Super Earth

Astronomers on Monday announced the discovery of 50 new planets circling 


stars beyond the sun, including one “super-Earth” that is the right distance 


from its star to possibly have water.


“If we are really, really lucky, this planet could be a habitat” like Earth, said 


Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, 


Germany.


The planet, dubbed HD85512b, circles an orange star somewhat smaller and 


cooler than our sun about 36 light-years away. The star, HD85512, is visible in 


the southern sky in the constellation Vela.


The newly found planet circles this star every 59 days, putting it at the edge 


of the “habitable zone” where water could exist if atmospheric conditions 


were right.


In a teleconference, Kaltenegger said that the planet is at the warm edge of 


its star’s habitable zone, as if “standing next to a bonfire.” That means the 


planet would require a lot of cloud cover — which reflects starlight — to keep 


the surface cool enough to prevent any water from boiling, she said.


Astronomers have not determined whether the new super-Earth is rocky like 


the Earth or gassy like Jupiter, let alone whether it has an atmosphere. The 


new super-Earth is 3.5 times the mass of Earth.


Astronomers inferred the existence of the planet by watching its star wobble 


ever so slightly. The speed of the wobble indicated the existence of a planet 


tugging at the star.


This “radial velocity” technique has been productive, offering astronomers 


working at La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile evidence of the 50 new 


“exoplanets” announced Monday. The planet-hunting instrument, called 


HARPS, are operated by the European Southern Observatory.


Sixteen of the new planets announced Monday, including the new super-Earth, 


are of the right mass to be made of rock instead of gas.


“We are building up a target list of super-Earths in the habitable zone,” 


Kaltenegger said.


To determine whether the planet has an atmosphere, astronomers need to 


capture an image of the planet — which they have not done — and analyze the 


light for signs of water, carbon dioxide and other gases. No existing telescope 


is sensitive enough for that task.


But a new telescope to begin construction next year, the European Extremely 


Large Telescope, will be up to the task, said Markus Kissler-Patig of the 


European Southern Observatory. It will be “technically capable of finding life 


around the nearest stars,” he said, by analyzing the atmosphere of exoplanets. 


The new super-Earth is a “prime target” for the new telescope.


Since 1995, astronomers have found more than 600 planets beyond Earth, 


according to a catalog.


In the accelerating race to bag and tag planets outside our solar system, 


HD85512b marks the second super-Earth found at the right distance from its 


star to possibly hold water, considered a vital ingredient for life. The first, 


called Gliese 581d, was discovered by the same telescope in Chile in 2007.

Feeding Frenzy of Draco Constellation

An artistic image of the black hole

 A monster black hole shredded a Sun-like star, producing a strangely long-lasting flash of gamma rays that probably won't be seen again in a million years..

That is definitely not the norm for gamma ray bursts, energetic blasts that typically flare up and end in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, often the sign of the death throes of a collapsing star.

"This is truly different from any explosive event we have seen before," said Joshua Bloom of the University of California-Berkeley, a co-author of research on the blast published in the journal Science.

Initially spied by NASA's Swift spacecraft, which is trolling the universe for gamma ray bursts, this particular flash has lasted more than two months and is still going on, Bloom said in a telephone interview.

What makes this even stranger is that the black hole, located in the constellation Draco (The Dragon) about 4 billion light years, or 24 sextillion miles (38.62 sextillion km) -- 24 followed by 21 zeroes -- from Earth, was sitting quietly, not eating much, when a star about the mass of our Sun moved into range.

"We have this otherwise dormant black hole, not gobbling up an appreciable amount of mass, and along comes this star which just happens to be on some orbit which puts it close to the black hole," Bloom said.

FEEDING FRENZY

"This was a black hole which was otherwise quiescent and it sort of has an impulsive feeding frenzy on this one star," he said.

Bloom figures this may happen once per black hole per million years.

This kind of behavior is different from what active black holes generally do, which is to suck in everything their vast gravity can pull in, even light. Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, are thought to harbor black holes in their hearts.

Black holes are invisible, but astronomers can infer their existence because the material they pull in lights up before it gets sucked in.

In this case, though, the black hole feasted on one star -- about the same mass as our Sun -- with such relish that it tore the star apart before gulping it down. As it did so, the black hole emitted powerful gamma ray jets from its center as bits of the dying star were turned into energy.

The black hole's gravitational pull was so great that it exerted what's called a tidal disruption on the passing star.

Astronomers could use this observation to help them learn more about how black holes grow, Bloom said.

"We still don't understand how black holes and the universe grow," he said. "We think most black holes start off as being no more than the mass of our Sun ... How they go from 10 solar masses to a billion solar masses is critical."

