A team of European astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's HARPS Instrument to find the smallest extrasolar planet ever discovered; it's believed to be only 14 times the mass of the Earth. The planet orbits a star called mu Arae every 9.5 days, which is located 50 light-years away in the southern constellation of the Altar. A planet this size lies right at the boundary between rocky planets and gas giants. But since it's so close to its parent star, it's probably rocky, with a relatively small atmosphere, so it would be classified as a "super Earth".
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Phosphorus is central to life on Earth for many reasons; it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA, and it's an important element in many chemical processes. The questions is, how did the Earth get so much of it? Researchers from the University of Arizona believe that the meteorites that rained down early on during the formation of the Earth could have been the source. They found that many iron-nickel meteorites are rich with minerals that contain phosphorus, and propose that life could have formed around a spot where a meteorite struck the Earth.
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft completed a 51-minute engine burn that raised its orbit away from Saturn. When it first arrived at the Ringed Planet, Cassini passed very close to the planet and went right through the rings. On its next flyby, it'll pass outside the rings and make its first close-up flyby of Titan at a distance of only 1,200 km (746 miles) - nearly 300 times closer than its previous flyby. Cassini is expected to make 45 visits to Titan over the next 4 years, and some will be even closer.
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This image of a Martian crater was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May, 2004. The crater is unevenly weathered, with a gentle slope on the wind-facing side, and a steep slope on the lee-side - on Earth these features are called ?barchanes?, and usually form in arid regions. There's a dune field on the bottom of the crater, that seems to be composed of sand of volcanic origin; how it got to the bottom of this crater is a mystery.
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Planet hunting has traditionally only been possible with very large telescopes, capable of detecting tiny changes around distant stars which indicate the presence of planets. But now a team of astronomers have found their first extrasolar planet using a 4-inch telescope essentially developed with off-the-shelf equipment. The new Jupiter-sized planet is located about 500 light-years away, and was discovered using the transit method, which looks for a dip in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front. The team surveyed 12,000 stars in an area half the size of the Big Dipper's bowl, and turned up 16 candidates for planets. Follow up observations with larger observatories confirmed which ones had planets, and which didn't.
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This is a detailed image of an exploded star called Cassiopeia A, taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The space-based observatory focused on this remnant for 1 million seconds (just over 11 days), and revealed the bright outer green ring 10 light years across which was generated by the shockwave from the supernova explosion. Two large jets extend outside this shockwave on opposite sides, and contain large quantities of silicon. This means they were formed early on in the explosion; otherwise, they'd contain mostly iron from the star's central regions.
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NASA's Spirit rover has dug up plenty of evidence on slopes of "Columbia Hills" that water once covered the area. Spirit has been inspecting an outcrop called "Clovis" on a hill about 9 metres (30 feet) above the Gusev Crater plains, and it's found that liquid water changed the composition of the rock. Unlike rocks in the plains, which have coatings and veins created by small amounts of water, these formations have been deeply affected by water over a long period of time.
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Scientists have used data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft to uncover strange rocky lumps underneath Ganymede's icy shell. One theory is that they're rock formations, lodged deep in the ice and held up for billions of years. The data was gathered by Galileo during its second flyby of the moon in 1996. This discovery challenges theories about the thickness and strength of Ganymede's ice - you would expect the rocks held up at the top, or resting at the bottom, but not somewhere in the middle. Galileo was crashed into Jupiter nearly a year ago.
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NASA's Genesis spacecraft has nearly returned to Earth with its precious cargo of particles from the solar wind. On September 8, the spacecraft's sample return capsule will enter the Earth's atmosphere, and it will be captured in midair by a helicopter in Utah. The particles were collected over the course of 27 months, and captured in hexagonal wafers of pure silicon, gold, sapphire, and diamond. These are so fragile, that engineers didn't want to risk it actually striking the ground and damaging some of these wafers. Two helicopters will be in the air as the capsule parachutes down, and they should have 5 opportunities to snag it before it hits the ground.
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Here's a question that's surprisingly difficult to answer: how old is the Milky Way? A team of astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to get an approximate age of 13.6 billion years, give or take 800 million. They reached this estimate by studying some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which are located in globular star clusters, and born together in the same cloud of dust at the same time. They made difficult observations of a substance called Beryllium-9, which has been accumulating throughout the Universe since the Big Bang.
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One experiment on board the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will let it cook particles from a comet in a miniature oven, and then "smell" the results. When Rosetta arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, it will send down a small spacecraft to actually land on its surface. This lander will be able to scoop up and drill samples from the comet's surface and then place them in an Evolved Gas Analyser. This tiny oven can heat the particles to 800 degrees Celsius which converts them into gas which can then be analyzed to understand what chemicals are present.
