Carbon Dioxide Found on Extrasolar Planet

Are you interested in extreterrestrial life? There’s a good news for you. No, there’s no green creatures with antenna yet, but a prerequisite to their existence is found. Hubble space telescope found carbon dioxide on a planet in other solar system.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of the solar system, a significant step in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Though the planet is more similar to Jupiter than Earth and is too hot to harbor life, the ability to identify organic compounds on other planets is key to being able to find other habitable worlds, and potentially life.

Nice job indeed.

Martian Water is Confirmed by Phoenix Mars Lander

The way to finding Martian life gets an exciting boost today with the confirmation of water in Mars:

Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

It’s interesting to see how this discovery will lead to in the future.

Stopping Earth-Bound Asteroids: Nukes or Not Nukes?

What is the best way to stop asteroids coming to the Earth? NASA released a report that the best way to do so is by using nukes:

Scientists have sent Congress a report on ways to prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth. Among the proposals: Use nuclear weapons to nudge a big space rock off a collision course. Some scientists don’t think much of that idea.

But there are gentler alternatives:

The venerable scientist explained that all but the largest heavenly bodies can be redirected by rear-ending or towing them with an unmanned spacecraft.

The Cause of Aurora Borealis - the Northern Lights - is Discovered by NASA

Ever wonder about how a phenomenon called "aurora borealis", also known as the Northern Lights, happens? NASA has found the answer:

The culprit turns out to be magnetic reconnection, a common process that occurs throughout the universe when stressed magnetic field lines suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that’s been stretched too far.

Just in case you are curious, here is more explanation about aurora:

Auroras (North/South Polar Lights; or aurorae, sing.: aurora) are natural colored light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the polar zone. They typically occur in the ionosphere. Some scientists[who?] call them "polar auroras". In northern latitudes, the effect is known as the aurora borealis, named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for north wind, Boreas. It often appears as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the sun was rising from an unusual direction.

Mars’s Soil Seems Suitable for Life and Mars Rained Too

Perhaps we are getting closer to actually finding proof of life on Mars. Recent study from Phoenix Mars Landers mission showed that Martian soil could possibly support life:

Martian soil around NASA’s Phoenix Lander is slightly alkaline and has enough different minerals that it could support Earthly plants and—more to the point—microbes beneath the Martian surface, according to the first results from the probe’s wet chemistry experiment released today.

A separate study also showed that it once rained on Mars:

Drawing on soil data from the five missions to Mars before the current Phoenix Lander and comparing it to information collected in Earth’s driest places, the scientists concluded that water must have fallen from above, not welled up from below, as has been thought.

Very interesting.

High-Resolution Picture of Milky Way: 5 Gigapixel

NASA has created a high-resolution picture of our galaxy. The picture is built from more than 80,000 snapshots taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The image’s resolution is not less than 5 gigapixel! Awesome!

As a Wired wrote, it’s a “180-foot-long mosaic of 800,000 high-resolution snapshots, all on glorious 400,000-pixel by 13,000-pixel display”. If even the picture is 180-foot long, I have no idea how long it will take to download it.