There is a strong connection between the mass of black holes and the mass of the galaxies that host them, with black holes feeding on gas and stars that come near.

Black hole

A black hole is an (almost invisible) body in space, created most likely from a collapsed red super giant star, that is so dense that neither light nor matter can escape its gravitational pull.

Inside a star there is a constant battle between inward pressure from gravity, and outward pressure from heat. If you were to throw an unopened can of soda into a fire, the beverage would expand from the heat and explode. This is the same principle at work when a star is burning, its heat is generating great outward pressure but this constant explosion is matched by gravity that is equally strong, thus a star maintains its shape and size.

When a star nears the end of its life it cools off slowly and the outwards pressure grows weaker and weaker as the temperature of the star drops. When the outward pressure from the heat is nearly gone, the inward pressure of gravity still remains and is determined by the size of the star. It is theorized that when a star roughly ten times the size of our sun nears the end of its life, it shrinks as its own gravity slowly pulls it in, but as it becomes more and more dense the gravity becomes stronger.

The gravity becomes so intense that not even light can escape it. If you have ever watched water swirling down a drain, then you have a pretty good idea what happens as a black hole pulls things in. As matter and light approach the vicinity of a black hole they are slowly drawn in. If they are not headed straight for the spacial anomaly then they are taken into a violent and unstable orbit around the black hole until finally the orbit falls apart and it is sucked down by the immense gravity.

The size of the black hole is determined by the mass of the collapsed star. The critical radius of a non-rotating black hole is called the Schwarzschild radius, called after the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) who investigated the problem in 1916 on the basis of Einstein's theory of general relativity. According to general relativity the gravitation of a black hole bends space and time to such an extent where they broken down into a dimensionless body of infinite density.

The boundary around the collapsed star having this radius is referred to as the 'event horizon'. Anything, whether it be light or matter passing this boundary will be forever lost within the black hole with no chance of escape. What happens beyond the event horizon nobody can tell, because all the laws of physics break down and no longer apply. There are many theories but little proof to support them.

Black holes can't be seen, as they do not emit any electromagnetic radiation^*. But they can be detected because of their affects on the surrounding stars.

In a binary star system, Cygnus X-1, (where the primary is a normal star of approximately 30 solar masses) due to Doppler shifts from the system it is believed that there is a companion of approximately 10 to 15 solar masses orbiting the primary. There are X-ray emissions from the system usually associated with an 'accretion disk' (a hot, dense disk of gas from the primary star spiraling down into the compact object orbiting the primary). There is evidence indicating that the X-rays are being emitted from the orbiting companion. Due to the mass of the companion object it is thought that it is a black hole.

Evidence of black holes is mounting, and it is now believed that most galaxies of a large enough size and possibly our own have a black hole at their centre.

* It is now known that black holes emit what is called Hawking Radiation, this is a complex process but for those who are interested, here is a brief explanation. Virtual particle pairs are constantly being created near the horizon of the black hole, as they are everywhere. Normally, they are created as a particle-antiparticle pair and they quickly annihilate each other. But near the horizon of a black hole, it's possible for one to fall in before the annihilation can happen, in which case the other one escapes as Hawking radiation.

Space Storm Tracked from Sun to Earth

For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.

“The movie sent chills down my spine,” says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Researcher Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small.”

CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. When they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages. Tracking these clouds and predicting their arrival is an important part of space weather forecasting.

“We have seen CMEs before, but never quite like this,” says Lika Guhathakurta, program scientist for the STEREO mission at NASA headquarters. “STEREO-A has given us a new view of solar storms.”

STEREO-A is one of two spacecraft launched in 2006 to observe solar activity from widely-spaced locations. At the time of the storm, STEREO-A was more than 65 million miles from Earth, giving it the “big picture” view other spacecraft in Earth orbit lack.

When CMEs first leave the sun, they are bright and easy to see. Visibility is quickly reduced, however, as the clouds expand into the void. By the time a typical CME crosses the orbit of Venus, it is a billion times fainter than the surface of the full Moon, and more than a thousand times fainter than the Milky Way. CMEs that reach Earth are almost as gossamer as vacuum itself and correspondingly transparent.

“Pulling these faint clouds out of the confusion of starlight and interplanetary dust has been an enormous challenge,” says DeForest.

Indeed, it took almost three years for his team to learn how to do it. Footage of the storm released today was recorded back in December 2008, and they have been working on it ever since. Now that the technique has been perfected, it can be applied on a regular basis without such a long delay.

