Science News

This first appeared on October 26, 2009, as a feature at ScientificBlogging.com

Later this evening I’ll be giving a talk to a group of astronomers on what its like to see like an alien. The be...

The video footage posted on YouTube (below) taken by the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1), a camera system aboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft, managed to capture what looks like a large cylindrical object orbiting the planet Mercury.

While watching a video of a coronal mass ejection travel from the sun, it would appear that a solar observatory has discovered a massive alien spacecraft...

Astronomers searching for an Earth-like alien planet are getting closer, thanks to recent discoveries by the Kepler space telescope.

Sprites often accompany lightning storms, flashing high in the atmosphere -- but could we detect these electrical discharges on other worlds?

Hawkling prefers another possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations, Hawking warns,"we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved" a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,' Hawking says "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."

As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging — and just as potentially transformative.

These often unsung researchers are willing to spend years or even decades getting a finicky instrument to run smoothly; setting up proper controls to minimize spurious results; beating back noise that threatens to swamp their signal; and striving for an ever more painstaking level of precision — a determination and single-mindedness that borders on heroic. Here, Nature describes five such quests.

What has puzzled observers and theorists so far is the high proportion of planets — roughly one-third to one-half — that are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. These ‘super-Earths’ are emerging as a new category of planet — and they could be the most numerous of all (see ‘Super-Earths rising’). Their very existence upsets conventional models of planetary formation and, furthermore, most of them are in tight orbits around their host star, precisely where the modellers say they shouldn’t be.

“It poses a challenge,” says Douglas Lin, a planet-formation modeller and director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing, China. “You can’t just tweak the parameters. You need to think about the physics.”

NASA’s Kepler mission has spotted the first possibility for a planet to escape to if it turns out the Mayans were right about 2012.

700 exoplanets have been confirmed, but we are only just glimpsing the tip of the proverbial exoplanetary iceberg.