The Kepler telescope has spotted two Earth-sized planets circling another star. Although they are too close to the star to be habitable, they are the smallest planets we’ve ever observed circling as close to their star, not unlike our sun.

This handy reference guide gives you a good look at how Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f stack up against Earth and Venus.

Also, we’d like to hereby suggest Tango and Cash as permanent names for the new kids on the block.

[Silicon Republic]

A newly identified comet is coming home for the holidays. And by holidays I mean mid-December and by home I mean the Sun. So really that first sentence doesn’t mean anything. But a comet is going to graze the surface of the Sun, most likely disintegrating it.

The comet is categorized by astronomers as a “sungrazer” and it is destined to do just that; literally graze the surface of the sun (called the photosphere) and pass through the sun’s intensely hot corona, where temperatures have been measured at upwards of 3.6-million degrees Fahrenheit (2-million degrees Celsius).

We should get some pretty wicked images from the daredevil space racer’s death defying stunt. In the slim event that the comet survives, we might even be able to see it in broad daylight.

[Live Science]

A modern day tale of Icarus! The burning need to see an asteroid pass between the Earth and the moon led one man to do his best impression of Father Christmas one and a half months early.

Translated from French paper Est Republicain:

A madman who wanted to see the passage of the asteroid “grazing” the earth from the top of a disused factory chimney Crevéchamps in Meurthe et Moselle got stuck in “altititude” last night in Lorraine.
The young man, named Yoan, guided by an indescribable curiosity, climbed the chimney in the dark, with a backpack and his computer.

Unfortunately for him, in his rise to dominate the stars and make the transition from the “asteroid”, he did give rungs of the ladder under his weight. The man found himself a prisoner of his observation site. Impossible indeed down: 5 meters separated him from other levels…

It could be worse. Just ask Pheobe Cates in Gremlins.

[Improbable Research]

It’s pretty apparent the sky is going effing bananas. Moon’s are going super and now the sun is frigging multiplying. Or, at least is seemed like it was. This shot from Chinese television appears to show a pair of suns shining down like this was a contemplative shot from the sands of Tatooine.

As it turns out, it was just an optical illusion. Although, no one is quite sure what that illusion is exactly:

What’s going on? Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to Space.com, asked Jim Kaler, the University of Illinois astronomer who squelched the excitement over the aforementioned exploding Betelgeuse and who has written books on the day and night sky.

The double sun image is an effect of optical refraction, Kaler said, but it’s a “pretty darn rare” one, and one not fully explained by science.

“I doubt it’s been computer modeled,” he said. “There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage.”

In short, we cannot be sure that the sun has not, in fact, multiplied and is preparing to bleach all of our bones with their combined heat beam.

[MSNBC]

The Weird Things staff loves all kinds of science, but we hold a special place in our heart for “weird science”, which is exactly what astronomers from the University of Alberta are saying is going on inside the neutron star Cassiopeia A. Astronomer Craig Heinke’s team has found that this neutron star contains a core of superfluid, a friction-less liquid that could seemingly defy the laws of gravity. The astronomers started researching the star after a sudden temperature drop and they determined that the temperature drop was due to the fact that its core transformed into a superfluid and is venting heat in the process.

“If you could put some of this superfluid in a jar it would flow up the walls of the container and over the edge,” said Heinke.

[Physorg]

No one knows exactly why the sun rose roughly 48 hours ahead of schedule in the remote Greenland town of Ilulissat which like many arctic circle towns spends prolonged periods in total darkness.

Some say global warming has melted the ice caps that surround the town so far that the sun snuck over quicker.

However some have suggested a mischievous astronomical shift is to blame.

We are going to pin the blame on someone incorrectly programming the town’s only clock.

[Daily Mail]

So a new research paper has come out and told us what Hollywood has been telling us for years; if we meet aliens they’re most likely going to act like 16th century conquistadors and take our resources and annihilate us in the process. Similar to Stephen Hawking’s dire warning it says contact would spell doom for us all. Space.com

The rational is that since that’s what we did in the past to other other civilizations, that’s what an advanced civilization will do to us.

