Water galore on Moon and Mars

Two major discoveries revealed today may have made it a lot easier for humans to leave Earth and establish new colonies on the Moon and Mars. In a sensational announcement, NASA announced that there are vast quantities of water on the Moon, which has always been considered an arid world. A second discovery revealed that water ice exists at mid-latitudes on Mars. This is much further from the poles and closer to the equator than water was previously thought to lie and means there should be supplies for human explorers to drink. The new martian ice was detected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe which spotted the ice in craters produced by recent meteorite impacts on the red planet. The discovery delighted space scientists still reeling from the revelation that water is widespread on the Moon. There are no lakes or rivers -the lunar soil, or regolith, is still drier than any desert on Earth. But the evidence from three space probes shows that as much as a liter (or quart) or water could be extracted from every tonne (ton) of dirt. That may not sound much. Indeed, water would still be an extremely precious commodity. But processing plants would be able to produce enough water to maintain a colony on the Moon without the far more costly option of delivering water in blocks of ice from Earth. Apart from giving lunar colonists water to drink, the supplies could irrigate plants in special greenhouses growing vegetables for the humans to eat. Evidence suggests that lunar soil would supply the nutrients needed for some plants. European Space Agency scientist Bernard Foing led a team that discovered that marigolds are suited to growing in lunar soil without extra nutrients. Russian scientists have discovered that certain vegetables can survive the lunar cycle of much longer days and nights. But lunar gardeners could also use artificial light to produce a familiar day-night rhythm for vegetables being grown for the first human colonists. The existence of water molecules was revealed by a sensitive NASA spectrometer aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 probe to the Moon. This produced a colour map of the surface indicating the chemical make-up. The result showed the presence of both water and a closely related molecule called hydroxyl, which contains just one atom of hydrogen to an atom of oxygen, all over the Moon’s surface. The water is believed to be produced when a radiation from the Sun, called the solar wind, batters the Moon. This contains hydrogen which reacts with oxygen in the lunar rocks. The Indian probe's findings confirmed results previously indicated by two NASA missions that glanced at the Moon as they flew past to other targets - Cassini and Deep Impact. It had been thought that some water ice might be trapped in the eternal shadows of some craters near the Moon's south pole. On October 9, a NASA probe, called LCROSS, will bomb the moon, near its south pole, to look for more signs of the lunar water in the blast debris. As space scientists celebrated the discovery of water on the Moon, NASA announced that there is much more of it on Mars too. An orbiting probe has revealed that water ice exists at mid-latitudes on the Red Planet. This is much further from the poles and closer to the equator than water was previously thought to lie. It means there should be ample supplies for human explorers to tap into wherever they land. The new martian ice was detected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe. Its HiRise camera spotted it shining brightly in craters up to 8ft deep produced by recent meteorite impacts on the red planet. Scientists were amazed at how pure it turned out to be. The ice swiftly evaporated - or more correctly sublimated - after being exposed to the thin martian air. Investigator Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona said: "“We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars’ climate today. ”This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago." Picture: Two HiRise images show how water ice exposed by  recent meteor impact swiftly vaporised.  (Credit: NASA). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Solid evidence for Earthlike world

European astronomers have found the first solid evidence for a rocky planet outside our own solar system, they revealed today. Observations have confirmed that the new world, dubbed Corot-7b, is the most Earthlike yet found. It is less than twice the diameter of our own planet and has a similar density. But there the resemblance ends. Corot-7b lies so close to its own sun that its surface must be like a vision of hell. Temperatures soar above 2,000 degrees on its day side and sink to minus 200 degrees on the night side. It means the surface could be covered with molten lava or boiling oceans and it certainly could not hold any form of life as we know it. Corot-7b is 23 times closer to its parent star than inner planet Mercury is to our own sun, and it zips around it at 750,000 km per hour making its year – the time it takes to complete one orbit - just 3 days 17 hours long. Didier Queloz, leader of the European team that made the observations from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, said: "This is science at its thrilling and amazing best. We did everything we could to learn what the object discovered by the CoRoT satellite looks like and we found a unique system." The Earthlike world was detected in February 2009 by a planet-hunting spaceprobe called Corot. It was spotted around an otherwise unremarkable star named TYC 4799-1733-1 in the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, about 500 light-years away. The star is slightly smaller and cooler than our own sun and only about 1.5 billion years old. Corot detected the planet by spotting a dip in starlight when it passed in front of its own sun ocne every orbit. To obtain precise data to reveal the planet's nature they used a device called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph attached to the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The studies also disclose that a second super-Earth lies in the same alien solar system . It does not pass in front of the star but made its presence known by its gravitational pull. It circles its host star in 3 days and 17 hours and has a mass or “weight”, about eight times that of Earth. Picture: An artist's impression of the Earthlike world close to its parent star. (Credit: ESO).  • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Squashed plutoid has a red spot