Alysha Reinard of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center explains the benefits for space weather forecasting:

“Until quite recently, spacecraft could see CMEs only when they were still quite close to the sun. By calculating a CME’s speed during this brief period, we were able to estimate when it would reach Earth. After the first few hours, however, the CME would leave this field of view and after that we were ‘in the dark’ about its progress.”

“The ability to track a cloud continuously from the Sun to Earth is a big improvement,” she continues. “In the past, our very best predictions of CME arrival times had uncertainties of plus or minus 4 hours,” she continues. “The kind of movies we’ve seen today could significantly reduce the error bars.”

The movies pinpoint not only the arrival time of the CME, but also its mass. From the brightness of the cloud, researchers can calculate the gas density with impressive precision. Their results for the Dec. 2008 event agreed with actual in situ measurements at the few percent level. When this technique is applied to future storms, forecasters will be able to estimate its impact with greater confidence.

At the press conference, DeForest pointed out some of the movie’s highlights: When the CME first left the sun, it was cavernous, with walls of magnetism encircling a cloud of low-density gas. As the CME crossed the Sun-Earth divide, however, its shape changed. The CME “snow-plowed” through the solar wind, scooping up material to form a towering wall of plasma. By the time the CME reached Earth, its forward wall was sagging inward under the weight of accumulated gas.

The kind of magnetic transformations revealed by the movie deeply impressed Guhathakurta: “I have always thought that in heliophysics understanding the magnetic field is equivalent to the ‘dark energy’ problem of astrophysics. Often, we cannot see the magnetic field, yet it orchestrates almost everything. These images from STEREO give us a real sense of what the underlying magnetic field is doing.”

All of the speakers at today’s press event stressed that the images go beyond the understanding of a single event. The inner physics of CMEs have been laid bare for the first time — a development that will profoundly shape theoretical models and computer-generated forecasts of CMEs for many years to come.

“This is what the STEREO mission was launched to do,” concludes Guhathakurta, “and it is terrific to see it live up to that promise.”

Dark Energy

Dark energy is perhaps the most mysterious thing in the cosmos, and yet it accounts for 73% of the observable universe. What's more, the amount of dark energy seems to be increasing...and that could ultimately rip apart the entire universe.

For the purposes of this post, I am going to be treating dark energy in much the same way astrophysicists do - as the current best explanation for certain features of the universe, albeit one that is still not well understood. 

The question we'll be looking at is what dark energy might mean for the future of the universe. One thing we do know about it is that it appears to have a constant density throughout the universe over time. Since the universe is expanding, that means the amount of dark energy has to in some way increase to keep up with it - in fact, since so much of the expanding universe is empty space, it means that the proportion of stuff (that's a technical term) in the universe that is dark energy will increase over time - and it's already a pretty huge percentage of that.

The simple explanation for that is that dark energy is somehow a feature of space-time itself, so it expands in kind as the universe expands. That means that the "energy" part of dark energy is a misnomer, but that's the least of our worries. Assuming this is true, we can then say that dark energy is associated with negative pressure, meaning that it acts as a repulsive force driving the expansion of the universe.

In this conception, dark energy is basically just "the cost of having space", meaning that any given volume of space requires a certain amount of dark energy in order to, well, exist. (I know this is vague. There's still a lot we don't know.) As far as cosmologists can tell, the density of dark energy and the pressure of dark energy are in a 1:1 ratio - or, since the pressure of dark energy is negative, a 1:-1 ratio. This is referred to as the equation of state for dark energy, and so the commonly accepted value is -1.

So here's the question: will that -1 stay the same for the rest of the universe's existence? Right now, we have no idea, but we do have a sense of what would happen if it did change. If the density of dark energy decreased over time, that would slow down the rate of expansion - if the ratio dropped made it to -1/3, then the expansion would cease entirely. That would potentially lead to the Big Crunch, in which we see a reversal of the Big Bang. That was once the most popular scenario among astrophysicists for the end of the universe, but it's only possible if the dark energy density decreases.

But what if the density of dark energy increased? As it stands, the universe will just keep on expanding forever. Is there a more extreme fate than that? Oh, you'd better believe it. If the ratio dropped still further to -2 or -3, the dark energy density would approach infinity within a finite amount of time.

So what does that mean? Well, remember that the observable universe is just whatever in the larger universe has had enough time for its light to reach Earth, and the expansion of the universe means that some parts of the universe have moved forever beyond our gaze. Now imagine everything is pulled so far apart by the cosmic expansion that each individual bubble of observable universe is no larger than a galaxy, or the solar system, or our planet, or the room around you...or even down to the individual atoms.

