Scope will spot new Earths and aliens

Nasa has got its cheque book out again - this time to back plans for a new space telescope powerful enough to discover planets like Earth and even signs of alien life. The $3 billion New Worlds Observer will be able to spot oceans, continents and even clouds on small rocky planets, say scientists. Its "eye" will be a four-metre wide mirror gathering light from stars many light-years away - it will collect nearly three times as much light as the 2.4-metre mirror on the Hubble space telescope. The NWO will feature a 50-yard wide, daisy-shaped plastic "sunshade" with petals made from black plastic like that used for rubbish bags. It will block the brilliant light from the distant stars, shielding their overpowering glare and allowing the telescope to observe any planets in orbit around them. The imaginative project is the brainchild of astronomers led by Professor Webster Cash, of the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Nasa have awarded them $1 million to allow plans for the telescope to be advanced. As well as observing features on other rocky worlds like Earth, the telescope's instruments will be able to detect signs of life, or biomarkers, such as methane, oxygen and water. Last week, Nasa scientists revealed that as many as 60 per cent of nearby stars like the Sun could have terrestrial-type planets. And an international team used a technique called OGLE to discover a new solar system that they say most resembles our own. The telescope and its 50-yard-wide starshade would launch into an orbit roughly 1 million miles from Earth. The parasol would then unfurl and be steered by thrusters into the lines of sight of nearby stars which are thought likely to have planets. Professor Cash said: "This observatory can be built today with existing technology." He believes he could have the telescope ready for launch in 2017. His colleague, astronomy research assistant Julia DeMarines told Boulder's The Campus Press: "What else bigger could there be than finding life on another planet? I think this will make people feel less alone." Picture: An artist's impression of how the telescope will work. (William Cash). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Ten teams bid for Moon prize

Ten teams have lined up to begin the ultimate flying race - the first private mission to the Moon. The competitors, including one based in Britain, have all signed up to try to win $30 million in prize money from sponsors Google. To win, they must land a probe on the Moon and carry out a number of tasks there, by December 2012. These include sending a robotic rover at least 500 metres and broadcasting photos, videos and emails back to Earth. The Google Lunar X Prize follows a similar contest, the Ansari X Prize, to put a human into space. That was won in 2004 by Scaled Composites who are now building a passenger-carrying spaceliner for Virgin Galactic. Google's contest was announced by the internet giant in September. First team to make a bid for it, in December, was Odyssey Moon, which is based on the Isle of Man, 60 miles off Lancashire. They have named their robotic lander, shown in the artist's impression, above, MoonOne. Now nine more teams, in the US, Italy and Romania, have picked up the challenge. Odyssey Moon has based itself in Douglas to take advantage of special tax breaks and other incentives offered to attract space entrepreneurs. This might be one small step for the Isle of Man but the mission will use Canadian technology. Their prime contractor will be MDA Space Missions of Canada, who built the robotic arms used by Nasa's shuttles and the International Space Station. Company chief Robert Richards believes the real prize is that the Moon holds a fortune in energy and minerals just waiting to be extracted by go-ahead entrepreneurs. He predicts they could set off a lunar goldrush of low-cost missions to Earth's natural satellite, which he describes as "an eighth continent rich in energy and resources floating just offshore." Google - which has been busy applying its mapping technology to the Moon - is offering a first prize of $20 million, a second prize of $5 million plus $5 million for other achievements. The prizes are reduced in 2013 and 2014 if the competition is not won by 2012. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. Picture: An impression of Odyssey Moon's craft MoonOne. (Google Lunar X Prize). ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com