One of the newly discovered dwarf worlds that got Pluto kicked out of the major planets club is sporting a distinct spot, scientists have discovered. Icy plutoid Haumea has a red blotch that appears to be richer in minerals and organic materials than the surrounding surface. It could mark the location of an impact in relatively recent times. Haumea, discovered by Mike Brown of Caltech in 2004, and named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, is unusual because of its squashed ovoid shape. This is caused by its rapid spin – it makes one rotation in a little under four Earth hours. The fast spin is also put down to an impact by another body such as a large asteroid around a billion years ago. The zone that Haumea inhabits, called the Kuiper Belt, is thought to be swarming with millions of small icy bodies. A NASA probe, New Horizons, is racing to visit the region out beyond Neptune. Haumea seems to have captured two of them as moons – the plutoid was discovered by Brown's team to have two tiny satellites, now called Hi'iaka and Namaka, in 2005. The plutoid's “great red spot” was discovered by measuring the dwarf planet's change in brightness as it rotated. There was a clear light-curve which appeared different at different wavelengths, leading discoverer Dr Pedro Lacerda to deduce its colour. Dr Lacerda, who is Newton Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, will present his findings at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam today. He said: “Our very first measurements of Haumea told us there was a spot on the surface. The two brightness maxima and the two minima of the light-curve are not exactly equal, as would be expected from a uniform surface. This indicates the presence of a dark spot on the otherwise bright surface. “But Haumea’s light curve has told us more and it was only when we got the infrared data that were we able to begin to understand what the spot might be.” The spot's colour may show that it is richer in minerals and organic compounds, or that it contains a higher fraction of crystalline ice. If it does mark the scar from an impact, then the material detected might be like that the impacting body was made of, possibly mixed with material from beneath Haumea's icy surface. Haumea is the fourth largest known plutoid, or Kuiper belt object, after Eris, Pluto and Makemake. It measures 1,250 miles (2,000 km) by 1,000 miles (1,600 km) by 625 miles (1,000 km). The way it spins tells us this is a rocky world beneath the ice. Astronomers now plan to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2010 to make detailed spectroscopic observations to try to identify the spot further and work out how it originated. The plutoids are too distant to get detailed images of them. This is said to be the best picture of Pluto from Earth - it is said to be better than an image taken by the Hubble space telescope. Picture: Part of a computer model showing how the red spot appears on Haumea. ( Credit: P Lacerda). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Record storm is raging on Saturn

Space scientists have been watching the longest continuously observed thunderstorm in the solar system raging on planet Saturn. The powerful storm, complete with lightning 10,000 times more powerful than on Earth, began in mid-January 2009 and is still going strong eight months later. Such storms are clearly regular events. The new record breaks a previous one set by a storm which lasted from November 2007 to July 2008, lasting 7.5 months. Amateur astronomers helped monitor that storm through their backyard telescopes. Both were spotted and monitored by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around the giant ringed world. Who knows how long storms have lasted in the years before Cassini's arrival at Saturn in 2004. The current thunderstorm on Saturn is the ninth to be observed since then. Scientists are able to listen in to very powerful radio waves emitted by the lightning flashes using the antennas and receivers of the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument. The radio waves are about 10,000 times stronger than their terrestrial counterparts and originate from huge thunderstorms in Saturn's atmosphere with diameters around 3,000 km, Dr Georg Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will tell the European Planetary Science Congress today in Potsdam, Germany. Dr Fischer said: “These lightning storms are not only astonishing for their power and longevity, the radio waves that they emit are also useful for studying Saturn's ionosphere, the charged layer that surrounds the planet a few thousand kilometres above the cloud tops.” The observations of Saturn lightning using the Cassini RPWS instrument are being carried out by an international team of scientists from Austria, the US and France. Results have confirmed previous studies of the Voyager spacecraft indicating that levels of ionisation are approximately 100 times higher on the day-side than the night side of Saturn’s ionosphere. As we reported last month, torrential rain has also been spotted on Saturn's amazing moon Titan. Picture: Saturn's moon Tethys sits quietly above the planet as a train of earlier storms rumbles through the its southern hemisphere in July 2008. (Credit: NASA). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Champagne supernova for Tom

