First water detected on an alien world

UK space scientists have made a breakthrough in the search for aliens by discovering water for the first time ever on a planet orbiting another star. They detected the vital substance as steam in the atmosphere of a giant world called HD189733b in the constellation of Vulpecula, the Fox. It is a find of a kind that Nasa predicted earlier this year. The planet, which is 63 light years away from Earth, is a giant gas ball like Jupiter. It is more than 30 times closer to its own sun than we are to ours and is so hot that there cannot be life as we know it. But the scientists, led by researchers from University College London, are excited to find that water exists on alien worlds. They used Nasa's Spitzer space telescope, which has previously checked out an exoplanet's windy weather, to detect it. Spitzer has also identified a planet as glowing like a cinder. Professor Keith Mason, head of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, said: "This first conclusive evidence of the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System provides an exciting breakthrough in our knowledge of extra-solar planets. It represents a real step forward into establishing whether we are alone in the universe or whether there is life on other planets.” Planet HD 189733b, which is 15 per cent bigger than Jupiter, is known as a transiting planet because it passes directly in front of its star, as viewed from the Earth. Parts of its atmosophere reach 2,000 degrees. The international team of astronomers discovered the water vapour by analysing the star's light as it passed through the planet's atmosphere during the star's "eclipses". Dr Giovanna Tinetti, of UCL, said: “Although HD 189733b is far from being habitable, and is actually quite a hostile environment, our discovery shows how water might be common out there and how our method can be used in the future to study more life-friendly environments. "The 'holy grail' for today’s planet hunters is to find an Earth-like planet that also has water in its atmosphere. That discovery, when it happens, will provide real evidence that planets outside of our Solar System might harbour life. So the discovery that water exists on an extra—solar gas giant is a vital milestone along that road of discovery." Picture: An artist's impression of the planet. Credit: ESA - C. Carreau ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Be first to view at the Galaxy Zoo

Space fans can become masters of the universe by helping astronomers identify one million newly found galaxies. Scientists at Oxford want volunteers to visit their Galaxy Zoo to help them classify different types of galaxy deep in the cosmos. The distant "star cities" were all photographed by an automatic robotic telescope in New Mexico, fitted with a 142-megapixel digital camera, for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We've reported before how Sloan has even found new companions for our own Milky Way. Now astronomers want ordinary people to examine galaxies individually, to say what form they take, by visiting their www.galaxyzoo.org website. After a short training test, individual objects automatically located in the sky survey pop up on screen. For each one, the volunteer clicks a button to say whether, for example, it is a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, an elliptical galaxy or just a star. Incredibly, for most of the galaxies, that moment will be the first time that human eyes have ever viewed them. Yet each is a collection of billions of stars containing who knows what civilisations. The project is being run by Oxford University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski with assistance from co-presenter of the BBC's The Sky At Night, Chris Lintott. I signed up to take part, passed the short test, and embarked on my galaxy hunt. I have to say I found it strangely addictive! Chris agrees. He told me: "It's like eating crisps. You think 'just one more' and then you're still there five minutes later!" Galaxy Zoo was inspired by projects like SETI, which searches for alien radio signals, and Stardust@home which uses home computers to analyse dust particles from a comet. But this time, they want the computer users to be directly involved. Kevin said: "It’s not just for fun. The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern recognition tasks like this. Whether you spend five minutes, 15 minutes or five hours using the site your contribution will be invaluable." Chris said: "What the Stardust team achieved was incredible, but our galaxies are much more interesting to look at than their dust grains. We hope that participants in Galaxy Zoo will not only contribute to science, but have a lot of fun along the way." The astronomers say they hope the survey will shed light on how different kinds of galaxies are distributed across the sky. They believe the results might even reveal that there is something fundamentally wrong with existing models of the universe. The number of galaxies in the universe is simply mind-boggling as we reported earlier after Hubble photographed 500,000 in just one tiny patch of sky. Sir Patrick Moore is backing the Galaxy Zoo project. He said: "Non-professionals have always been deeply involved in studying the sky and they now have yet another opportunity to make themselves really useful. Moreover, their help is now of immense value so do join up – as I am doing myself!" ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Astronomers spot most distant galaxies