A lunar ear on the early universe

Nasa is backing space scientists' plans to build a new £500,000 observatory on the far side of the Moon. The new radio telescope will be more powerful than any on Earth. And shielded from interference from TV stations and electronic equipment, it will listen in to the earliest days of the universe. Instead of a single dish, such as at Jodrell Bank, in Cheshire, the lunar telescope will comprise of an array of hundreds of separate antennae. Robotic rovers will steer them to different parts of the side of the Moon which is never seen from Earth because it always presents the same face to us. The network of aerials, all working together like a giant ear on the sky, is likely to be built in 2025 at the earliest, five years or so after the US plans to return men to the Moon. The fantastic new telescope would tune in to one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy - the so-called Dark Ages when the first stars and galaxies were being born, shortly after the Big Bang. It is also a time when invisible dark matter which is thought to make up most of the universe condensed to form a cosmic scaffolding which holds everything in place. Such observations are impossible from Earth because of the overpowering noise of radio and TV transmissions plus natural interference from a layer of electrically-charged gas in the upper atmosphere. The telescope would also be able to study violent eruptions from the sun that can disrupt communications on Earth, zap satellites' electronics and even knock out power grids. Proposals to build the telescope are being led by astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have been awarded a £250,000 grant by Nasa to advance their plans. They follow a similar proposal for an optical telescope with a liquid mirror for the lunar surface. Professor Ian Morison, of Jodrell Bank, told Skymania News: "There is no atmosphere on the Moon and, if you built a telescope on the far side, you could avoid radio interference from Earth and the ionosphere. "It would be a wonderful place to carry out low-frequency observations which we are unable to do at the moment. That would allow us to learn more about the origin of the universe." Last year it was announced that Jodrell Bank is to be the HQ of another vast radio telescope array to be built in Australia or South Africa. Picture: The far side of the Moon, photographed from Apollo 16. (Nasa). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Space telescope finds Earths galore

Nasa has discovered new evidence that Earth-like planets are common in the galaxy - boosting the chances that we have alien neighbours. The Spitzer space telescope has shown that up to 60 per cent of nearby stars like the sun are likely to have rocky worlds in orbit around them. The findings, announced at a conference in Boston today, are a major boost to the chances that extra-terrestrials exist throughout the universe. Astronomer Michael Meyer, of the University of Arizona, and colleagues used Spitzer to survey six sets of stars similar in mass to the sun, in different age groups. Meyer said: "We wanted to study the evolution of the gas and dust around stars similar to the sun and compare the results with what we think the solar system looked like at earlier stages during its evolution." The Spitzer telescope is heat-seeking - it observes with infrared eyes - and is able to detect dust left from the collisions as planets form. They found warm dust around up to a fifth of stars in the four younger age bands. Meyer said: "That's comparable to the time scales thought to span the formation and dynamical evolution of our own solar system." In a separate study, Thayne Currie and Scott Kenyon, of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their colleagues also found evidence of dust from terrestrial planet formation around stars from 10 to 30 million years old. "These observations suggest that whatever led to the formation of Earth could be occurring around many stars between three million and 300 million years old," Meyer said. He said interpretation of the data showed that at least one star in five like the sun is potentially forming new worlds, but that as many as 62 per cent of the stars studied could have their own families of planets. "The correct answer probably lies somewhere between the pessimistic case of less than 20 per cent and optimistic case of more than 60 per cent," Meyer said. Last year we reported how a planet had been found in the so-called Goldilocks Zone where a world might support life as we know it. And the discovery of an individual solar system, said to be similar to our own, was announced last week. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

There's oil on that thar moon

Saturn's biggest satellite, Titan is an oil baron's dream, space scientists have revealed. The orange world - which is half as big again as our own Moon - has hundreds of times more fuel slopping about than the entire known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. So-called hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are literally raining from the sky in the form of a persistant drizzle. Vast quantities of the stuff is sitting around in hundreds of lakes that cover Titan's surface. But any oil magnate hoping to get at it would face a return journey of several billion miles. The new findings were discovered by Nasa's Cassini probe that is in orbit around the giant ringed planet Saturn, studying it and its vast family of natural satellites. Pictures sent back show that Titan's surface has features just like the rivers, lakes and coastlines of Earth - except that they were carved by its liquid hydrocarbons instead of water. Mountain ranges are topped with the methane equivalent of snow that fell from the moon's own clouds. Cassini scientist Ralph Lorenz, of the Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, said: "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material - it's a giant factory of organic chemicals. This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan." Cassini has mapped about 20 per cent of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed. Several dozen each are thought to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. What is more, dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organic material that is several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves. Planetary scientists are excited by conditions on Titan because they seem to be very similar to those on an early Earth and so the moon could be home to primitive life. UK planetary scientist John Zarnecki, of the Open University, has previously told Skymania News: "We believe the chemistry is there for life to form. It just needs heat and warmth to kick-start the process. In four billion years time, when the sun swells into a red giant, it could be paradise on Titan." Professor Zarnecki was in charge of the surface science package on Huygens, a European probe which made a spectacular landing on Titan in January, 2005, after being carried there by Cassini. He now believes it may have landed in a dried-up methane lake bed. He said: "We think where we landed was damp just below the surface and so may have been full of liquid a few years ago." • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. Photo: Nasa/JPL. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

