Good news from the Stars

"The planetary system around the red dwarf Gliese 581, one of the closest stars to the Sun in the galaxy, has been the subject of several studies aiming to detect the first potentially habitable exoplanet."

A French Astrophysics team concluded that the planet named Gliese 581d can be considered the "first confirmed exoplanet that could support Earth-like life".

But it doesn't mean it looks like Earth at all. See why in the article.

An interstellar message that means a lot to us may be inscrutable to E.T. because it is too anthropomorphic.

Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it's conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that's the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.

This would not be a good place for space tourism...

"This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md."

"The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely ten to twenty times that of the Sun."

Apparently, the collapse (explosion ?) happened some 15 million years ago.

Interesting stuff on the Deep Space Network.

"We need a set of protocols that work on interplanetary distances, TCP/IP does not" according to Google's Chief Internet Evangelist

via @vincentlieser

Interesting post on the Icarius project. A 5-year plan to design an unmanned interstellar Spaceship.

The result?

Not exactly the USS Enterprise...

Fossils of algae-like beings in meteorites reported by astrobiologist Richard Hoover in Journal of Cosmology

Hoover claims that the lack of nitrogen in the samples, which is essential for life on Earth, indicates they are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere."

By The Guardian

"Scientists seek reliable bacteria and algae to provide astronauts with oxygen and food on two-year round-trip to Mars. Ability to recycle human waste desirable" (The Guardian)

"We may have lost Pluto, but it looks like we might be getting Tyche. Scientists may soon be able to prove the existence of the gas giant, which could be four times the size of Jupiter, according to astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette."

For those following this topic, this apparently is the new name of the G1.9 Brown Dwarf Star that Spanish Astronomers claimed the discovery of last summer (see post here: http://t.co/shYC8Fk ).

And it's apparently not a new discovery (NASA P/R again ?) since this article dated last April already mentioned the whole Nemesis/Tyche story: http://bit.ly/cVXSOs

Per Wikipedia, "The use of the name "Tyche" for the planet may also be a reference to an earlier theory of the Solar System's structure that involved the Sun having a dim companion named Nemesis as it was proposed as a cause for mass-extinctions on Earth. Tyche was the name of the sister of Nemesis." http://bit.ly/es1eE5