New Discoveries/Interest Stories To Discuss

[Mikal]

Newest planetary discovery is small, fast and hot


A European space telescope has found a unique planet 390 light years away with a diameter less than twice that of the Earth, making it the slimmest planet yet detected outside our solar system.


03/02/2009 2:38:30 PM






An illustration from France's space agency, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, of a planet transiting a star.
(CNES)

CBC News

The planet also lies very close to its parent star - about 2.5 million kilometres - and so completes an orbit in a speedy 20 hours. By comparison, the closest planet to our sun, Mercury, orbits at an average distance of 58 million kilometres and completes a circuit of the sun once every 88 days.

European astronomers, who announced the finding Tuesday at a symposium in Paris, also believe the planet may be the fastest yet discovered.

Because of its close proximity to its sun-like star, the planet is also extremely hot, with temperatures estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500 C.

Astronomers found the planet using the COROT space telescope in large part because its close proximity made it easier to detect when it passed in front of - or transited - its star, dimming the star's light.

COROT had to look far away to spot the change: the star the planet orbits lies 3,690 trillion kilometres distant, or about 24.6 million times the average distance from the Earth to the sun.

The density of the planet, named COROT-Exo-7b, is still under investigation, so it is too early yet to say what its mass is relative to the current record-holder for least massive planet: a small planet discovered in 2008 orbiting a spinning neutron star.

Because of its temperature, however, the researchers speculate the newly discovered planet may be rocky like Earth and covered in liquid lava, or it could belong to a class of planets thought to be made of rock and water in equal amounts.

"This discovery is a very important step on the road to understanding the formation and evolution of our planet," Malcolm Fridlund, the European Space Agency's COROT project scientist, said in a statement.

"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth. We now have to understand this object further to put it into context, and continue our search for smaller, more Earth-like objects with COROT," he said.

The discovery has been submitted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

COROT-Exo-7b is one of the few terrestrial planets - small rocky planets like the Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury - discovered outside our solar system.

About 330 planets outside our solar system - called exoplanets - have been discovered thus far. Most of these have been huge gas giants that are easier to detect when they pass in front of a star or through an alternative method called gravitational lensing, whereby the presence of the planet is inferred based on the way a star's light bends in response to the planet's gravitational influence. A select few very large exoplanets have also been seen directly.

COROT, launched in 2006 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was specifically designed to detect tiny changes in brightness from nearby stars as a result of transiting planets.

NASA's Kepler telescope, set to launch on March 5, is designed to use similar methods of detection, but with a more focused mission - limiting its search to transiting Earth-like planets in habitable zones of space, where the temperatures on the planet might support liquid water and where it might be possible to sustain life.


Mikal

[austintorn@aol.com]

More stuff about exoplanets here:

http://www.toequest.com/forum/though...mbly-line.html

[Mikal]

Young Butterflies Trick Ants Into Raising Them





Trickster | Discovery News Video Feb. 4, 2009 -- Flitting across your yard, butterflies seem friendly and harmless. But at least one type has learned to raise its young as parasites, tricking ants into feeding it and giving special treatment.

The pupae of the European butterfly Maculina rebeli exude a scent that mimics the ants and make themselves at home inside the ant nest. Once they become a caterpillar they even beg for food like ant larvae, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

But, not content just to be fed, the butterflies even manage to demand special treatment, Jeremy A. Thomas of Britain's University of Oxford and colleagues report.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Moths Remember Caterpillar Life



It turns out that ant queens make subtle sounds that signal their special status to worker ants. The caterpillars have learned to mimic those sounds, the researchers say, earning high enough status to be rescued before others if the nest is disturbed.

In times of food shortage, nurse ants have been known to kill their own larvae and feed them to the caterpillars pretending to be queen ants, they added.

In nature, the real ant queen and the caterpillar keep to different parts of the ant colony and would not encounter one another, the report said.

But in an experiment, a butterfly pupa pretending to be an ant queen was placed in a chamber with worker ants and four real ant queens. The ant queens began to attack and bite the caterpillar, but the workers intervened, biting and stinging their own queens, which they then pulled to a far corner of the chamber while other workers attended them.