Space scientists have caught a glimpse of the most distant galaxies ever seen. They are so far away that their light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The giant cities of stars appear as they were when the universe was just 500 million years old - little more than the blink of an eye since the Big Bang that created the cosmos. Their discovery will be announced today at a conference in London by Professor Richard Ellis, from the California Institute of Technology. The galaxies were discovered with one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, the Keck II instrument on Hawaii, which acts as a 10-metre-wide eye on the sky. But they are so faint that they needed a natural "magnifying glass" deep in space to make them visible from Earth. The light from the distant galaxies was magnified using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. In other words, massive clusters of other galaxies lying between them and us warped and enhanced the light just like the lens on a telescope. Professor Ellis said: "Gravitational lensing is the magnification of distant sources by foreground structures. By looking through carefully-selected clusters, we have located six star-forming galaxies seen at unprecedented distances, corresponding to a time when the Universe was only 500 million years old, or less than four per cent of its present age." Space observatory Spitzer has also been looking back to the early days of the universe, detecting light from the earliest objects within it. Astronomers are now building telescopes on the ground and to fly in space to peer even further back to a time when the very first stars began to shine. Photo: The picture shows how the six faint galaxies were revealed on the edge of giant clusters of galaxies closer to Earth. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Raging dust storm hits Mars rovers

A huge dust storm has blown up on Mars, threatening to destroy two plucky robot rovers that have spent nearly three and a half years exploring the planet. The raging storm is covering nearly the whole of the martian southern hemisphere, blotting out almost all sunlight. It is so vast that it is severely affecting both Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, although they are on opposite sides of the planet. Nasa scientists fear that the storm will cause the solar-powered rovers' batteries to run down completely, leaving them silent, sand-battered wrecks. The main storm has blown up in just two weeks to cover nearly seven million square miles of Mars. It has been made worse by a second storm that erupted a few days ago. Opportunity has been hit hardest by the bad weather, with power levels already significantly reduced. The dust storm blew up just as Nasa were planning to sent the robot on a possible mission of no return inside a steep-rimmed crater called Victoria. Project manager John Callas said: "The storm is affecting both rovers and reducing the power levels on Opportunity. We are keeping an eye on this as we go forward, but our entry into Victoria Crater will be delayed until no sooner than July 13." Dust storms blow up every few years on Mars and scientists are worried because the big ones often last for months. Our pictures, from the Hubble space telescope, show how one blew up in 2001, almost completely hiding the surface. Opportunity, which landed in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars, has been exploring despite nursing a broken robotic arm. Its companion rover Spirit, in Gusev Crater, is soldiering on with a broken right front wheel which it has to drag through the martian soil. This failure has actually helped provide one of Spirit's greatest discoveries. Each rover is the size of a small car. Both have been incredibly successful because their original missions were scheduled to last just 90 days. Photo: Hubble/Nasa/ESA. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Sponge world has ingredients for life

Space scientists have discovered the vital ingredients for life on a peculiar moon that is shaped like a bath sponge. Water and chemicals called hydrocarbons were spotted in craters on Hyperion, a rocky satellite of the ringed planet Saturn. Photos from Nasa's Cassini spaceprobe show that Hyperion is possibly the strangest world in the solar system. Just 220 miles across, and made of ice and rock, it looks like a cosmic loofah. Cassini peered into the cup-like craters to detect the basic building blocks for life. Planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank, of Nasa's Ames centre in California, said: "Of special interest is the presence on Hyperion of hydrocarbons - combinations of carbon and hydrogen atoms that are found in comets, meteorites, and the dust in our galaxy. "These molecules, when embedded in ice and exposed to ultraviolet light, form new molecules of biological significance." Cruikshank added: "This doesn't mean that we have found life, but it is a further indication that the basic chemistry needed for life is widespread in the universe." Cassini's instruments mapped Hyperion's mineral and chemical features, confirming the presence of frozen water and finding it mixed with solid carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Cassini made the observations, reported this week in the journal Nature, in 2005. It has also been sending back amazing images of Saturn itself such as this psychedelic shot which we covered last month and a stunning view down on the planet and its rings. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Captain Jack probes the Big Bang