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This image was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, and shows a system of outflow channels called the Dao Valles and Niger Valles; it was taken in June 2004, during the spacecraft's 528th orbit. The eroded channels are in a region of Mars that's near the southern flank of the Hadriaca Patera volcano, so they could have been created by fast moving lava "running off" during an eruption.
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Cassini has uncovered two new mini-moons of Saturn, orbiting between Mimas and Enceladus. The new moons have been dubbed S/2004 S1 and 2/2004 S2, and scientists estimate that they're approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) in diameter. They were detected using automated software that scans through images taken by Cassini to look for moving objects. Scientists have two theories about moons this small: they could have survived since the formation of the Solar System, or they could have formed more recently by particles from Saturn's ring accumulating together.
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A new image of Abell 2125, taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, shows several intergalactic clouds of hot gas in the process of merging together; they seem to be in the process of creating a single massive galaxy cluster. Chandra's resolution allows astronomers to distinguish the clouds from the individual galaxies inside it.
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An astronomer from the University of Hawaii has captured a detailed image of a dust disk around a new star; structures in the disk show evidence of planets. The photo is of a star called AU Microscopii, which is 33 light-years away, and the closest known star with a visible disk of dust. Dr. Michael Liu used the infrared capabilities of the giant twin 10 metre (33 feet) telescopes of the Keck Observatory, and saw clumps in the stellar disk; it should be smooth and featureless if there weren't any planets.
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Globular star clusters - groupings of millions stars in close formation - are some of the most beautiful objects in the sky. Our own Milky Way has about 200 of them, but astronomers believe we used to have many more. Astronomers think that these star clusters might actually be all that remains from irregular dwarf galaxies were consumed by the Milky Way and had their outer stars stripped away. A team from Harvard and the Carnegie Institute of Washington observed 14 globular clusters in a distant galaxy, and realized that they're so large, they nearly overlap the size of small galaxies, and have many similar characteristics.
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NASA's Genesis spacecraft made an important flight correction maneuver on Monday, which put it on course to return to the Earth after more than three years in space. Genesis has spent this time collecting particles of the solar wind on ultra pure wafers of gold, sapphire, silicon and diamond. On September 8, it will send a sample return capsule into the Earth's atmosphere, which will be caught by specially trained helicopter pilots. The particles will then be analyzed by scientists in laboratories around the Earth.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unusual situation where a young, hot star is carving out a cavity in a region of space that was once filled with cold, dense material. The massive star is known as N44F, and its stellar wind is moving nearly 5 times as fast as our Sun's solar wind. It's also ejecting 100 million times more material than the Sun. The fast moving torrent of particles collides with the colder surrounding material, pushes it away, and heats it up. N44F is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located 130,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado.
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Okay, new background. This time you'll be switching your computer desktop to show the Little Ghost Nebula - known to astronomers as NGC 6369 - taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the eyepiece of a small telescope, this planetary nebula looks like a ghostly ring surrounding a faint dying star. At some point thousands of years ago, the central star expanded in size to become a red giant star, and then expelled its outer layers. The blue-green ring is the expelled material, which now reaches a light-year in size.
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The European Space Agency's Cluster spacecraft have helped answer a 17-year mystery about how the magnetosphere, a magnetic bubble that surrounds the Earth, keeps filling up with electrified gases, when it should be acting as a barrier to keep them out. The four Cluster spacecraft found huge swirling vortices of gas at the outer edges of the magnetosphere caused by interacting flows of solar wind. As they collapse, they force material into the magnetosphere, filling it up.
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This is the best picture that Cassini's taken so far of Hyperion, one of Saturn's smaller moons (266 kilometers, 165 miles across ). The picture was taken on July 15, when Cassini was about 6.7 million km (4.1 million miles) away. Hyperion has an irregular shape, and it's known to tumble erratically as it orbits around Saturn. Cassini will get a much closer view when it does a flyby on September 26, 2005.
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Tonight's the night when the Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak of 60 meteors/hour, and if we're lucky, a new filament of material from Comet Swift-Tuttle will give the event and extra boost. One way to make the moment last is to capture images of meteors with your camera; but, it's as hard as it sounds. First, you want to have the darkest skies you can find, and don't start until after 9:00pm. Use a standard 35 mm camera secured to a tripod, and use very fast film: ISO 400, 800 or 1,000 is recommended. Pick and area of sky, focus on infinity, and then start your camera's exposure, and then stop when a meteor streaks through the area. Don't be afraid to experiment.
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It's just one year to go before the launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - the next spacecraft from Earth to head for the Red Planet. Due for launch on August 10, 2005, the spacecraft will reach Mars 7 months later, and mapping the planet with the most powerful instruments ever sent to Mars; its camera will be so sensitive, it will be able to see objects as small as a metre (3 feet) across. The team building the spacecraft - 175 at Lockheed Martin and 110 and NASA's JPL - has completed integration and testing of most of the MRO's components, and nearly completed its software.