Mikal

[Mikal]

March 17, 2009
Egypt to Open Inner
Chambers of 'Bent' Pyramid
from Mitch Battros - Earth Changes Media

Travelers to Egypt will soon be able to explore the inner chambers of the 4,500-year-old "bent" pyramid, known for its oddly shaped profile, and other nearby ancient tombs, Egypt's antiquities chief announced Monday.

The increased access to the pyramids south of Cairo is part of a new sustainable development campaign that Egypt hopes will attract more visitors but also to avoid some of the problems of the urban sprawl that have plagued the famed pyramids of Giza.

Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the chambers of the 330-foot-pyramid outside the village of Dahshur, 50 miles south of Cairo, will be opened for the first time to tourists within the next "month or two." "This is going to be an adventure," he told reporters.



Mikal

[Mikal]

Mar 31, 2009
An image from the Hubble Space Telescope has astronomers baffled once again.
The Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) recently announced the discovery of a "mystery object" that does not fit with observational data compiled by the Sloan Deep Sky Survey (SDSS). According to Kyle Barbary, an astrophysics graduate student with U.C. Berkeley and lead author of a paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal, the observation is:

"...inconsistent with all known supernova types, is not matched to any spectrum in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database" of vast numbers of objects. "We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class."

As Barbary and his colleagues indicate, the closest they can come to the characterists of SCP 06F6 are quasars whose "hot gas" envelopes absorb radiation emissions at specific frequencies. However, a spectrographic analysis of the newly found object reveals nothing recognizable to the team. They are unable to determine if it is in our own galaxy or somewhere much farther out in deep space.

One speculation suggests that the radiation profile could be from gases falling into an undetectable supermassive black hole (SMBH). As gas collides with material orbiting within the intense gravity field generated by the SMBH, it becomes superheated―often to temperatures exceeding ten million Kelvin―and is heavily ionized. Indeed, one absorption line was identified as Fe X (ten-times ionized iron) that is often seen in the Sun's corona during a solar eclipse. Could this clue be pointing to what has actually been observed?

Ten times ionized iron is atomic iron with ten of its electrons stripped away. Conventional theories propose that the ionization occurs when the iron atoms collide with other atoms because the solar corona is at such a high temperature. The energetic collisions positively charge the iron, making it an excellent conductor of electricity. Charge separation occurs in the Sun's corona (and presumably in other stars), forming double layers in the plasma. It is the explosive collapse of double layers that causes solar flares and other phenomena to erupt so violently.

In these pages we have often referred to Hannes Alfvén and his quotation about double layers in space. He was of the opinion that they should be considered a new class of celestial object because they are known to produce gamma and x-ray bursts when they explode. (Alfvén, H., "Double layers and circuits in astrophysics", (1986) IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science ISSN 0093-3813, vol. PS-14, December 1986, pages 779-793).

Space is filled with cells and filaments of plasma, some radiating in arc-mode and some radiating at frequencies that are invisible to the naked eye. Electromagnetic forces in plasma are much more powerful than the “gravity-only” force that prompts modern cosmological theories. Because Birkeland current filaments connect cosmic bodies in circuits like light-years-long transmission lines, an overload response to surges in the flow of galactic electricity could be what astronomers are seeing in SCP 06F6. An invisibly radiating star might have split due to electrical fissioning in order for the larger surface area to accommodate the increased current. In a previous Picture of the Day about V838 Monocerotis, a similar mechanism was described.

Plasma physicist Wal Thornhill wrote:

"After 100 years of neglect, an electrical model of stars is just beginning to emerge. It is an engineer’s view that offers a coherent understanding of our real place in the universe (cosmology) and practical insights for the future exploration of space. If the Sun shines as an electric light ‘plugged in’ to the Electric Universe, the objective tests become obvious. Perhaps, with a real understanding of stars we may reach childhood’s end in the cosmos."

