Sunday, January 15, 2012
Fobos Grunt
Above: The final architecture of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft and its major components as of 2011. Credit: IKI
Saturday, January 14, 2012
2012: No Planet X
Apparently, Planet X (a.k.a. Nibiru) was spotted by astronomers in the early 1980′s in the outermost reaches of the Solar System. It has been tracked by infrared observatories; seen lurking around in the Kuiper Belt and now it is speeding right toward us and will enter the inner Solar System in 2012. So what does this mean to us? Well, the effects of the approach of Planet X on our planet will be biblical, and what’s more the effects are being felt right now. Millions, even billions of people will die, global warming will increase; earthquakes, drought, famine, wars, social collapse, even killer solar flares will be caused by Nibiru blasting through the core of the Solar System. All of this will happen in 2012, and we must begin preparing for our demise right now…
As investigated in my previous article “No Doomsday in 2012“, a lot of weight had been placed on the end of an ancient Mayan calendar, the “Long Count”. According to this calendar and Mayan myth, something is going to happen on December 21st, 2012. Now the world’s Planet X supporters seem to have calculated that this hypothetical, deadly planet will arrive from a highly eccentric orbit to wreak gravitational havoc on Earth, sparking geological, social, economic and environmental damage, killing a high proportion of life… in 2012.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Milky Way brims with planets
Carl Sagan would have loved it: not only are there billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, but every star may also harbour a planet. Millions of these could be like the fictional planet Tatooine in Star Wars, which orbits two stars.
About 700 extrasolar planets have been found in the Milky Way, a small number compared with the number of stars present. To find out whether such planets are truly rare or just hard to find, Arnaud Cassan of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and colleagues turned to gravitational microlensing, in which one star focuses the light from a more distant star.
While other techniques are best at finding planets around nearby sun-like stars, gravitational microlensing can study any star up to 20,000 light years away.
The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) observes millions of stars every night with telescopes in Chile to find microlensing events. Then the Probing Lensing Anomalies Network (PLANET) follows up on intriguing signals using a global network of telescopes.
The researchers studied six years of microlensing data from the two projects and estimated that extrasolar planets are the rule rather than the exception, with each star in the galaxy hosting an average of 1.6 planets. More specifically, 17 per cent of the stars host a Jupiter-like planet, 52 per cent have a Neptune-like planet, and 62 per cent harbour a super-Earth – a rocky planet up to 10 times as massive as Earth.
Super-Earths
The seeming abundance of rocky super-Earths lends support to the core accretion model of planet formation, in which small rocky bodies collide and clump together to grow into these objects.
"Our results suggest that Earths should be even more common than super-Earths, if the mechanism to build an Earth is similar to that of building a super-Earth," says Cassan.
Meanwhile, William Welsh of San Diego State University in California and colleagues studied 750 stars observed by NASA's Kepler satellite. Based on their findings, they reckon several million planets in our galaxy orbit two stars, like the Star Wars planet Tatooine.
"Nature seems to like forming planets. The more carefully we look, the more of them we find," says Welsh.
About 700 extrasolar planets have been found in the Milky Way, a small number compared with the number of stars present. To find out whether such planets are truly rare or just hard to find, Arnaud Cassan of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and colleagues turned to gravitational microlensing, in which one star focuses the light from a more distant star.
While other techniques are best at finding planets around nearby sun-like stars, gravitational microlensing can study any star up to 20,000 light years away.
The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) observes millions of stars every night with telescopes in Chile to find microlensing events. Then the Probing Lensing Anomalies Network (PLANET) follows up on intriguing signals using a global network of telescopes.
The researchers studied six years of microlensing data from the two projects and estimated that extrasolar planets are the rule rather than the exception, with each star in the galaxy hosting an average of 1.6 planets. More specifically, 17 per cent of the stars host a Jupiter-like planet, 52 per cent have a Neptune-like planet, and 62 per cent harbour a super-Earth – a rocky planet up to 10 times as massive as Earth.
Super-Earths
The seeming abundance of rocky super-Earths lends support to the core accretion model of planet formation, in which small rocky bodies collide and clump together to grow into these objects.
"Our results suggest that Earths should be even more common than super-Earths, if the mechanism to build an Earth is similar to that of building a super-Earth," says Cassan.
Meanwhile, William Welsh of San Diego State University in California and colleagues studied 750 stars observed by NASA's Kepler satellite. Based on their findings, they reckon several million planets in our galaxy orbit two stars, like the Star Wars planet Tatooine.
"Nature seems to like forming planets. The more carefully we look, the more of them we find," says Welsh.
Millions of planets orbit two stars (Illu
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