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An unmanned cargo ship blasted off from Kazakhstan today, en route to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Progress 15 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 0503 UTC (1:03 am EDT), and safely reached orbit 10 minutes later. It's carrying propellant, air, water, spare parts, life support components and equipment hardware. One special delivery is a set of new pumps for the US spacesuits on board the station that experienced cooling problems earlier this year. The crew used Russian-built spacesuits to make their latest spacewalks.
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Here's a perspective view of the caldera at the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the Solar System. The image was taken with Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which allows scientists to assemble a 3D view of any surface feature on Mars. Olympus Mons is 22 km (14 miles) high, and the caldera drops down 3 km (1.9 miles). The circular regions inside the caldera are where the lava was emerging at different points in the volcano's history.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image of a dying star in the middle of a doughnut of leftover gas and dust. The dying star is is part of a planetary nebula, called NGC 246, which used to be similar to our own Sun, but it expended all its fuel and then boiled off its outer layers. Spitzer "sees" in the infrared spectrum, which allows it to peer through most of the obscuring material and get a much better look at the star and its surroundings. NGC 246 is located 1,800 light-years away in the Cetus constellation of our galaxy.
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Another X Prize contender's rocket crashed over the weekend. Armadillo Aerospace's lead engineer and funder John Carmack reported that their prototype rocket ran out of fuel on a test flight and crashed shortly after takeoff. The $35,000 hydrogen peroxide-powered "Black Armadillo" lifted off from the launch pad and then ran out of fuel 180 metres (590 feet) into the air; it crashed into the ground and was completely destroyed. The team hopes to be flying again in September with a completely new vehicle.
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The European Space Agency's Mars Express has relayed images from the NASA Mars rovers for the first time, demonstrating how the robots at Mars can work with each other to keep the data flowing back to Earth. Mars Express flew over the Opportunity rover on August 4, and received 15 images which were stored in the rover's memory. The data was transferred to the ESA's operations centre in Germany, and then passed along to NASA's JPL in Pasadena. This communication was possible because the rovers and Mars Express use the same communication protocols.
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This image of Saturn's moon Rhea was taken as Cassini was looping away after it went into its initial orbit around the Ringed Planet. The image was taken on July 15, in visible light when Cassini was 5.1 million km (3.2 million miles) away from Rhea, and shows its heavily cratered surface and a bright feature near the terminator.
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The Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science has succeeded in launching and deploying the first ever solar sail into space. A solar sail is a thin metallic film pushed by light from the Sun - like a sail on Earth is pushed by the wind - it requires no engine. The 7.5 micrometers thick sail was carried on board an S-310 rocket launched from the Uchinoura Space Center, and deployed at 122 km (75 miles) altitude.
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NASA announced on Friday that one of Hubble's four science instruments has failed, and they're not sure if they can get it working again. The instrument is called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), and it's designed to detect black holes and measure the temperature of stars. Engineers think that its backup power converter has failed; unfortunately, it already lost its primary power converter almost three years ago. The STIS was installed during a servicing mission in 1997, and it's already exceeded its planned lifespan of 5 years.
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NASA is working on a human-like robot called "Robonaut" to assist astronauts with the maintenance of the International Space Station. It's still a long way off before the robot joins the astronauts in space, but things are developing well. This week the robot got a "space leg" so that it can move itself around a simulated version of the station. Another test put it onto a modified Segway scooter so that it could wheel around the lab. The robot is controlled through "telepresence", where commands from a human controller are transmitted to the robot wirelessly.
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The European Space Agency's Envisat Earth observation satellite is so sensitive it can track changes on the surface of our planet that move at the pace your fingernails grow. One of Envisat's tasks as it orbits the Earth every 100 minutes is to make a precise map of the seismic areas that make up 15% of the planet's surface. At the end of its five year mission, the spacecraft will have provided details about how these seismic areas have changed over time. By comparing these changes to the locations of earthquakes around the world, scientists should get an insight into regions that could be due for a shakeup.
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This detailed picture of Saturn's stormy atmosphere was taken on July 13 by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, when it was 5.1 million km (3.2 million miles) away from the planet. It was taken using Cassini's narrow angle camera using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light.
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Astronomers used to believe that dwarf irregular galaxies were leftover building blocks from the beginning of the Universe which somehow avoided getting gobbled up by larger galaxies. New observations using the Subaru Telescope of dwarf galaxy Leo A has challenged this theory, however, as it's clearly been through a lot in its history. Astronomers found that size and structure of Leo A is significantly more complex than previously observed, and it shares many aspects of larger, more complex galaxies like our own Milky Way - it probably went through similar mergings and galactic collisions.
