Another Red Dwarf Super-Earth Located

The Planetary Habitability Laboratory has announced the discovery of another Superearth...that is to say, a rocky planet with a mass somewhere in the ballpark of Earth's mass. In this case, Gliese 163c has a mass of 6.9 Earths (minimum) and 1.8 to 2.4 Earth radii. It has an orbital period of just 26 days! The star, Gliese 163, is a Red Dwarf Star found some 50 light years distant from us. Yes, folks. That's ANOTHER Superearth found around ANOTHER Red Dwarf. Is it possible that we will find life in a Red Dwarf system and not in a Yellow Dwarf system, like ours? Gliese 163c is apparently much warmer than Earth, so the prospect of life is minimum, but not impossible...at 60 degrees Celsius, even some Earth-based extremeophiles can dig it. 

As the PHL notes, more and more potentially rocky Earth-like planets are being found around red dwarf stars. Scientists who study these exoplanets didn't initially think that red dwarfs would be likely candidates for habitable planets. But times they are a-changin. From the stellar PHL article: 

"The potential for habitable planets around red dwarf stars has been and issue of much debate. Tidal effects on the planets around these stars might cause extra surface heating or even tidal locking (always giving the same face to its parent star). Also, these stars are more active and their stellar wind might erode planetary atmospheres much faster. These factors might preclude the potential for life on smaller planets but not for planets with thicker atmospheres, something expected for superterran planets. Our Solar System lacks an example of a superterran. Its eight planets are either the smaller terrestrial kind, like Earth, or the larger gas giants, like Jupiter. Understanding superterrans around red dwarf stars, a non Sun-like star, just adds to the challenge of assessing their habitability."

Do check out the ORIGINAL ARTICLE over at the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, which is by far the best way for the public to understand current research on exoplanets. 

Welcome Gliese 163c! Click to see in detail. 

Neil Armstrong Leaves Earth One Last Time

Thank you for the adventure, Neil.

Blurring the Lines: Carnivorous Plants and Photosynthetic Animals

There is a relatively simple dogma in a layperson's rules of biology concerning the difference in plants and animals. It is this: Plants make their own food. Animals do not. The resultant food chain or pyramid begins with food producers (plants) at the bottom and food consumers (animals) at all the layers above the producer layer. The difference between plant and animal is so categorically different, that they are organized by taxonomists into separate kingdoms...and there are only 5 (or 6) kingdoms of life. There is, of course, no overlap.

However, it really isn't that simple. First of all, there are plants out there that, in addition to using photosynthesis to make their own food, can capture and consume prey, albeit in a rudimentary fashion (some 630 species worldwide). Plants like the Venus Flytrap, Pitcher Plants, Flypaper Plants, Bladder Traps, Lobster-pot Traps, and other plants in a similar category (an additional 300 species) have evolved to flaunt such biological categorical dogma as the plant-animal divide. The existence of these plants proves that evolution by natural selection, one of the foundational laws of biology, knows no bounds or category and will capitalize on any naturally-existing phenomenon in order to gain some tangible advantage in survival. Although elm trees aren't hunting gazelles on some exotic savanna quite yet, the nature of these plants who behave like animals is nothing short of extraordinary. Want to know what is even crazier? You can OWN some of these plants as houseplants. That's right...you can flaunt biological dogma in your own living room.

Where and How to watch the Curiosity Landing

So, you have heard about MSL Curiosity, the most audacious probe/rover/thing sent to another world by humanity. Its scheduled to land on Mars in under two days (1 day and 13 hours, as of this post). So, how can one watch this marvelous, historical undertaking...LIVE? Turns out NASA has prepared and rolled out several methods with which you can participate, including smartphones and video game consoles.

The first step is to find out AT WHAT LOCAL TIME CURIOSITY WILL LAND for your area. Easy. Click here on this map to figure that out (map provided by @pillownaut of pillownaut.blogspot.com).

Now, choose your preferred device or source.

NASA MSL Cursiosity Mission Homepage
NASA TV
NASA JPL Ustream Channel 1 (with commentary)
NASA JPL Ustream Channel 2 (uninterrupted)
Follow @MarsCuriosity on Twitter for live updates
Watch the Curiosity Landing on Xbox Live
Watch with Ustream on Android
Watch using the NASA TV app on Android
Watch with NASA TV app on iOS
In Los Angeles area? Go to Planetfest, set up by the Planetary Society
Use this map to find Curiosity Landing Parties in your area (set up by @Pillownaut)
Follow #GoCuriosity on Twitter for live conversation during the landing
Live Google+ hangout with Fraser Cain, Pamela gay, Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) as well as other guests from the Planetary Society and the SETI Institute
Check out the awesome event site http://getcurious.com/ (has a wicked countdown splash page)
Worldwide Landing parties

