Logging The Cyber World

Tags: alien civilization, aliens, allen telescope, drake equation, et, extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, UFO

Proof of extraterrestrial intelligence could come within 25 years, an astronomer who works on the search said Sunday.

“I actually think the chances that we’ll find ET are pretty good,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., here at the SETIcon convention. “Young people in the audience, I think there’s a really good chance you’re going to see this happen.”

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Tags: alien, astronomer, Earth-like, planets, space telescope, stargazer, WFIRST

A $1.6 billion space telescope that could reveal the nature of dark energy and identify Earth-like planets should be the top priority for astronomers and astrophysicists, according to a long-awaited report that lays out the pressing needs for the next 10 years of space science.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) would launch in 2020 as one of the next generation of telescopes that should target the early universe, search for nearby habitable planets and test the boundaries of fundamental physics, according to the Astro2010 Decadal Survey by the National Academy of Sciences.

“During the last Decadal Survey, exoplanets weren’t a big element, and dark energy wasn’t really a big deal,” said Claire Max, an astronomer at the University of California in Santa Cruz and member of the Decadal Survey committee. “There are a whole lot of things that are really new.”

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Tags: billions of stars, cosmos, galaxy, number of stars, stars

Ever try to count all the stars in the sky? Don’t. Scientists recently announced that there may be a billion (that’s with a “b”) more stars out there than they originally thought.

A buzzy article from the Discovery News explains that astronomers “may have underestimated the tally of galaxies in some parts of the universe by as much as 90 percent.”

How could sky watchers have missed so many stars? Apparently, astronomers rely on ultraviolet light signatures to determine the number of stars in the cosmos. But that might not be the most accurate way to go about conducting a census of the universe. “In the case of very distant, old galaxies, the telltale light may not reach Earth as it is blocked by interstellar clouds of dust and gas — and, as a result, these galaxies are missed by the map-makers.” The story inspired a slew of searches on everything from “how many stars in the sky” to “how to count stars.”

More Details at Yahoo Buzz!

Tags: space tweet, tweet, twitter

Tweeting is no longer only an earthly phenomenon.

A NASA astronaut made Twitter history on Friday by sending the first tweet from outer space. Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer broadcast the following message directly from the International Space Station:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

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Tags: commercial travel, space tourist, space travel, spacecraft

Five years ago, with the winning of the Ansari XPrize, hopes for commercial space travel seemed to soar as high as the space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, that had flown the series of sub orbital flights in the summer and autumn of 2004. Now, with the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, hope has taken another step toward reality.

SpaceShipTwo, which has been under development the past few years by Scaled Composites, will take two pilots and six paying passengers on sub orbital barn storming flights. For two hundred thousand dollars, anyone can experience micro gravity and witness the curvature of the Earth, experiences hitherto only reserved for astronauts flying on government space craft.

The first commercial flights past the one hundred kilometer mark will likely take place in 2011, after an extensive testing regime. As with SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo will be taken to a height of about fifty thousand feet by a mother ship, the White Knight Two, and then released as it fires its rocket engines.

Read the full article at Examiner.com

Tags: another star planets, Earth-like, Gliese 581, nearest star, planet

European astronomers said Tuesday that they had discovered the smallest planet yet found orbiting another star. The planet could be as little as only 1.9 times as massive as the Earth and belongs to a dim red star known as Gliese 581, which lies about 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra.

The star was already know to harbor at least three more massive planets. The new planet, known as Gliese 581e, is probably rocky like the Earth, but it lies in such a close orbit — only three million miles from its star — that it is surely blasted with too much radiation and heat to be livable.

More at NYTimes

Tags: alien civilization, earthlike worlds, extraterrestrial light, laser signal, radio signal, super-civilization

Over a decade ago SETI pioneer Jill Tarter and I had a dinner discussion about the protocol procedures for announcing to the world the first detection of a signal broadcast from an extraterrestrial civilization.

I expressed relief that I would never have to worry about publicizing such a discovery from Hubble Space Telescope. “Hold on Ray,” Jill said, “you never know, Hubble might conceivably pick up a signal that other telescopes can’t detect.”

Oh, my worst nightmare! Imagine keeping that information under a news release embargo!

Now, some readers will scratch their heads at this because SETI has been popularized in the 1997 movie Contact where actress Jodie Foster “listens” for radio signals from E.T. with the huge radio telescope array near Socorro, New Mexico.

Interested? Read more at Discovery.com

Tags: galaxy, lifeform, stars, top 10, universe, weird things

The more we look among the stars and galaxies, the weirder things seem to get.

Even space itself is puzzling, for example. Recent studies suggest that the fabric of the universe stretches more than 150 billion light-years across — in spite of the fact that the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old.

From super-fast stars to the nature of matter, here we cover other strange and mysterious elements of the universe.

10. Hypervelocity Stars

If you’ve ever gazed at the night sky, you’ve probably wished upon a shooting star (which are really meteors).

But shooting stars do exist, and they’re as rare as one in 100 million.

In 2005, astronomers discovered the first “hypervelocity” star careening out of a galaxy at nearly 530 miles per second (10 times faster than ordinary star movement).

We have ideas about what flings these rare stars into deep space, but aren’t certain; anything from off-kilter supernova explosions to supermassive black holes might be responsible.

Caption: Artist’s rendition of a hypervelocity star leaving a galaxy. Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Read the Top 9 here.

Tags: crescent moon, jupiter, moon, planets, smiling sky, venus

Astronomers and stargazers have been watching a rare astronomical phenomenon.
Jupiter and Venus are in conjunction and lie just two degrees apart, so lucky skygazers will be able to see the two planets getting closer.

At the same time, the crescent Moon will eclipse Venus and, if you watch the Moon at sunset through binoculars, you will see an occultation of Venus by the Moon. The planet will seem to disappear as the dark limb of the Moon passes over it.

More on BBC News

Tags: mars mission, mars weather, martian clouds, phoenix, snow on mars

TORONTO — A Canadian-built weather station on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds.

“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway of York University in Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian Meteorological Station on Phoenix.

“That is snow falling from the clouds.”

“We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground,” he said.

Data collected show the snow vaporizing before reaching the surface.

A laser instrument, the lidar, designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars, detected snow from clouds about four kilometres above the spacecraft’s landing site.

The lidar shoots pulses of laser light into the Martian sky, measuring components of the atmosphere such as dust, ground fog and clouds, from the surface up to a range of 20 kilometres.

Read more @ ctv.ca