A British amateur astronomer has broken a 36-year-old record for the number of exploding stars discovered by one person. Retired telecoms engineer Tom Boles, of Coddenham, Suffolk, has photographed and identified 125 supernovae erupting in distant galaxies from his private observatory. The previous record was held by a professional scientist, Bulgarian-born Professor Fritz Zwicky, who studied the size and age of the universe at the California Insitute of Technology. He found 121 of the suicidal stars before his death in 1974. Tom, 65, a former president of the British Astronomical Association, operates three computer-controlled telescopes from his countryside site which is unhampered by light pollution. He has been searching for supernovae since 1996 and monitors 12,000 galaxies, working every clear night. Tom told Skymania News: I hadn't really appreciated the significance of the achievement when it happened. I was aware of Zwicky's tally but not that it held any other significance than that it was the achievement of a great man. He died a year after his final discovery. Had he lived longer his tally would no doubt have been much greater. "The greater part of my achievement comes from the fact that it was done from the UK with its poor, damp, irregular and difficult to predict weather conditions. "Also, unlike the larger professional efforts of Zwicky, the funding for the effort was entirely private. Around half a million images have been taken to make the discoveries and so accruing over 300,000 hours observing time." Supernova discoveries are important to professional astronomers because Type IA blasts can help give precise distances for galaxies and so help to determine the size of the universe. They have been detected by professionals as far away as 11 billion light-years. You can read more about Tom's observatory and equipment here. Skymania News told last night of a new Galaxy Zoo project to allow computer users to detect supernovae even if they haven't got a telescope! Picture: This CCD photo by Tom Boles reevals one of the supernovae he found this year, SN2009es in the galaxy IC 1525. It was discovered at magnitude 17.7 on May 24. (Credit: Tom Boles). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Planet-hunter will find alien moons

A planet-seeking spacecraft launched in March is so powerful that it will even detect habitable moons around alien worlds, UK scientists said today. NASA's $595 million Kepler mission is flying through space checking out 100,000 stars looking for other planets resembling Earth. Its instruments scan the light of stars in one small region of the Milky Way, watching for little blips revealing that a planet is passing in front of one of them. Now a team led by Dr David Kipping of University College London says they may even find habitable moons too. They will be able to support alien life if they live in the "Goldilocks zone" around a star where conditions are not too hot or cold but just right. Dr Kipping, who believed that many thousands or even millions of these moons exist in the galaxy, has devised a way to discover them by looking for a wobble in the planet that each is orbiting, due to its gravitational pull. The new research shows that Kepler's telescope will be powerful enough to spot the changes in the planet's position and velocity. An alien solar system's moon - dubbed an exomoon - will be easiest to detect if it is orbiting a fluffy planet like Saturn, say the scientists, rather than a more dense or solid world. This is because Saturn's lightness would make it wobble much more than a heavy planet. If the Saturn-like planet is at the right distance from its star, then the temperature will allow liquid water to be stable on any sufficiently large moons in orbit around it and these could then be habitable. The team found that moons as small as a fifth the weight of the Earth should be easily detectable with the Kepler spaceprobe around 25,000 stars up to 500 light-years away from Earth. Star Wars fans are already wondering if Kepler might find planetary satellites like the fabled Forested Moon of Endor, the planet that was home to the Ewoks. Dr Kipping said: "For the first time, we have demonstrated that potentially habitable moons up to hundreds of light years away may be detected with current instrumentation. "As we ran the simulations, even we were surprised that moons as small as one-fifth of the Earth's mass could be spotted. It seems probable that many thousands, possibly millions, of habitable exomoons exist in the Galaxy and now we can start to look for them." The team's findings will be published by the Royal Astronomical Society. Last month, Skymania News told how Kepler had detected the phases of an extrasolar planet. Picture: Artist Dan Durda's impression of the scne from a moon orbiting an extrasolar planet. (Credit: Dan Durda, Southwest Research Institute). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Cannibal galaxy in our back yard

