doesn’t cause the damage itself. “You may want to know where the low-pressure area is, to predict a storm,” Andre noted. 

Improving space weather forecasts to the point where they’re comparable to ordinary weather forecasting, was “not even remotely possible if you’re missing most of your plasma,” Moore, with NASA, said. Now, with a way to measure cold plasma, the goal of high-quality forecasts is one step closer. 

“It is stuff we couldn’t see and couldn’t detect, and then suddenly we could measure it,” Moore said of the low-energy ions. “Now you can actually study it and see if it agrees with the theories.”

Photo from NASA Mars Orbiter Shows Wind's Handiwork

This enhanced-color image shows sand dunes trapped in an impact crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
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January 25, 2012

Some images of stark Martian landscapes provide visual appeal beyond their science value, including a recent scene of wind-sculpted features from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The scene shows dunes and sand ripples of various shapes and sizes inside an impact crater in the Noachis Terra region of southern Mars. Patterns of dune erosion and deposition provide insight into the sedimentary history of the area.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six science instruments since 2006. Now in an extended mission, the orbiter continues to provide insights about the planet's ancient environments and about how processes such as wind, meteorite impacts and seasonal frosts are continuing to affect the Martian surface today. This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other orbital and surface missions combined.

More than 20,600 images taken by HiRISE are available for viewing on the instrument team's website:http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu. Each observation by this telescopic camera covers several square miles, or square kilometers, and can reveal features as small as a desk.

HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. 

Cambridge scientist 'debunks' flying myth

A scientist at Cambridge University has debunked the long-held myth about how aircraft stay aloft.

Aeroplanes can fly as their wings cause the air pressure underneath to be greater than that above, lifting them into the air. But, engineers have for years been frustrated by a theory, which wrongly explains what causes the pressure change, a myth commonly found in school textbooks and flight manuals.

But, Prof Holger Babinsky of Cambridge University's engineering department has now created a minute-long video, posted on 'YouTube' website, to lay to rest the myth once and for all, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.

According to conventional wisdom, the pressure change happens as the air on the curved upper surface of the wing has further to travel than that below the flat underneath surface, meaning it must travel faster to arrive at the other side of the wing at the same time.

Prof Babinsky says the myth goes against the laws of physics and the real explanation has nothing to do with the distance the air has to travel.

According to him, the curvature of the wing causes the change in air pressure because it pulls some of the air upwards, which reduces pressure, and forces the rest beneath

it, creating higher pressure.

A law known as the Bernoulli equation means that when pressure is lower, air moves faster -- so the air stream above the wing does move more quickly than the one below, but this is not what causes the difference in pressure.

World's first magnetic soap 'produced'

In a pioneering research, scientists claim to have produced the world's first magnetic soap that is composed of iron-rich salts dissolved in water.

A team at Bristol University says that its soap, which responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution, would calm all concerns over the use of surfactants in oil-spill clean-ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products.

For long, researchers have been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase the ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system.

The Bristol University team produced the magnetic soap by dissolving iron in a range of inert surfactant materials composed of chloride and bromide ions, very similar to those found in everyday mouthwash or fabric conditioner.

The addition of the iron creates metallic centres within the soap particles, say the scientists led by Julian Eastoe.

To test its properties, the team introduced a magnet to a test tube containing their new soap lying beneath a less dense organic solution, the 'Angewandte Chemie' journal reported.

When the magnet was introduced the iron-rich soap overcame both gravity and surface tension between the water and oil, to levitate through the organic solvent and reach the source of magnetic energy, proving its magnetic properties.

A non-hydrolytic sol–gel route to highly active MoO3–SiO2–Al2O3 metathesis catalysts

Mesoporous mixed oxides prepared via non-hydrolytic sol–gel outperform markedly other MoO₃-based catalysts in the metathesis of propene.