There are some very serious flaws with this argument. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

1. Our galaxy is a really, really big place
The argument claims that aliens would come to earth and take our minerals and such. Why? Current estimates put the total number of planets in our galaxy in the hundreds of billions – maybe even the trillions if you count planetoids. Even if we assume an absurdly highly number of them have intelligent life, that leaves millions of planets to exploit for minerals and other resources.

The galaxy is not a bigger version of the earth. In the 15th century humans lived on every habitable continent. There was no place you could go for resources except Antarctica that didn’t have people living on it. Trying to exploit any place for resources meant that you were likely to come up against indigenous populations.

In a really big galaxy, there’s no reason to upset the locals unless that’s what you want to do.

2. Energy
Space is big. The distance between solar systems is huge. If you have some kind of technology that can easily bridge this gap or lesson the amount of energy you need to travel between stars, earth’s resources are going to look pathetic in comparison. Seriously, are we worried they’re coming here to steal our coal to fuel their space ships?

3. Comparative Advantage
Any sufficiently advanced species should have a grasp of economics. Like us, they may not always heed what they’ve learned, but if they’re flying about space they probably have a better grasp on prosperity than we do. If they’re profit motivated it would be the best possible news for us.

One of the most important principles of economics is comparative advantage. It basically means this; If you have two parties unevenly matched in skill and productivity, it’s always advantageous for both for the more skilled and productive party to let the lessor skilled party focus on production of whatever the first party is least efficient at – even if it’s more efficient than the second party.

An example would be Apple. By focusing all of its energies on designing iPhones and allowing a less-skilled party to make the iPhone, Apple increases its productivity and profit. The less-skilled party benefits by making the product. Both gain. If Apple focused all its resources on designing and making the iPhone they’d make less overall because it’s unable to maximize what it’s most efficient at.

In our alien contact scenario we’re the unskilled, inefficient party. Despite this, we still have value we can bring to a superior civilization. That value may be in providing services, cheap labor or producing reality television. Whatever it may be, the most valuable thing we can offer isn’t our resources, but 7 billion individuals with varying degrees of creativity and ingenuity. Comparative Advantage

However…
If they’re a bunch of religious zealots who abandoned everything they learned that gave them prosperity or secular zealots with no regard for the concept of individuality, we’re screwed.

Astronomers are chuckling to themselves after laypeople paying attention freaked out last week when two astroids swooped through Earth’s orbit, nearly missing our planet. While a double complete asteroid swipe is rare, the still scary idea of a single asteroid nearly destroying our lives happens, like, all the time.

In fact, with a rough estimate of 50 million unknown asteroids, a 33-foot-wide (10-meter) near-Earth object could pass harmlessly between Earth and the orbit of the moon every day, Johnson added. Such an asteroid might hit Earth’s atmosphere once every 10 years, but because of its small size, it would pose no substantial threat to the people or property below.

“They would certainly break up in Earth’s atmosphere, or we might get some meteorites on the ground,” Johnson said.

So, don’t worry so much. Or worry every day. Either way.

[Space]

The sun has awoken from his slumber and you will feel his wrath upon your global positioning satellites and financial services.

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

“The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.”

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

A lot of this could be avoided with preparation by those who run the satellites. So we have that going for us.

[NASA]

Phil Plait dissects a recent rumor about the Betelgeuse star. The short version of the rumor? The star is going to go all supernova in weeks or months (not years or hundreds of years) and the brightness could affect crops and cause streaming panic in the streets.

Phil’s rebuttal? Not so much.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start stockpiling canned goods and telling your friends the sky is falling just so in two months when you pal’s newly orphaned children are huddled in your bunker to get away from the blood-thirsty mobs left by a post-apocalyptic society you can say… “I told your pa this was coming, (wistful glance to a bare wall) wish he would’ve listened.”

[Bad Astronomy]

Probably not, but maybe!

A mystery object in a galaxy far, far away could be a supermassive black hole that got booted from its home galaxy’s center, according to a new study.

Then again, the strange body could be a rare type of supernova or an oddball “midsize” black hole—more massive than black holes born when single stars explode but “lighter” than the supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies.