The brightest galaxy visible in the night sky outside our own Milky Way is busy gobbling up its neighbours, astronomers at Cambridge have discovered. The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, which can be seen with the naked eye as a fuzzy blob containing a trillion stars, lies only about 2.5 million light-years away - right on our cosmic doorstep. Scientists observed wispy streams of stars on the fringes of Andromeda - the leftover remains of smaller galaxies that it has absorbed. And they say that another spiral galaxy in our neighbourhood, M33 in the constellation of Triangulum, is destined to be a future victim. The Cambridge astronomers were part of an international team that made a million light-year-wide survey of the Andromeda Galaxy and its surroundings using a powerful digital camera on the giant Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. They discovered that some clumps of stars in Andromeda could not have formed within that galaxy because there would not have been enough gas there to be born from. They deduced therefore that they were from smaller galaxies it had digested. Dr Mike Irwin, of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, is a lead author of a report by the team in Nature. He said: "This is a startling visual demonstration of the truly vast scale of galaxies. The survey has produced an unrivalled panorama of galaxy structure which reveals that galaxies are the result of an ongoing process of accretion and interaction with their neighbours." Their results also suggest that Andromeda is interacting with the Triangulum Galaxy. Dr Scott Chapman, of the Institute of Astronomy, said: "Ultimately, these two galaxies may end up merging completely. Ironically, galaxy formation and galaxy destruction seem to go hand in hand." M31 was thought to be the largest galaxy in our so-called Local Group, but other work at Cambridge has suggested that our Milky Way is bigger. In June astronomers announced they had found the first planet in our Andromeda galaxy neighbour. • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Monster black hole is furthest known

Astronomers have found the most distant giant black hole in the universe, 12.8 billion light-years away. The cosmic cannibal, known as a supermassive black hole, has swallowed up as much material as one billion stars like the Sun. It lies at the heart of a galaxy as big as our own Milky Way, report an international team of scientists led by Dr Romotsugu Goto from the University of Hawaii. They are surprised at its size because they are looking back in time to see the galaxy as it was nearly 13 billion years ago when the universe was less than a billion years old. Astronomers have been uncertain how supermassive black holes form but believe it happens when several smaller ones merge. The newly found distant galaxy supports this theory because it provides a reservoir of these so-called intermediate black holes. Dr Goto said: "It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the Universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the Sun. The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe." The distant black hole was detected with a Suprime-Cam camera newly upgraded with red-sensitive CCDs on the Japanese Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Japanese scientist Yousuke Utsumi said: "We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy forming together. This discovery has opened a new window for investigating galaxy-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the universe." Other supermassive black holes in the distant universe have been found embedded in blobs of gas and dust. The biggest known black hole, 6.4 billion times more massive than the Sun, was reported in June. Our own Milky Way galaxy contains a supermassive black hole of its own. The results of the study will be published this month by the UK journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Picture: A false-colour image of the most distant supermassive black hole known, labelled CFHQSJ2329-0301. The white central pixels mark the black hole and the coloured surround is the host galaxy. (Credit: Tomotsugu Goto, University of Hawaii). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Record sunstorm will spell disaster