That is what infinity density means, and it would cause what's known as the Big Rip, in which all structures in the universe down to the subatomic particles get torn apart. If the ratio dropped to even just -1.5, the universe would suffer this fate within the next 22 billion years.

That's not a cheery thought, but a miniature version of this process could end up doing the universe a world of good. If the ratio of pressure and density of dark energy can be variable throughout the universe, then it would be possible for the cosmos to experience Little Rips, in which only certain parts of the universe get torn apart. This would actually work to "reboot" the entropy of the universe, as all the newly split apart material can begin again the process of forming stars and galaxies.

Dr.Michio Kaku about alien civilizations

Dr.Michio Kaku describes the three types of alien civilizations.....

Dr.Michio Kaku on Multiverse

Let us hear the info on multiverse theory from Dr.Michio Kaku, Theoretical Physicst... He explains us about the  cosmos and the dark energy that leads to the concept of existence of multiple universes.

Aristotle’s Laws of Thought

Aristotle's "Laws of Thought" date back to the earliest days of Western Philosophy. They shape the basic structure of Western philosophy, science, and its overall worldview - the worldview that can so puzzle many non-Westerners. Many philosophers who followed Aristotle, such as Locke, Leibnitz and Schopenhauer, have modified and enhanced his principles. However, the initial intent has remained the same. These laws are fundamental logical rules, with a long tradition in the history of philosophy, which together define how a rational mind must think. To break any of the laws of thought (for example, to contradict oneself) is to be irrational by definition. These three classic laws of thought were fundamental to the development of classical logic. They are:

• Law of identity - an object is the same as itself: “A is A”


• Law of noncontradiction - contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true, e.g. the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive.


• Law of excluded middle - Everything must either be or not be. There is no in-between.

These are self-evident logical principles - axioms that cannot be proved (or disproved), but must be accepted (or rejected) a priori. Other postulates could be substituted for them, and in fact have been in other traditions such as Buddhism, which celebrates contradiction. Even Greek philosophy before Aristotle (and Parmenides, who proposed similar laws) did not always embrace these concepts. But practically everything we know of traditional Western Philosophy and Logic embodies these principles. Preceding Aristotle by over a century, Heraclitus believed that contradictions were necessary - that their existence was essential to a thing's identity:

"Not only could it be stated that identity is the strife of oppositions but that there could be no identity without such strife within the entity."

He argued that because all things change, they must have already had in them "that which they were not". Only the existence of such contradictions could account for the change we see in the world. For example,

"Cold things grow warm; warm grows cold; wet grows dry; parched grows moist."

The defenders of Aristotle’s three laws of thought quickly learned that they had to establish the context for the application of these laws, because they were frequently assailed with counter-examples that seemed to violate them. It became clear that the laws could not be employed loosely or in poorly defined conditions. So, they began to require a “definite logic” model. In this model, the terms and the expressions formed from these terms must be clearly definable and knowable. But this ideal is rarely achieved in the real world, and we are forced to make assertions about things in less than precise, fuzzy terms. Not until the creation of Mathematical Logic by Boole in the 19th century, and later Russell and others, was logic able to refine its expression with mathematical, perfectly clear terms and operations.

This development in logic admirably suited the predispositions of the Western mind. Western philosophy to a very large extent has been founded upon the Laws of Thought and similar ground rules. We believe that our thinking should strive to eliminate ideas that are vague, contradictory, or ambiguous, and the best way to accomplish this, and thereby ground our thinking in clear and distinct ideas, is to strictly follow laws of thought.

In spite of how dominant these laws of thought have been, they have not been without their critics, and philosophers from Heraclitus to Hegel have leveled powerful arguments against them. But the issue does not seem to be whether the laws are applicable or not, but where and when are they applicable? Certainly, the laws of thought have a place, but what is that place? As Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Also as Nagarjuna, one of the fathers of Buddhism, wrote in "Verses on the Middle Way":

"Everything is real and not real.
Both real and not real.
Neither real nor not real.
That is Lord Buddha's teaching."

The time to abandon strict laws of thought arises when we are beyond the realm to which ordinary logic applies, or as when “the sphere of thought has ceased, the nameable ceases.” A similar sentiment is expressed by Wittgenstein's assertion in the Tractatus,

"what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence"

It would be very narrow minded, indeed, as well as barren and joyless, to try to apply these or similar laws to every human experience. However, in the narrow, modest realm of science, whose goal is merely to explain how things work and of what they are made, this type of restricted and disciplined thought is a perfect fit.