“All three of those [options] are exotic and have something peculiar to them,” said study co-author Peter Jonker, an astronomer with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht.

Guess which option we’re rooting for? I’ll give you a hint, the site isn’t “Moderately Surprising Things.com”. I believe in the ejected!

A thin film of water ice and organic material has been identified on an asteroid by a NASA telescope. This bolsters the theory that an asteroid brought both crucial elements for life to Earth.

“It now appears that when the asteroids and planets were first forming in the very early Solar System, ice extended far into the Main Belt region,” said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “Extending this refined view to planetary systems around other stars, the building blocks of life — water and organics — may be more common near each star’s habitable zone.”

The discovery also confuses the definition of comets and asteroids, in case you were wondering.

[Pop Sci]

Who needs The Watcher? According to radio astronomers at the University of Manchester, a “baffling new object” in a nearby galaxy is unlike anything they’ve seen before.

But those who know better sure recognize that color scheme, that stature…

The object appeared very suddenly last May at radio wavelengths and has persisted ever since, showing no signs of going away. It was originally thought to be a young supernova, as M82 is a known star nursery. But most of M82′s stars die quickly in massive stellar explosions — a new supernova generally occurs once every two or three decades — at which point their radio wavelengths begin a slow decay. The mystery object has shown no such signs of dimming.

I for one welcome our new world eating overlord.

[PopSci]

As per Popular Science:

Until recently, radio astronomers have concentrated almost exclusively on the high-energy radiation streaming in towards Earth from exotic stellar bodies like pulsars, quasars, and super-massive black holes. But now, a new European observatory called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has begun releasing data on the low-energy radiation that permeates the Universe.

While seemingly less sexy than high-energy research, low-energy radiation actually allows scientists to look even deeper into the past, to within 500,000 years of the Big Bang, and will provide a much more detailed account of some of the most mysterious periods of the Universe’s earliest days of existence. LOFAR is also going to be used by SETI to search for faint signs of extraterrestrial life.

Heavy, Doc.

[PopSci]

After the discovery of Neptune in 1846 astronomers began to wonder if there were other planets beyond its orbit. The discovery of Pluto (now not a planet) seemed to answer the question, but others wondered if even further out a larger earth-sized object could be waiting to be discovered.

Space.com has a fascinating claim made by a planetary scientist, Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute:

“When the solar system’s story is finally written, it’s much more likely that it will have closer to 900 planets rather than the nine that we grew up with.”

900 planets? How could that be possible? Anything Earth or Mars-sized in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune would be visible; but beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Oort Cloud:

Brown and Stern say that the Oort Cloud represents a more likely prospect for worlds the size of Mars or Earth. The Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system with billions of icy bodies at distances as far out as 50,000 times the distance between the sun and Earth.

Now these planets are likely to be colder than Hoth, but who knows what we could do with some extreme terraforming…

link: Earth-Sized World Could Lurk in Outer Solar System – Yahoo! News

In the latest Scientific American theoretical physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez speculate that there might be a greater chance of life developing in other universes with different physical laws and that our own may not be as finely tuned as once thought.

Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes—assuming they exist—may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects.

For example, if life really is possible in a weakless universe, then why does our own universe have a weak force at all? In fact, particle physicists consider the weak force in our universe to be, in a sense, not weak enough. Its observed value seems unnaturally strong within the Standard Model. (The leading explanation for this mystery requires the existence of new particles and forces that physicists hope to discover at the newly opened Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva.)

In an interesting experiment to see how well terrestrial bacteria might survive on Mars, a group built their own Mars simulator.

From UniverseToday.com:

A team led by Giuseppe Galletta of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Padova simulated the conditions present on Mars, and then introduced several strains of bacteria into the simulator to record their survival rate.

So how did the experiment turn out?

The results – some of the strains of bacteria were shown to survive up to 28 hours under these conditions, an amazing feat given that there is nowhere on the surface of the Earth where the temperatures get this low or the ultraviolet radiation is as strong as on Mars.