New solar system is just like ours

UK astronomers have helped discover the best example yet of a solar system like our own. It contains two giant planets resembling smaller versions of our own Jupiter and Saturn. And their existence means that there could be rocky worlds like Earth in the alien planetary system too - and so perhaps we are not alone. Space scientists are excited because the find suggests once again that solar systems just like the Sun's are common throughout the galaxy. We have reported before on previous such discoveries. The latest find was made due to a fluke of nature. The two planets lie nearly 5,000 light years away but were revealed by a natural magnifying glass in space. The star they orbit passed in front of a more distant star and magnified its light by 500 times - a phenomenon called gravitational microlensing. The event was spotted using a technique called OGLE - the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, For two weeks in early 2006, this dramatic example of the phenomenon was observed from observatories around the world. They included scientists from universities in Manchester, Exeter, Liverpool, St Andrews, Scotland, and Oxford. As Professor Andrew Gould, of Ohio State University, studied the light beam, he spotted two blips - distortions that were caused by the two planets. It is the third time a Jupiter-sized planet has been found by microlensing. The new solar system has been labelled OGLE-2006-BLG-109L. Dr Martin Dominik, of the University of St Andrews, said: "While most planetary systems around other stars substantially differ from the solar system, a series of recent detections have brought us closer and closer to home. Sooner rather than later, someone can be expected to discover an Earth-mass planet orbiting a star other than the Sun - and it could be us." Colleague Professor Keith Horne, of St Andrews, added: "Once we know that planets similar to Earth are common, it is straightforward to go ahead on finding them and investigating whether these harbour any forms of life." Scott Gaudi, of Ohio State, said: "This is the first time we had a high-enough magnification event where we had significant sensitivity to a second planet - and we found one. You could call it luck, but I think it might just mean that these systems are common throughout our galaxy." The smaller planet is roughly twice as far from its parent star as the larger one, just as Saturn is roughly twice as far away from the sun as Jupiter. Astronomers say microlensing could soon help them directly to detect planets as small as the Earth. Picture credit: KASI/CBNU/ARCSEC • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com

Hubble spots 'earliest galaxy seen'

Astronomers using the Hubble space telescope have peered 13 billion years back in time to spot what could be the youngest, brightest galaxy ever seen. They were only able to see so far thanks to the gravitational effects of a cluster of galaxies much closer to home. It acted like a natural magnifying glass to make the incredibly distant galaxy ten times brighter, bringing it into view. The infant galaxy, undergoing a burst of starbirth, appears as it did soon after the Big Bang that created the universe. Detailed images taken with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) were combined with images from a second Nasa infrared space telescope called Spitzer. It has been dubbed A1689-zD1 and is emerging from the so-called Dark Ages of the universe when it was cold and dark and devoid of stars. Astronomers have previously found other galaxies near the edge of the universe. and Spitzer has detected the glow of the first objects ever created. But they believe the latest find might claim the record for distance. Space scientist Garth Illingworth of the University of California, said: "We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 13 billion years in the past. This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time." Fellow scientist Piero Rosati from the European Southern Observatory, Germany, said: "This object is the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy so far." Cosmologists believe the dark ages began about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, as matter in the expanding universe cooled and formed a thick fog of cold hydrogen. At some point during this era, stars and galaxies started to form. Their collective light heated and cleared the fog, ending the dark ages about a billion years after the Big Bang. During its lifetime the Hubble telescope has peered ever farther back in time, viewing galaxies at successively younger stages of evolution. Picture: A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies is seemingly caught in a spider’s web of background galaxies, eerily distorted by gravitational lensing, in the main image. The distant galaxy is invisible in the top right image, taken in visible light, but is revealed in the lower two taken with infrared cameras. Credit: Nasa; ESA; L. Bradley (Johns Hopkins University); R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz); H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University); and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Probe searches for new Earths