By Stephen Smith

[Mikal]

05, April 2009
Breaking News, Japan: UFO almost causes Asian WW3
Michael Cohen m.cohen@allnewsweb.com


An astonishing revelation regarding UFOs is being reported in some initial media reports relating to the very recent Japanese false alarm regarding an alleged North Korean missile attack. The entire population of Japan is in a state of utter panic and anger and an international crisis might well all be the result of irresponsible actions of extraterrestrial tourists flying a UFO from North Korea to Japan on a sightseeing expedition.
As the story initially unfolded the remarkable information emerged that the highest levels of the Japanese defence establishment conceded that their most advanced radar system has picked up, in the words of their official press release, an ‘Unidentified flying object’ (UFO).
The event is reported to have also caused utter chaos in the Japanese Prime Minister’s office.
The drama, which came close to causing a fully fledged war began when Japan's most advanced Radar warning system known as the ‘FPS-5’ picked up an object moving from North Korea to Japan and sounded off a warning signal on the morning of April 4 2009.
Around the same time intelligence reports emanating from South Korea and the United States had been recently warning that a supposed peaceful satellite launch by the North Koreans known as ‘Starlight No.2’ is in fact a cover for the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles ‘Taepodong-2’, designed to attack Japanese and U.S targets.
As a result of this security heads immediately came to the conclusion that the North Koreans had launched a missile attack on Japan and alerted the press and the Government, Sending the Prime Minister’s office into wartime chaos.
The Prime Minister’s office immediately sent an email to 43 local Government offices stating that the ‘The North Koreans have fired a ‘F1’ Missile’-plunging these regional offices into a state of sheer mayhem.
Meanwhile initial press releases began the job of alerting residents in high-risk areas and the authorities started making emergency plans to evacuate the most vulnerable populations. The Department of Transport and the Navy were alerted and went into emergency mode.
Shortly thereafter it was conceded that a mistake was made and the object detected officially declared a UFO by the Japanese Defence Office. It was also confirmed that no Korean missile was heading towards Japan. Residents of areas considered most vulnerable to North Korean attacks and the general population are now furious at the Government.
The radar images have now been sent for analysis and no conclusions as to what the incredibly fast object was have emerged. It is unlikely they ever will. As Governments hide their knowledge of extraterrestrial craft in their airspace from each other and their citizens it is hardly surprising that such blunders occur.
Some Asian ufologists are suggesting that the Aliens sent the Japanese government a belated message letting them know it was just one of their craft-hence the mysterious turn-around.

It appears that an official UFO cover-up has swung well into action with earlier regional news reports reporting the fact that the object was declared a UFO by the Japanese Department of Defence while later ones are reporting that the alarm was merely a 'false positive' and carefully avoiding any mention of UFOs.

Unsurprisingly, no western reports mention that the object that the radars picked up was declared a UFO by the defence authorities.
If any aliens are reading this article they should be alerted to how dangerous their semi-secret joy flights can be. If they are keeping themselves covert for our sakes perhaps they should re-consider and come out in the open; even if our ‘representatives’ would rather they didn’t.


Hard to tell what this is really all about but thought it was interesting anyway. If anyone can reach Japan it would be nice to verify it...

Mikal

[Mikal]

Scientists Dismiss Prediction of Italy Earthquake; But Should They Have?


Earthquakes like the one that killed more than 200 people in Italy this week are still impossible to predict, and a local scientist's claims to have done so should be treated with caution, geophysicists say. But does it deserve a second look?

Gioacchino Giuliani who works at the National Institute of Physics is at the center of a debate about the limits of seismology after Italian officials shrugged off his warnings last month that a devastating earthquake in the central Abruzzo region was imminent. Giuliani based his forecast on emissions of radon gas. The theory goes that the gas is released as the fault line adjusts itself before a major earthquake.

Mitch, Earth Changes...

I was shocked when I received this information in a Newsletter. Shocked because the physicist's warning was ignored when it could have saved lives. I also thought it was interesting that radon gas is emitted from the earth along fault lines prior to an earthquake and we seem to be ignoring that....


Mikal

[Mikal]

Humans and Aliens Might Share DNA Roots
By Brandon Keim April 07, 2009 | 7:26:38 PMCategories: Astrobiology, Evolution


The building blocks of life may be more than merely common in the cosmos. Humans and aliens could share a common genetic foundation.

That's the tantalizing implication of a pattern found in the formation of amino acids in meteorites, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and simulations of primordial Earth. The pattern appears to follow basic thermodynamic laws, applicable throughout the known universe.

