NASA's Kepler Provides Insights on Enigmatic Planets

Artist's view of a Earth-size rocky exoplanet. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. Astronomers don't know how they form or if they are made of rock, water or gas. The Kepler team today reports on four years of ground-based follow-up observations targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations confirm the numerous Kepler discoveries are indeed planets and yield mass measurements of these enigmatic worlds that vary between Earth and Neptune in size. Included in the findings are five new rocky planets ranging in size from 10 to 80 percent larger than Earth. Two of the new rocky worlds, dubbed Kepler-99b and Kepler-406b, are both 40 percent larger in size than Earth and have a density similar to lead. The planets orbit their host stars in less than five and three days respectively, making these worlds too hot for life as we know it. A major component of these follow-up observations was Doppler measurements of the planets' host stars. The team measured the reflex wobble of the host star, caused...
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Alien space probes visited Earth many times

Arwen Nicholson and DuncanForgan of the University of Edinburgh (UK) used computer simulations to prove that if representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations were able to travel from one planet to another, they would fly across our entire galaxy in a relatively short period of time and visit our planet. Voyager 1 spacecraft was able to move away from the Earth at a distance of less than one light day in 36 years of its mission. So far, according to scientists, it has not left the solar system. However, according to Nicholson and Forgan, it takes an alien spaceship only ten million years to explore the whole Milky Way. The ship would need to travel at the speed of one-tenth the speed of light, if accelerated due to the gravitational field of stars. During the 1960s, a theory appeared about "smart" space probes capable of replicating themselves. American astronomer Ronald Bracewell believed that mankind should do its best to invent such probes, rather than catch radio signals of artificial origin, as suggested by SETI program. In 1949, John von Neumann developed a mathematical model of the device that was cloning itself. According to current calculations made by Nicholson and Forgan, there are three possible scenarios for such probes to operate. This includes flying with running engines, the use of gravitational acceleration...
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NASA Received An SOS Call From Another Galaxy

NASA detected, intercepted, and decoded a mathematically-based distress signal from a purportedly doomed planetoid outside our own galaxy. The article was written by two journals. NASA simply managed to not get much publicity. At that time the newspapers wrote very little about this issue. When after thirteen years managed to decrypt the message fails to hide from the media The signal was detected in January of 1998 but, however and as it might be expected, it took many years to properly decode the message. NASA experts claim to have intercepted an intergalactic distress call from an alien civilization that had already peaked and was actually dying when saber-tooth tigers still roamed the earth.  Russian superior officer in ex-Soviet Union’s army Dr. Victor Kulakov told “Universe” that the signal emanated from a point beyond the galaxy nearest to our own, Andromeda, and was sent by beings that had apparently achived a civilization no more advanced than our here on Earth. ” The simple fact that we received and decoded the message proves beyond any doubt that their knowledge and technology were, at the very best , within our reach ” Dr. Kulakov explained. “And while there are years of study ahead of us, i can say with certainty that the death of their civilization was not the result of some cosmic catastrophe....
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Shapley Supercluster

While scanning the sky for the oldest cosmic light, ESA’s Planck satellite has captured snapshots of some of the largest objects populating the Universe today: galaxy clusters and superclusters. Several hundred galaxies and the huge amounts of gas that permeate them are depicted in this view of the core of the Shapley Supercluster, the largest cosmic structure in the local Universe. The supercluster was discovered in the 1930s by American astronomer Harlow Shapley, as a remarkable concentration of galaxies in the Centaurus constellation. Boasting more than 8000 galaxies and with a total mass more than ten million billion times the mass of the Sun, it is the most massive structure within a distance of about a billion light-years from our Milky Way Galaxy. The hot gas pervading galaxy clusters shines brightly in X-rays, but it is also visible at microwave wavelengths, which Planck sees as a distinctive signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang. Looking for this signature – called the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect – Planck has already spotted more than 1000 galaxy clusters, including several superclusters and pairs of interacting clusters. This composite image of the core of the Shapley Supercluster combines the gas detected with Planck at large scales between the members of the supercluster (shown...
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Colossus In Coma Cluster One Of Largest Structures In Universe, Enormous Arms Of Hot Gas Stretch Half A Million Light Years

Coma Cluster                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Credit: Chandra A team of astronomers has discovered enormous arms of hot gas in the Coma cluster of galaxies by using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. These features, which span at least half a million light years, provide insight into how the Coma cluster has grown through mergers of smaller groups and clusters of galaxies...
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