Exciting news! An international team has found a new exoplanet of the super-Earth category that is in the habitable zone of its host star. The planet has the best habitability index of the exoplanets yet, as explained here.
The system is special because of the fact that it is a triple star system (the other stars are known as Gliese 667A and 667B). The system has three known planets, and there might be even another one that is also in the habitable zone!
All very exciting in itself, but the most interesting to me is the fact that the system and its planets are relatively nearby, a mere 22 lightyears. In astronomical terms that is right on our doorstep! That will possibly make further investigations easier.
BOOM! River woke up with the ground shaking. BOOM! It took a moment to realize that it was the next compound that was building itself was making that noise. River turned around to lie just a moment longer before getting up. The new compound meant there would be even more work for them to take up, but it also meant less classroom hours this week. River decided it was not such a bad thing after all.
Getting up was easier than staying in bed with that noise. Strange how the noises got stronger lately, he decided to talk to Hope about that later. It must have some significance. They were always encouraged to not ignore their instincts; it made for some interesting discussions sometimes. River smiled recalling one involving spoons. Not that it always was easy, school work included the sciences were detachment and objectivity was required, River suspected that finding the right balance was one of the major goals of their education.
Breakfast was served in the hall for him and his schoolmates. It was a good place to start the day; it had magnificent views over the red landscape. The skies were clear as always, although they said that this year may see the first clouds, proper ones, not the dusty ones that would announce windy conditions. River peered in the distance, but no sign of them yet. As if not the whole compound would be here if they were. River smiled, not much was going on that not everybody knew in an instant.
“Listen up, all of you, no doubt that you have noticed that the new compound is rooting itself today, which means we will have a building week. The new roster is on the ‘net. Have fun and be on time! There is a lot to do, but the compound warming will be exceptional. More details on that later. Lunch will be served in the different locations, so see you all at dinner.”
Skye, their mentor, stood up and left. “Have you all heard? We will have nine more exercise rooms when we are done. Nine! I can’t wait to play the newest edition of Knights, I hope they installed it.” “Oh no, trust me to be assigned to the bathroom tiling again.” Everybody was talking at once now that their mentor was gone. It was that energy that River knew was what made the elders assign them to building duties. And it felt good to know that they too could help build the city. River checked the roster to see what team he was assigned to.
Our intrepid Mars Rover Opportunity (lovingly called Oppy by its followers) has started its ninth year on the red planet. This calls for a new Mars picture in celebration.
By the way all the raw* images made by her cameras are found on the NASA Mission site.
* ‘Raw’ here means there is nothing done to enhance the images yet, what you see what the camera saw.
The sharpest picture of the Andromeda Nebula was released by the Hubble Telescope allowing zoom deep into the core of the young galaxy. Imagine how many planets are present in that view. The newest estimate for the number of planets in our Milky Way based on the findings of Kepler is 160 billion…
With 2012 around the corner I would like to thank you for being here and wish you a happy new year. I still enjoy posting here, and even though the work on Joynet Solutions is claiming a lot of my time, I will certainly will continue to do so.
The new year will see the start of a set of science-fiction themed stories. My aim is to publish a new story every month. I am really looking forward to that, and I hope you will enjoy them too.
Sometimes we are reminded of just how risky and difficult space flight is, even if it is not manned. The Russian mission to Mars’ moon Phobos is not running as it should be. After being successfully launched from Earth, it failed to head off to Mars. Instead it will fall back, and still being loaded with the fuel that would have gotten it to Mars, it will burn to a cinder.
Not all hope is lost however, because the journey always was intended to be round-trip, so some of the instruments might still survive the fiery return. One experiment in particular is of interest: a module appropriately called LIFE. It contains 10 species of microscopic organisms, representing all three of Earth’s domains of life. Some of the LIFE species have never been flown in space before, if some or all of these survive we will know more about life’s resilience to the rigours of outer space.
The past years I have tried to keep you up to date on the new exoplanet discoveries. The discoveries are coming thick and fast now, they even can be called relatively numerous, so I was toying with the idea of setting up an overview. An overview like that would be hard to keep up-to-date though, with the different groups that exist around the world.
Since I never gotten ’round to start it, I was very happy to hear that there now is a formal Habitable Exoplanet Catalog, set up at Arecibo. It combines the data of confirmed planets and the Kepler Candidate planets.
Since this week the first Kepler Science Conference is running, you can expect the data to be updated very soon.
The system that is Earth is so incredibly beautiful and intricate. It’s climate is kept stable by the interaction between chemistry and biology. The salt water in the oceans and the sweet water that is constantly being moved around by the suns energy are fundamental and keeps surprising us the more we know about it. The gulf-stream that plays such an important part in keeping Europe warm, is powered by salty water sinking at the North Pole. This sinking water does more than that, as is shown in this beautiful footage made by the BBC.
A quick post to keep you up to date on new Solar system findings:
The moon is possibly much younger than Earth, 70 million years, and created by a Mars size protoplanet colliding with young Earth.
Wind on Mars is a much lighter thing than here on Earth, since the atmosphere is much less dense. That is why scientists assumed sand dunes on Mars would remain stationary. Pictures by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have now shown that they do move. 1-0 for observational science!
And, today (November 16th 2011) NASA will announce new findings about Europa, my pet Jupiter moon, with its large ocean of salty water under thick ice. I’m curious to find out what the news is, the event will be broadcast live on NASA TV at 13:00h EST.
EDIT: The live conference has come and gone; here is the video.