We can all discuss this at the upcoming Carl Sagan Day: Carl Sagan Day Saturday November 7th

Bacteria Could Survive in Martian Soil | Universe Today

Originally from Arxiv and here

The Russian space research institute IKI has announced ambitious plans to explore the planet Venus. Is this a sign that they’ve forgone Mars because the “Red Planet” is just so cliche now? Or do they know something we don’t?

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Russia plots return to Venus

Mr. Show had it first…

Real story.

Ah, moons. So often overshadowed by your rocky, gassy, and thermonuclear overlords, you help invoke tides, stabilize axial tilts, sculpt and replenish rings, and provide at least one species with a stepping stone to timidly venture from the safety of their home planet. In this article we pay tribute to all those underappreciated planetary custodians by recognizing five of the downright weirdest moons in the solar system.

1. Titan (Saturn)

Imagine a dreamy world with clouds, wind, rain, rivers, lakes, shore lines, sand dunes and seasons, and this distant moon of Saturn is probably the last destination that springs to mind. Titan not only exhibits all of these familiar characteristics, but it is also the only moon known to have a thick atmosphere – composed mostly of nitrogen too, just like Earth.

That’s where the similarities just about end, though. If you excitedly read the paragraph above, hopped into the nearest spacecraft, journeyed the 750 million miles to Titan, landed on the surface and casually strolled outside to stretch your legs or go for a swim, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. With no oxygen to breath, its thermostat set to a chilly -179° Celsius, impenetrably dim, hazy skies and vast lakes filled with liquid natural gas; Titan offers a fairly unforgiving environment for life as we know it.

2. Io (Jupiter)

Like a cosmic game of tug o’ war, Io is gravitationally pulled in several directions at once by its parent planet and fellow Galilean moons. All this interaction generates a heck of a lot of internal heat that eventually needs to be released. As a result, the Jovian moon is currently the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The tidal forces inflicted on Io are so strong that its solid surface may contract and expand as high as 330 feet, as opposed to Earth’s comparatively pathetic high and low tides of about 60 feet.

3. Europa (Jupiter)

It’s been about 30 years since hydrothermal vents were discovered in Earth’s oceans, and along with them the first community of organisms that relied on minerals and bacteria extracted from deep within the planet to survive, rather than sunlight. As evidence began to mount that a liquid water ocean could exist beneath Europa’s icy crust, so then did the possibility of finding life beyond Earth.

The same processes responsible for turning Io into an overflowing cauldron of silicate and sulphur could also play a key role in keeping Europa warm enough for microbial life to survive in a sub-surface ocean. Unfortunately, sending Bruce Willis and his crack team of oil drillers to find this ocean would be a mission somewhat difficult for NASA to justify in today’s economy, so we may have to wait a decade or two before probes can investigate the moon a little closer to make sure it’s worth the effort.

4. Mimas (Saturn)

I could rattle off a few mildly interesting facts about this moon, like how it’s largely responsible for creating the famous Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings or that it was almost shattered by an enormous impact that left a 130-kilometer-wide crater; but you’re probably staring blankly at the picture above, wondering if you should stock up on canned goods and hustle your family into a bomb shelter to await inevitable invasion by the Galactic Empire (coincidence? Or… cosmic conspiracy?!). FYI: My bunker has Wi-Fi.

5. Triton (Neptune)

Billions of years ago Triton is thought to have existed as one of two nameless, oversized snowballs in the Kuiper Belt, happily traveling around the sun while orbiting a common center of mass with its companion. At some point in time this duo moved a little too close to Neptune and the gas giant’s superior gravity proceeded to capture what is now Triton by wrenching the object out of its heliocentric orbit, subjecting it to a future of planetary subordination. One of the repercussions of this traumatic event is also what makes Triton so unique; it is the only large moon in the solar system that has an orbital direction opposite to that of its planet’s rotation – also known as a retrograde orbit.

Unfortunately for Triton, its orbital energy is being steadily depleted by the conflicting influence of Neptune’s rotation. As a result, the moon is gradually drifting closer to Neptune, all but ensuring one of two unhappy fates: breaking apart due to tidal forces or violently crashing into Neptune in a mere few billion years.