A Nasa spacecraft has begun a search for other planets just like Earth. Previously found worlds outside our own solar system have all been giant balls of gas similar to Jupiter. Current searches for new worlds are mainly being carried out from ground observatories, including the robotic SuperWASP observatories. Now, by observing from beyond the atmosphere in the vacuum of space, scientists believe their Deep Impact probe will detect much smaller, rocky planets. The unmanned spaceprobe is so named because it made a spectacular attack on a comet, called Tempel 1, in July 2005. Its 820 lb missile blew a hole the size of a soccer stadium in its surface, creating a brilliant explosion that could be seen back on Earth. Deep Impact is now heading for another comet, Hartley 2, after its first choice for a second target was lost. But as it cruises en route, it will aim its onboard telescope at five nearby stars around which giant planets have already been spotted. The alien worlds were detected as they passed in front of their parent stars, as seen from the ground, causing a tiny dimming of starlight. Analysis of the light showed that they were giant planets with massive atmospheres. Now Nasa scientists will study these planets' movements even more closely, watching for changes in their orbits. Such effects will show that there are other planets, possibly as small as the Earth, pulling on their bigger neighbours. Deep Impact's extended mission has been labelled Epoxi. Principal investigator Drake Deming of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, said: "We're on the hunt for planets down to the size of Earth, orbiting some of our closest neighbouring stars." A European satellite called Corot, launched in December 2006, is also hunting Earth-sized worlds from space. Picture: Moment Deep Impact blasted a crater in Comet Tempel 1. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com

Should we tell aliens we're here?

Alien-hunters are calling for messages to be broadcast directly into space to tell ET that we are here. But others are urging caution, saying it could be dangerous to reveal our existence to other civilisations. Presumably they fear that despite the incredible distances between the stars, aliens who tune in could send an invasion fleet! The bid to send messages to the stars is led by scientists frustrated at our failure to discover signals from extra-terrestrials. They are calling for an overhaul of the tactics employed by SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - which simply listens to the heavens. Five million home computer users around the world have signed up to run their Seti@home screensaver to help analyse radio signals from space. These are overwhelmingly produced naturally by galaxies and other exotic objects in deep space. But scientists are seeking signs of an intelligent message - a task akin to looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack. New Scientist reports this week that some in the SETI team are now calling for a radical change by beaming messages into space - just as Nasa did in a stunt on Monday when they broadcast the Beatles hit Across The Universe towards the Pole Star. Astronomer Richard Gott, of Princeton University, New Jersey, says that if aliens took the same attitude as Earthlings, we would never hear from each other. He said: "We'll all be sitting round listening, but nobody's doing any talking." But Douglas Vakoch, of the SETI Institute, said: "Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks. We have already given away our position in the solar system and information about human biology on the Voyager and Pioneer probes and in a message sent from the Arecibo observatory in 1974." Some believe such discussions are academic because humans have been sending signals into space since the dawn of radio and TV. Professor Ian Morison, of the Jodrell Bank radio observatory, in Cheshire, has told Skymania: "Humans have been leaking signals into space for years, beaming out at the speed of light. "If any aliens have powerful enough technology, they could be tuning in to our old broadcasts." As he has also pointed out, powerful new radio telescopes being built on Earth might be able to detect alien broadcasts too! Picture: The giant Lovell radio dish at Jodrell Bank, in the UK. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com

Will time travel begin this year?