Supernova Explosion

Here is a small visual on the explosion of a supernova....

Diamond Planet.

Pulsars are small spinning stars the size of cities like Cologne that emit a beam of radio waves. As the star spins and the radio beam sweeps repeatedly over Earth, radio telescopes detect a regular pattern of radio pulses. For the newly discovered pulsar, PSR J1719-1438, the astronomers noticed that the arrival times of the pulses were systematically modulated and concluded that this is due to the gravitational pull of a small orbiting companion, a planet. These modulations can tell astronomers several more things about the companion. First, it orbits the pulsar in just 2 hours and 10 minutes, and the distance between the two objects is 370,000 miles — a little less than the radius of our Sun. Second, the companion is so close to the pulsar that if its diameter was any larger than 37,000 miles — less than half the diameter of Jupiter — it would be ripped apart by the gravity of the pulsar. “The density of the planet is at least that of platinum and provides a clue to its origin”, said Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The team thinks that the planet is the tiny core that remained of a once-massive star after narrowly missing destruction by its matter being siphoned off toward the pulsar. They found the pulsar among almost 200,000 gigabytes of data using special codes on supercomputers at Swinburne University of Technology, at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and at the INAF Cagliari Astronomical Observatory, Italy. The project is part of a systematic search for pulsars in the whole sky involving also the 100-meter Effelsberg radio telescope of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in the Northern Hemisphere. “This is the largest and most sensitive survey of this type ever conducted,” said Michael Kramer from MPIfR. “We expected to find exciting things, and it is great to see it happening. There is more to come!” How did the pulsar acquire its exotic companion? And how do we know it’s made of diamond? Pulsar J1719-1438 is a fast-spinning pulsar that’s called a millisecond pulsar. Amazingly, it rotates more than 10,000 times per minute, has a mass of about 1.4 times that of our Sun, but is only 12 miles in radius. About 70 percent of millisecond pulsars have companions of some kind: Astronomers think it is the companion that, as a star, transforms an old, dead pulsar into a millisecond pulsar by transferring matter and spinning it up to a very high speed. The result is a fast-spinning millisecond pulsar with a shrunken companion-most often a white dwarf. “We know of a few other systems, called ultra-compact low-mass X-ray binaries, that are likely to be evolving according to the scenario above and may likely represent the progenitors of a pulsar like J1719-1438,” said Andrea Possenti, of INAF. But pulsar J1719-1438 and its companion are so close together that the companion could only be a stripped-down white dwarf, one that has lost its outer layers and more than 99.9 percent of its original mass. This remnant is likely to be largely carbon and oxygen; stars of lighter elements like hydrogen and helium just won’t fit. The density means that this material is certain to be crystalline: that is, a large part of the star may be similar to a diamond. “The ultimate fate of the binary is determined by the mass and orbital period of the donor star at the time of mass transfer. The rarity of millisecond pulsars with planet-mass companions means that producing such exotic planets is the exception rather than the rule, and requires special circumstances,” said Benjamin Stappers from the University of Manchester. “The new discovery came as a surprise for us,” said Michael Kramer. “But there is certainly a lot more we’ll find out about pulsars and fundamental physics in the following years.”

Habitable Planet

French scientists believe that a planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581 could sustain life similar to Earth.

Twenty light years away is a small red star. Orbiting this sun are six planets that range in size

from slightly smaller than Earth to about the size of Neptune. Several of these planets fall within the star's "Goldilocks" zone, neither too hot from proximity to the star nor too cold from being too far. If a planet is too hot, all water would be steam but if its too cold then it would be ice, neither of which can support life. Luckily, a group of astronomers from the National Centre for Scientific Research in France believe that the fourth planet - unimaginatively labeled

Gliese 581d - is just right.

"With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere - a likely scenario on such a large planet - the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall," the report said.

Last September, a group from Australia announced the discovery of a sixth plant in the Gliese 581 system that also fell within the habitable zone. That planet was dubbed Zarmina's World after the lead researcher's wife, but its existence is still in question.


581d is much bigger than Zarmina - roughly 7 times Earth's mass - and the French have used computational models to estimate that its thick atmosphere would be able to retain heat but would result in conditions very different than our home planet.

"The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth," the French statement read.

The bad news is that even though the Gliese 581 is fairly close to Earth, cosmically speaking, it would still take a very long time for us to get there. Even if we could travel at light speed, which last I checked was still technically impossible due to Einstein's little theory, it would still take us 20 years to reach the Gliese 581 system. If we used the same technology that was used to launch the shuttle Endeavor , the journey to Gliese would take almost 300,000 years.