"This may implicate a universal structure of the first genetic codes anywhere," said astrophysicist Ralph Pudritz of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

There are exactly 20 standard amino acids — complex molecules that combine to form proteins, which carry out instructions specified by RNA and DNA, its double-stranded and self-replicating descendant.

Ten were synthesized in the famous 1953 Miller-Urey experiments, which modeled conditions believed to exist in Earth's early atmosphere and volcano-heated pools. Those 10 amino acids have also been found in meteorites, prompting debate over their role in sparking life on Earth and, perhaps, elsewhere.

Pudritz's analysis, co-authored with McMaster University biophysicist Paul Higgs and published Monday on arXiv, doesn't settle the former debate, but it does suggest that basic amino acids are even more common than thought, requiring little more than a relatively warm meteorite of sufficient size to form. And that's just the start.

If the observed patterns of amino acid formation — simple acids require low levels of energy to coalesce, and complex acids need more energy — indeed follow thermodynamic laws, then the basic narrative of life's emergence could be universal.

"Thermodynamics is fundamental," said Pudritz. "It must hold through all points of the universe. If you can show there are certain frequencies that fall in a natural way like this, there is an implied universality. It has to be tested, but it seems to make a lot of sense."

Pudritz and Higgs tabulated the types and frequencies of amino acids found in primordial Earth experiments, then correlated the results on a graph of temperature versus atmospheric pressure at which the acids likely formed.

The 10 amino acids synthesized in primordial Earth experiments tended to arise at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and are chemically simple. Other, more complex acids formed less frequently, and require more temperature and pressure. Their distribution follows a clear, possibly thermodynamic, curve.

"The most frequent amino acid that forms is the one that's least-demanding, energetically. There's less and less amino acids that require more energy to form. That's very sensible, from a thermodynamic point of view," said Pudritz.

Internal conditions of meteorites are unknown, but some scientists believe that certain large meteorites are both warm and hydrated, making them roughly analogous to the relatively temperate environment of Earth's youth.

"There's a theory," said Pudritz, "that they could be made in the warm interiors of large-enough meteorites."

This is necessarily speculative, but it would explain why the 10 amino acids most common in primordial Earth experiments are also the most common acids found in meteorites.

Pudritz and Higgs speculate that these 10 common amino acids met the needs of the earliest replicating molecules, with other, rarer acids used by the nascent genetic code as they formed or arrived — a process called "stepwise evolution," culminating in the genes that gathered 3.6 billion years ago in a common ancestor of all complex life.

If simulations of interactions between these 10 acids indeed support molecules that can copy themselves, said Pudritz, then it's possible that they could support an ur-genetic code on Earth and elsewhere.

"There's a possible universality," he said, "for any code that would use amino acids."

Harvard University systems biologist Irene Chen, who specializes in the evolution of molecules, called the work "interesting," but noted that "in the absence of some experimental backup, it's generally difficult to know if this kind of analysis is a Panglossian argument."

The ultimate experimental backup, of course, is finding aliens. In the meantime, the ending of Battlestar Galactica seems a bit less implausible.

Citation: "A thermodynamic basis for prebiotic amino acid synthesis and the nature of the first genetic code." By Paul G. Higgs, Ralph E. Pudritz. arXiv, April 6, 2009.

[Mikal]

Cassini Equinox Titan Update
Jun 01, 2009

Almost a year into its extended mission, Cassini continues to reveal Titan's chaotic, enigmatic surface.
On October 15, 1997 NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft on a mission to explore Saturn and its family of moons, particularly Titan. It was the largest payload ever sent out to deep space, weighing almost six tons. It needed most of the seven year journey to Saturn for gravity boosts from Venus, Earth, and Jupiter because it could not carry enough onboard fuel to blast straight out to its target. As it was, the proposed decade-long flight, with engine burns, instrument usage, and radio transmissions to Earth, required that it carry several kilograms of plutonium as its primary power source.

On January 14, 2005 the Huygens probe separated from its mothership and successfully landed on the frigid moon. In June of 2008, the official mission timeline came to an end. It was renamed Cassini Equinox to commemorate the change of seasons on Saturn as the Sun passed through Saturn's equinox and began to illuminate the giant planet from the North. For the four year term of its original mission, Saturn was lit from the South, so NASA engineers are taking advantage of this rare opportunity.