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The annual Perseid meteor shower has already started, but it's going to peak on the night of August 11, with observers in dark locations seeing upwards of 60 meteors an hour. This year could be special, though, since the Earth is expected to pass through a brand new filament of material left over from Comet Swift-Tuttle when it flew past in 1862. This year's Perseids could turn into a full fledged meteor storm, but the only way to know for sure is to get out and watch. The best time will be after 11 pm, in the darkest skies you can find.
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NASA and JAXA have decided to extend the operations of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) until the end of 2004 so it can provide data during the Autumn storm season for the U.S. and Asia. Officials had originally planned to have the spacecraft cease observations in July, and then perform a safe de-orbit maneuver about a year later. TRMM measures rainfall levels over the global tropics, allowing scientists to study the transfer of water and energy from the oceans into the atmosphere and back again. Its radar can see through clouds providing detailed images of the insides of hurricanes and storms.
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Cassini took this image of Saturn - its new home - as it traveled away from the Ringed Planet after its arrival in orbit. Separate images were taken with its red, blue and green filters on July 17, and then merged to create a natural colour view. Cassini was 5.8 million km (3.6 million miles) away at the time.
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In orbit around Saturn for more than a month now, the Cassini spacecraft has been sending back mountains of scientific data. It's now detected flashes of lightning, a new radiation belt, and a glow around Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The spacecraft's radio and plasma wave science instrument is detecting the lighting, which varies from day to day; a dramatically different situation from what the Voyagers found 20 years ago. The new radiation belt is just above Saturn's cloud tops and extends around the planet, yet the radiation particles are able to "jump over" the planet's rings.
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A Russian Proton rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Wednesday, carrying a Brazilian Amazonas satellite into orbit. The rocket launched at 2232 UTC (6:32 pm EDT), and its Breeze M upper stage placed the satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit 9 hours, 11 minutes later. When it reaches its final position of 61-degrees West, it will provide broadcast television services to countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
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The Canadian da Vinci Project has informed the Ansari X Prize of its plans to launch its Wild Fire rocket on October 2, 2004. This is the second team to announce a launch attempt, after Scaled Composite revealed they'll be launching SpaceShipOne on September 29. Wild Fire will be carried to altitude in Saskatchewan on board a giant balloon; it will detach and then fly up to 100 km (62.5 miles). The team announced a new sponsor, Internet casino GoldenPalace.com, which has provided cash in exchange for advertising.
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Okay, time to update your desktop wallpaper. This time, it's a beautiful image of galaxy NGC 3949 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. We're embedded inside the Milky Way, so it's impossible to study many of our galaxy's large scale features. NGC 3949 is located 50 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ursa Major (aka the Big Dipper), and astronomers believe its very similar to the Milky Way in terms of shape and structure - it's like we're looking in a galactic mirror.
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This perspective image is of the flanks of Olympus Mons; located on Mars, this volcano is the tallest mountain in the Solar System. It was taken by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. The escarpment in the image rises 7,000 metres from the surface of Mars, and you can see the deposits around the base of the escarpment, which scientists have dubbed "aureole"; latin for "circle of light". These aureole deposits are a mystery, but one popular theory is that they're landslides of material shed from the sides of the volcano; perhaps connected with glacial activity.
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The European Space Agency's Integral probe detected a gamma ray burst in December 2003, which has now been studied by a host of telescopes and instruments for several months. Researchers now believe that the event, called GRB 031203, was the closest burst on record; it went off in a galaxy only 1.3 billion light-years away. Even though it was much closer, it wasn't much brighter than other bursts, and astronomers believe this could be the first discovery of a whole new class of gamma ray bursts which aren't as energetic, but could be much more common.
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The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft took this picture of the Earth and Moon from a distance of 70 million km (43 million miles); the furthest distance for a spacecraft this year. But this distance is just a fraction of the 800 million km (500 million mile) journey that Rosetta will make by the time it reaches Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 10 years time. The image was taken using the spacecraft's Navigation Camera System (NAVCAM).
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NASA's Terra satellite took this true-colour photograph of Hurricane Alex, the first Atlantic storm of the season, as it grazed the side of North America. At Noon on Tuesday, August 3, the Category 2 Hurricane had wind speeds of 100 km/h (62 mph), and was disrupting North Carolina's Outer Banks; thousands are without power, and Hatteras Island's only link to the mainland has been flooded. It's currently moving east-northeast out to sea, and so far there haven't been any injuries reported.
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Researchers from the UK believe that our Solar System could have formed differently from many other star systems, making places like our home much more rare in the Universe. After examining the 100 or so known extrasolar planetary systems, they found that they probably formed in a manner different from our own Solar System - in a way that's hostile to the formation of life. Planets could form in several different ways, and how the Earth formed is actually quite rare. It will still be 5 more years or so before astronomers have equipment with the resolution to confirm this.
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