We could be welcoming our first time-travellers from the future this year after a giant scientific experiment is switched on in May. Or that is what a couple of Russian scientists would have us believe. The giant, international, £2 billion underground laboratory near Geneva, called CERN, will investigate the tiniest particles in the universe making up atoms. Skymania visited the centre last year. It will accelerate them close to the speed of light and smash them together in an attempt to recreate conditions that existed in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang that created the cosmos. But the forces unleashed could tear the fabric of the universe, causing a rift in space and time like that in Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, whose star, John Barrowman - time agent Captain Jack Harkness - has also visited CERN. That would turn the experiment, called the Large Hadron Collider, into the world's first time machine, say Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, of the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow. Laws of physics dictate that time travel into the past is only possible as far as the point when the first time machine was invented. That means that any time travellers in the future will be unable to travel back earlier than 2008 - a date termed Year Zero by scientists. The respected Russian experts' predictions are reported in New Scientist this week. They say the energy contained in particles a trillionth the size of a mosquito will be enough to do extraordinary things to its surroundings. They say each particle travelling in the LHC will create a kind of shockwave that distorts space and time around it. Under certain conditions, the colliding waves will rip a hole in space and time - called a wormhole. This wormhole acts like a time tunnel that advanced civilisations might be able to manipulate to travel through and pay us a visit. Dr Brian Cox, of the University of Manchester, is one of Britain's leading experts in particle physics and will work on the UK's Atlas detector on the LHC. He is highly sceptical about the Russian claims. He told Skymania today: "Cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere are far more energetic than anything we can produce at the LHC. They have been occurring for 5 billion years, and no time travellers have appeared. "Stephen Hawking has suggested that any future theory of quantum gravity will probably close this possibility off, not least because the universe usually proceeds in a sane way, and time travel into the past isn't sane. "So - whilst with our current understanding of General Relativity it's true that these anomalies exist, to suggest that the LHC will have anything to say on the matter is in my opinion nothing more than a good science fiction story." • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com

Hubble snaps a cosmic cannibal

The Hubble space telescope has come up with the goods once again with a spectacular image of a cosmic pile-up. The photo shows the aftermath of an enormous collision between many galaxies, each containing many millions or even billions of stars. Astronomers call the giant fuzzball that gorged on all the galaxies NGC 1132. It is called an elliptical galaxy and is so vast that light takes an incredible 120,000 years to travel from one side to the other. Amazingly, its size when viewed with X-ray eyes is ten times bigger. And it resides within an enormous halo of so-called dark matter, a mysterious invisible component of the universe. NGC 1132 is a cosmic fossil, say scientists, and the result of a feeding frenzy in which a large cannibal galaxy drew in and gobbled up all its neighbours. It lies 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. There is evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy has snacked on smaller neighbouring galaxies, but to a much lesser extent. The Hubble image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, is even more remarkable when you check out the myriad of "stars" in the picture. Look closely and you will see that thousands are globular clusters of stars swarming around the giant galaxy like bees around a honey pot. Other blobs in the picture are hundreds of even more distant galaxies of all shapes and sizes - each containing millions or billions more stars. Picture: Nasa, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: M. West (ESO, Chile). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Spacestories.com

Beatles beamed across the universe

Nasa space scientists will turn DJ on Monday to beam a classic Beatles song into space to any listening aliens. They will broadcast Across The Universe literally across the universe using a giant radio dish at Goldstone, California. The stunt, using Nasa's Deep Space Network, is to mark the space agency's 50th anniversary and exactly 40 years since the song was recorded. Across The Universe will be beamed towards the North Star, Polaris, in the constellation of the Little Bear. Radio waves travel at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second. But the Beatles number won't reach the star, which lies 431 light years away from Earth, until the year 2439. Sir Paul McCartney was thrilled to hear that the song, mainly written by fellow Beatle John Lennon, was being beamed to the cosmos. He said in a message: "Amazing! Well done, Nasa! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul." Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, called the broadcast a significant event. She said: "I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe." Nasa has used Beatles music before. In November 2005, McCartney performed the song Good Day Sunshine in a concert that was transmitted to the International Space Station. Here Comes the Sun, Ticket to Ride and A Hard Day's Night are among other Beatles' songs that have been played to wake astronaut crews in orbit. Beatles fans have declared Monday, February 4, Across The Universe Day. They are inviting everyone to participate by playing the song at the same time it is transmitted by Nasa. This actually happens at midnight on Monday night/Tuesday morning, UK time. Two other anniversaries also are being honoured by the broadcast. One is the launch, 50 years ago this week of America's first satellite Explorer 1, and the other the founding, 45 years ago, of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports space missions. Deep Space Network execuive Dr Barry Geldzahler said in Washington: "I've been a Beatles fan for 45 years - as long as the Deep Space Network has been around." • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. Check out our new guide to Mars too. And support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com