Doctor Who time traveller Captain Jack has embarked on a new mission to unravel the origins of the universe. TV star John Barrowman called in at a research centre built to recreate conditions during the Big Bang that created time and space. The vast underground laboratory near Geneva, called CERN, is home to the £2 billion Large Hadron Collider which is like something out of science fiction. Particles of matter will be fired at each other at close to the speed of light along a tunnel the length of the Circle Line in London. When they collide, they are expected to create undiscovered particles such as the Higgs Boson and open doors to new dimensions. Scientists say they could even create millions of minute black holes. John, who plays Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and spin-off Torchwood, was shown round CERN by UK scientist Dr Brian Cox, who was advisor to sci-fi movie blockbuster Sunshine. John said as he toured the facility: "It's like something out of Stargate!" He added: "It’s nice to be able to see where all these questions that we have will, hopefully, one day be answered. "And its nice to know that the scientists, the guys and girls who work here, still have questions too. No one knows the answer, that’s the good thing - except Captain Jack!" Skymania News was given its own tour of CERN by Dr Cox earlier this year. He told us: "We're trying to understand the basic building blocks of the universe, how those building blocks stick together and, with a bit of luck, why those building blocks are there at all." ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

New missions for two Nasa probes

A spacecraft that launched the first war of the worlds is being sent to track down a new target. The Deep Impact probe fired an 820lb smart bomb at a distant comet called Tempel 1, exactly two years ago today. It blasted a huge crater out of the comet's head with the force of 4.5 tons of TNT. The brilliant flare was clearly visible 83 millions miles away back on Earth. Now Nasa has approved plans to send Deep Impact to another comet called Boethin but this time it will just study it without any of the fireworks. Boethin is a short-period comet that regularly returns to the inner solar system from beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Deep Impact is expected to fly past it on December 5, next year on a new mission dubbed Epoxi. Deep Impact has been given a second objective - to try to find out more about alien planets in other solar systems. It will turn its sensitive camera on several nearby bright stars which are already known to have giant planets. It will monitor the starlight as the planets pass in front of and behind their parent suns, collecting data which will be used to check whether they have rings, moons or Earth-sized companions. Nasa Chief Scientist John Mather said: "Epoxi is a wonderful opportunity to add to our growing body of knowledge of exoplanets. Watching planets go behind or in front of their parent stars can tell us about their atmospheric chemistry." We are also set to learn more about Deep Impact's original target because Nasa has agreed to extend a second probe's mission in order to study it. Stardust, which collected and sent home particles from another comet called Wild 2, will now chase Tempel 1, flying past it on February 14, 2011. Scientists want to examine the comet's icy surface and check what damage was done by Deep Impact's fridge-sized missile - the original blast was so bright that they did not get a proper look into the crater. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Cosmic fireworks for Independence Day

A spectacular photo of stellar fireworks taken by the Hubble space telescope is released today - just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July. The eye in the sky was able to pick out hundreds of thousand of individual red and blue stars in NGC 4449, a galaxy lying nearly 12.5 million light-years away. The city of stars is a so-called dwarf galaxy, much smaller than the giant spirals like M31 in Andromeda that are spread right across the universe. Bursts of star formation are visible right across NGC 4449. There are hot blue-white clusters of massive stars interspersed with countless dusty, red, cosmic nurseries where stars are being born. See the detailed close-up of part of the star cloud. The galaxy, found in the constellation of Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs, is experiencing a much higher stellar birthrate now than in the past, say Hubble astronomers led by Alessandra Aloisi. Such starbursts normally occur in the central regions of galaxies, but it is happening right across the galaxy in NGC 4449. The team that recorded this image in November 2005, using Hubble's now crippled Advanced Camera for Surveys, say that their target makes an ideal laboratory in which to study what may have occurred as galaxies formed an evolved in the early universe. The current explosive rate of star formation may have been affected by NGC 4449's interactions with neighbouring galaxies. Hubble has previously helped capture star formation in a much closer cradle of creation, the Great Orion Nebula. And of course, it also been a witness to the deaths of stars. Photo: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (ESA/STScI) and The Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.