Cassini recently flew close by Titan, and on June 6, 2009 its cameras will once again trace out a swath of radar images as it skims past the planet-sized moon at a distance of 965 kilometers from the surface. It is expected that the same low-lying regions NASA scientists refer to as "lakes," as well as the dendritic channels referred to as "river valleys," will dominate the conversation once the images are analyzed.

For years NASA has maintained that Titan's predominantly methane atmosphere has to be constantly replenished somehow, because so much of it is destroyed by sunlight. If the moon is as old as current theories propose, with that much leakage the atmosphere should have entirely evaporated long ago. The only mechanism that astrophysicists could imagine as a source was oceans of liquid methane beneath the dense cloud cover.

The Huygens lander quickly dispersed that idea when it touched down on what appeared to be a flat, rock-strewn plain. No methane droplets were detected falling from the sky, or precipitation of any kind for that matter, and no pools of methane were seen anywhere within its field of view. Instead, orbital images confirmed a dry surface when vast areas covered with dunes several meters high were seen. The dune fields, along with evidence for deeply carved channels over several hundred square kilometers, demonstrated that forces other than flowing liquids had been at work on Titan.

One of the principle tenets of Electric Universe theory is that the Solar System has been the scene of catastrophic encounters between charged planetary bodies at sometime in the recent past. Electric fields interacting with gigantic clouds of plasma caused major disruptions both in orbital arrangements and geological stability among the planets and moons. Indeed, many new objects may have been added to the mix in the form of cometary bodies scaling down in size from something as big as Venus to particles small enough to make up Saturn's rings.

If it can be suggested, based on the presupposition that Electric Universe proposals are correct, that Venus is a new member of the Solar System, then why not apply the same theory to Titan? If Titan is a relatively new addition to Saturn's system of some 60 moons, then the fact of its methane atmosphere does not indicate replenishment, but youth. There simply hasn't been enough time for Titan to lose its atmosphere—its atmosphere has only recently been created.

Titan is second only to Venus in its atmospheric density. However, what also prompted planetary scientists to come up with the "replenishment" theory to account for it is that Titan is too small, with too little gravity to hold an atmosphere so dense. Assumptions from conventional theories of Solar System evolution are invalid when it comes to Titan if it is billions of years old.

If, like Venus, Titan is not an ancient member of an even more ancient system of planets, but is a new member of an entirely remodeled system that has come about recently, then new ways of describing its structure and behavior must be considered.

A principle advocate of Electric Universe concepts, Wal Thornhill, has written several articles and offered many opinions about Titan and its place in an electrically charged Solar System:

"We must therefore allow that Venus and Titan may both have new surfaces if planets and moons are not formed through accretion by impacts billions of years ago. The 'befuddlement' and 'mystery' may prove to be the result of an unquestioned belief in that [billions-of-years-ago] hypothesis. Predictions based on that story have had no success in the space age. So we may be confident that planets did not accrete from a solar nebula."

Electrical activity on a scale sufficient to carve out craters and mountain ranges is something that is never reported in the conventional press. When it comes up at all, in a comments section or a blog, the idea is often mocked or banned more than it is given any consideration.

When there is room in the thoughts of reasonable people to apply easily understood elements of electrical theory to observations that otherwise elicit confusion when plugged into standard models, there will be more clarity of perception. Observations do not create new theories, observations are inserted into parameters that are previously established according to a hypothesis.

The Electric Universe hypothesis provides a more complete picture when the images and data from probes and telescopes are inserted into it. The primary reason it is not considered a viable model is the time element involved. It is a foregone conclusion among its opponents that the Solar System is much as it was since its initial formation billions of years ago. To consider a 10,000 year time frame is tantamount to blasphemy.

As has been publicized in these pages many times, though, a change in thought often occurs when it is least expected. When the time for change comes to pass, change is inevitable. The growing number of adherents to the Electric Universe conception of how the cosmos operates means that further changes to human thought are coming soon.


Stephen Smith

[austintorn@aol.com]

The View from Titan