Hundreds of new Earth-Like Planets discovered by Kepler Spacecraft
NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.
If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.
To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 alien planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system. That includes six newfound worlds discovered by a French observatory that were announced earlier this week.
The Kepler observatory will continue conducting science operations until at least November 2012. It will also continue searching for Earth-like planets, including those that orbit stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of alien planets.
The discovery of all these potential new planets is interesting and exciting. But they are all so far away... how can we get to them???
Which brings me to the second half of my Space News Blog:
Suspended Animation No Longer Just a Pipe Dream
A research scientist in a Seattle cancer laboratory has discovered the secret to reanimating organisms that had been frozen to a temperature below survivable limits.
Dr. Mark Roth was inspired by cases of individuals who survived prolonged exposure to the bitter cold with few adverse affects — like Canadian toddler Erica Nordby, who wandered from her house in the winter of and whose heart stopped beating for two hours before she was rescued, warmed, and came miraculously back to life; and Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, who fell asleep on a snowy mountainside in 2006 and was found 23 days later with a core body temperature of just 71°F. He too was successfully reanimated having suffered no appreciable ill effects.
Experimenting on yeasts and worms, Roth and his team found that if his specimens were deprived of oxygen before freezing, they'd enter a state of suspended animation from which they can be reliably revived.
Um so.... That's pretty exciting... Am I right?
The subzero water is so salty that it doesn’t freeze despite the cold, and it has no consumable oxygen in it. There are, however, big bubbles of methane that come to the surface, which had provoked the researchers’ curiosity as to whether the gas was being produced geologically or biologically and whether anything could survive in this extreme hypersaline subzero environment. “We were surprised that we did not find methanogenic bacteria that produce methane at Lost Hammer,” Whyte said, “but we did find other very unique anaerobic organisms – organisms that survive by essentially eating methane and probably breathing sulfate instead of oxygen.”
It has been very recently discovered that there is methane and frozen water on Mars. Photos taken by the Mars Orbiter show the formation of new gullies, but no one knows what is forming them. One answer is that there could be that there are springs like Lost Hammer on Mars. “The point of the research is that it doesn’t matter where the methane is coming from,” Whyte explained. “If you have a situation where you have very cold salty water, it could potentially support a microbial community, even in that extreme harsh environment.”"
Source (And more info): Physorg
Here's a different series I've been doing,in a similar style to my CAFA sketches. This stuff will appear under the tag: CAAP.
