Gizmorama
December 13, 2010
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GENUINE LEATHER MEN'S TRIFOLD WALLET
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Good Morning,
A newly discovered giant planet has made similarities
between its solar system and ours evident. Check out all
the details on this exciting discovery in the second article.
Plus, I couldn't decide on what articles to cut out because
there were so many that sparked interest, so I added an extra!
Until Next Time,
Erin
Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments
P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new
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Astonomers see distant 'carbon' planet
PASADENA, Calif. - U.S. astronomers say a huge, searing-hot
planet orbiting another star, and loaded with an unusual
amount of carbon, is the first such world observed from
Earth. The discovery was made using NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope in tandem with ground-based observations, a release
Wednesday from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., said. "This planet reveals the astounding diversity
of worlds out there," Nikku Madhusudhan of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology says. "Carbon-rich planets would be
exotic in every way -- formation, interiors and atmospheres."
The distant planet, dubbed WASP-12b, might harbor graphite,
diamond, or even a more exotic form of carbon in its inter-
ior, beneath its gaseous atmosphere, researchers say. Astro-
nomers don't currently have the technology to observe the
cores of planets orbiting stars beyond our sun, but their
theories hint at these intriguing possibilities. Earth has
rocks mostly based on silicon and oxygen plus other elements.
A carbon-rich rocky planet could be a very different place,
scientists say. "A carbon-dominated terrestrial world could
have lots of pure carbon rocks, like diamond or graphite,
as well as carbon compounds like tar," Joseph Harrington of
the University of Central Florida, principal investigator
of the research, says. "When the relative amount of carbon
gets that high, it's as though you flip a switch, and every-
thing changes," Marc Kuchner, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says. "If something
like this had happened on Earth, your expensive engagement
ring would be made of glass, which would be rare, and the
mountains would all be made of diamonds."
Fourth planet found in distant star system
LOS ANGELES - U.S. astronomers say a giant planet found out-
side our solar system is highlighting the remarkable resem-
blances between a distant planetary system and our own.
Researchers at UCLA, along with international colleagues,
discovered and imaged a fourth planet in a distant solar
system that resembles a supersized version of our own system,
a UCLA release said Wednesday. "Besides having four giant
planets, both systems also contain two 'debris belts' com-
posed of small rocky or icy objects, along with lots of tiny
dust particles," Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of
physics and astronomy says. Our giant planets are Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and our debris belts include the
asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and the
Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune's orbit. The newly discovered
fourth planet orbits a bright star called HR 8799, some 129
light years from Earth and faintly visible to the naked eye.
The new world joins three previously discovered planets that
were the subjects of a 2008 paper in the journal Science
reporting the first-ever images of a planetary family orb-
iting a star other than our sun. "This is the fourth imaged
planet in this planetary system, and only a tiny percentage
of known exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) have
been imaged; none has been imaged in multiple-planet systems
other than those of HR 8799," Zuckerman said. "We reached a
milestone in the search for other worlds in 2008 with the
discovery of the HR 8799 planetary system," astronomer
Christian Marois said. "The images of this new inner planet
are the culmination of 10 years' worth of innovation, making
steady progress to optimize every aspect of observation and
analysis. This allows us to detect planets located ever
closer to their stars and ever further from our own solar
system."
Ancient Mideast 'oasis' theorized
CHICAGO - A once fertile landmass now submerged under the
Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human
populations outside Africa, a U.K. scientist says. The area
in and around this "Persian Gulf Oasis" may have been host to
humans for more than 100,000 years before it was swallowed
up by the Indian Ocean about 8,000 years ago, archaeologist
Jeffrey Rose with the University of Birmingham in England
says. Rose's hypothesis, published in the journal Current
Anthropology, introduces a "new and substantial cast of char-
acters" to the human history of the Near East, and says
humans may have established permanent settlements in the
region thousands of years before current migration models
suggest, a release by the University of Chicago Press said
Wednesday. Archaeologists have turned up evidence of human
settlements along the shores of the gulf dating to about
7,500 years ago. "Where before there had been but a handful
of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeo-
logical sites appear virtually overnight," Rose said. "These
settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-
distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery,
domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest
boats in the world." But how could such highly developed
settlements arise so quickly, with no precursor populations
to be found in the archaeological record? Rose believes
evidence of those preceding populations is missing because
it's under the gulf. "Perhaps it is no coincidence that the
founding of such remarkably well-developed communities along
the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian
Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," Rose said. "These new
colonists may have come from the heart of the gulf, displaced
by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile land-
scape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."
NASA flying observatory in first mission
ITHACA, N.Y. - NASA says its new airborne astronomical
observatory has flown its first complete science mission
following five months of test flights. A 17-ton telescope
mounted in the fuselage of a modified 747 jumbo jet, the
SOFIA observatory, for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared
Astronomy, will embark on a 20-year investigation of the in-
frared spectrum of the universe, an area not yet explored by
satellite- or ground-based observatories. An Ithaca College
associate professor of physics on board for last week's sci-
ence mission says he looks forward to the cosmic insights
SOFIA will provide, a university release said. "The images
we captured are beautiful and rich in details that we already
know are unique and will advance our understanding of the
process of star formation," Luke Kelley said. "We're working
hard on data analysis and we look forward to sharing those
images and our scientific findings over the next few weeks
and months," he said. SOFIA is an international collaboration
between NASA and the German Aerospace Center, Deutsches
Zentrum fur Luft und Raumfahrt. The first science mission
flight flight took off from an Air Force runway in Palmdale,
Calif. "These initial science flights mark a significant
milestone in SOFIA's development and ability to conduct peer-
reviewed science observations," NASA Astrophysics Division
Director Jon Morse said. "We anticipate a number of important
discoveries from this unique observatory, as well as extended
investigations of discoveries by other space telescopes."
Study: Earth's precious metals from space
BOULDER, Colo. - Gigantic collisions 4.5 billion years ago
injected precious elements such as gold and platinum into
on Earth, the moon and Mars, a study suggests. In the final
period of planet formation, a body possibly as big as Pluto
probably collided with the Earth after the planet had been
hit by an even large object, scientists at the Southwest
Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said. Mars and the
moon absorbed smaller but still devastating blows, they
said. Gold, platinum, palladium and other so-called "sidero-
phile" elements have a strong affinity for iron and should
have followed iron down into the cores of Earth, the moon
and Mars as the bodies were forming, leaving a scarcity of
those metals in their mantles and crusts, study leader Bill
Bottke said. But precious metals are found in these bodies'
upper reaches in puzzling amounts, he said. "The abundance
of these elements is actually surprisingly high," Bottke
told SPACE.com. "People have wondered, 'How can this be?'
They've been arguing about it for decades." Bottke and his
colleagues favor the theory that siderophiles were replen-
ished shortly after core formation by collisions with planet-
esimals, the smaller building blocks of full-grown planets.
This bombardment came around 4.5 billion years ago, near the
end of our solar system's planet-formation period, re-
searchers said. It probably took place within a few tens of
millions of years of a collision with a Mars-size body that
blasted a giant chunk off our planet, creating the moon,
they said.
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