A spectacular explosion on the Sun that rocked the Earth 150 years ago this week could threaten the lives of tens of millions of people if it happened again today. The solar storm in September 1859 gave the Earth the mother of all buffetings. A worldwide aurora turned night into day. Telegraph operators were knocked out or shocked as sparks and flames leapt from their wires in a huge electrical surge. But in today's technology-dependent world, a similar event could bring down civilization in the biggest disaster ever to hit mankind. More havoc would be wreaked than in an asteroid impact, say experts. And humans would face doom as power and communications grids around the globe were destroyed by the event, preventing the production and supply of food, water and medicines. A British amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington, 33, witnessed the start of the storm that battered the Earth 150 years ago. He was sketching a giant blotch on the sun called a sunspot from near Redhill, Surrey, on September 1 when two dazzling beads of light appeared above it. They were the first observed solar flares. They faded within minutes. But the next eight days the night skies all around the globe were filled with dazzling red, green and purple auroras. They are usually just seen near the poles. They were caused by a billion tons of highly charged gas, called plasma, that battered the Earth after racing 93 million miles from the Sun at more than five million miles an hour. Smaller eruptions have been photographed by spacecraft such NASA's as Stereo. Our planet's natural shield, its magnetic field, protected humans from the deadly radiation in 1859 by deflecting it around the magnetic poles. But the massive electrical charge knocked out the Victorian equivalent of the internet, by sending telegraph systems haywire. Operators shocked by the surge quickly disconnected batteries that powered the telegraph network. But they found it kept working thanks to the power from the aurora. The next time a perfect solar storm on the same scale is aimed at Earth, the result will be devastating - and much more so for the developed world than for poor countries. Eight minutes after the flare - called a coronal mass ejection or CME - happens, a pulse of X-rays will cause huge disruption to radio communications. Then, 18 to 36 hours later, we will feel the full impact of space weather with the arrival of superheated gas called plasma from the Sun. Satellites on which we rely for communications will have their electronics fried, causing £40 billion damage in space. Astronauts on the space station or space tourists will die from massive doses of radiation. Then power grids around the world will be destroyed as transformers melt, beyond repair. It will take many months or years to replace them. A NASA report says the blackouts would cause more than a trillion pounds worth of damage to the US economy alone. British scientist Dr Stuart Clark is a solar expert who has written a gripping book about the 1859 solar storm and Richard Carrington called The Sun Kings. He told Skymania News: "These ejections from the Sun are huge. They can contain a billion tons of matter - smashed up atoms carrying vast quantities of electrical and magnetic energy - and that's what can do the damage. It will short out satellites vital for communications and GPS, turning them into useless junk. "The space station does not have sufficient shielding. A Carrington-sized flare would be unsurvivable." Dr Clark added: "The impact on power grids is the most dangerous effect. Another 1859-sized flare could take out power transformers right across the United States, at which point you have the biggest natural disaster possible. You can't replace these transformers quickly. So you face weeks, months or potentially even years without proper power supplies. "The ripple effect from that is colossal. Without power you can't pump fuel so you can't drive food to the supermarkets. You can't pump water to homes or handle sewage. With no power, there is no communication, no way for the Government to pass on information or advice. And even if you think about back-up generators, in places like hospitals, the petrol they need is not going to last longer than a couple of days. Millions will die. "You could see society collapse and a complete breakdown in law and order. Nowhere is safe from a Carrington-sized flare. This is much more threatening than an asteroid impact and it is much more likely than an asteroid." Dr Clark said that much less powerful space weather had already given an indication of the havoc that would be created. "In 1989 north-eastern Canada was knocked out by a solar storm. The region went from normal operations to a completely melted transformer in 90 seconds, cutting power to six million people. Repairs took months. "Another series of storms battered the Earth around Halloween in 2003. At least two satellites were wrecked and 60 per cent of NASA satellites malfunctioned in some way. "During that battering, they moved aircraft away from the magnetic poles. The main reason was to avoid communications blackouts, but they were also concerned about radiation levels in passenger jets." Scientists have found a tree-ring like record in the Arctic ice of how solar activity has affected Earth. They estimate that a solar event like that of 1859 happens twice in a thousand years. But there is nothing to say it won't happen next week. And Dr Clark says that a general decline in the sun's level of activity is creating conditions like those around the time that Carrington observed his fantastic flare. He said: "Hopefully, with space telescopes observing the Sun, it mean we won't be taken by surprise and will see a storm coming. But get it wrong and we'll have hardly any time to take action and the damage will be done. "The individual can literally do nothing to protect himself apart from get in some tins of beans and candles. And the only thing we can do to protect power stations is to turn them off. "If you see one of these things coming and decide it is big enough, turn the power off. That means people will die, there will be accidents, but it is the only sure fire way to proect the power stations. "But there is no chain of command, no structure for deciding when to turn the power off. And we have no idea when disaster will strike." Editor's note: I can highly recommend Stuart Clark's book, The Sun Kings, as an astronomical thriller. Click here to buy it from Amazon in the USA, or in the UK. It is available in hardback or paperback. Picture: Dramatic activity on the Sun in September 1999, photographed by the SoHo spacecraft - but on nothing like the scale of 1 September 1859. (Credit: ESA/NASA). • Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com