Fingers crossed, ladies and gentlemen...MSL Curiosity promises to be one of the greatest achievements in NASA history, and certainly among the greatest in the history of Humanity. #GoCuriosity

Super-Earth Found Hiding in Gliese 581 Star System After All

Gliese, or GJ, 581 - a star 20 light years from here

The Gliese 581 star system is roughly 20 light years away from Earth. If we could travel at the speed of light as a species, Gliese 581 is a place a human could visit in a single human lifetime. It is an M3 dwarf star, which is to say it is a Red Dwarf star. This means that its light is relatively faint compared to our Sun (which is a Yellow Dwarf star) and considerably smaller than our Sun, too. Scientists once felt that red dwarfs weren't places you would expect to find habitable worlds, but now - considering that red dwarfs make up maybe 70% of the Milky Way Galaxy - scientists are reconsidering. The Gliese 581 system is a good example of this change in attitude. Previous to the most recent news, Gliese 581 is suspected to contain up to 4 exoplanets (Vogt et al 2010). 

Now a new paper out by Steven S. Vogt, R. Paul Butler, and Nader Haghighipour re-examines the previous HARPS data for the Gliese 581 system. They found that previous attempts to examine the system (Forveille et al 2011) excluded outlying data points. Re-examination of the numbers by Vogt's team confirmed the same 4 planers previously known as well as some additional worlds, including confirmation of the now famous Gliese 581g:

"The periodogram of the residuals to a 4-planet all-circular-model reveals significant peaks that suggest one or more additional planets in this system. We conclude that the present 240-point HARPS data set, when analyzed in its entirety, and modeled with fully self-consistent stable orbits, by and of itself does offer significant support for a fifth signal in the data with a period near 32 days."

The Signatures of Intelligence

Blue Marble 2012 - Can you detect life in this picture? 

Looking for lifeforms out there in the Milky Way Galaxy is a very difficult task. Why so hard? You might say to yourself, "Well, I'll know a living thing when I see it." And generally, with the exception of a sea sponge or a slime mold, that is basically true. But, try recognizing something hundreds of millions of miles away, as is the case with Mars, or hundreds and hundreds of light years away, as is the case with most of the exoplanets we are discovering. In light of such a complication, the business of looking for life comes down to looking for signs of life. In order to do this, one must understand what kinds of life signatures can exist. A knowledge of all the different ways that lifeforms can alter their environment can give us an itemized list of what to look for on other worlds.

So, when scientists get a whiff of an alien atmosphere, as is the case sometimes when an exoplanet is detected by Astronomical Transit, they breakdown the light via spectroscopy and sift through the results looking for key atmospheric gases like oxygen or methane. These kinds of gases are signs of life, as far as LAWKI is concerned (Life As We Know It)...these gases in particular are waste products of the living metabolisms of millions upon millions of creatures. Another sign of life for LAWKI is water, and indeed water is being sought after like the holy grail as far as exoplanet discoverers and astrobiologists are concerned. Just recently, there has been chatter about how to discover exo-oceans - oceans on other worlds - by understanding how light from the parent star can reflect off of that ocean. It is crude to look for life in such a way, but at the moment our options are quite limited. What we need is to broaden our thinking on how particular biological patterns leave particular signatures in the environment they inhabit.

MSL Curiosity to Land in 20 Days

For those of you who might not have heard, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity - the most advanced human-made object ever sent to another world - will be landing on Mars Aug 6 2012 at approximately 1:31AM Eastern Daylight Time, or if you prefer, 10:31 pm Aug 5 2012 on the West Coast (or, more appropriately 5:30 am UTC).

While its true that we've been to Mars before, gigantic questions still linger unapologetically in our faces...Questions like, "Did Mars ever have life?" or "Was Mars truly ever a wet planet?" or "Can Mars support Human colonization?" or "What happened to Mars, to its magnetosphere, to turn a perfectly good world into a cold, barren platform for the political maneuvers of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen?"

The fact is, we know very, very little still about our nearest planetary neighbor. What we can tease out of Mars over the next few years with Curiosity is going to add much to the Search for Life, to our understanding of what is required of a rocky planet to support the creation of life. Mars and Earth are so very similar in many ways, so much so that it appears now, in this pre-Curiosity period, that we are dealing with a kind of Tale of Two Planets. Earth and Mars both seemingly started in the same situation billions of years ago and took two different paths in their planetary lives - Earth headed for the whole teeming-with-life gig while Mars got the Tatooine treatment.