Scientists uncover 70-million-year old dinosaur nest

Excellent  old dinosaur discover

Yahoo!7
November 19, 2011, 9:55 am

     Nest full of baby dinosaurs found. Photo: Discovery News

Scientists have uncovered a 70-million-year old nest filled with 15 baby dinosaurs in Mongolia, Discovery News has reported.

The round nest contains at least 10 complete fossil sets and measures 2.3 feet in diameter, researchers have said.

The researchers conclude that all the 15 dinosaurs show juvenile characteristics including short snouts, large eyes, and no prominent horns and large frills associated with adults of this species.
The babies were identified as the Protoceratops andrewsi, which were four-legged herbivores.

Researchers say the find provides unique insights in to the parental behaviour of the adult dinosaurs and reveals that the babies were kept in the nest and taken care of before they were big enough.

According to Live Science, researcher David Fastovsky, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Rhode Island, said, "It's quite striking that there are 15 juvenile Protoceratops here - that seems like a lot to care for.”

“But they were living in a harsh environment, so perhaps mortality rates were high. The evidence suggests they may have been overrun by migrating dunes during a sandstorm,” he adds.

Discovery reported the nest and the fossils of the babies are currently housed at the Paleontological Center of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.

Sun's giant sunspot unleashes powerful flare

Spectacular Solar Fire Show from Sun

Source: yahoo 7 News
Space.com
November 6, 2011, 10:55 am

Fierce storm sparks massive solar flare

Yahoo!7 Technology News

Sun's spectacular fire show

The Sun has unleashed one of the most powerful storms ever, triggering massive solar flares.

Sun's earlier storms captured

                           Solar flare. Photo: space.com

A powerful solar flare that erupted on Nov 3 from a huge blemish on the sun's surface has been classified as an X1.9 flare, ranking it in among the most powerful types of storms from our star can unleash.

The flare originated in a humongous sunspot that was sighted earlier this week, which ranks as one of the largest sunspots seen in years.

The flare "triggered some disruption to radio communications on Earth beginning about 45 minutes later," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Scientists are continuing to watch this active region as it could well produce additional solar activity as it passes across the front of the sun."

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin Stereo sun-watching spacecraft snapped photos and video of the huge solar flare during solar storm.

A flare is a powerful release of energy that brightens the sun, and is often associated with an area of increased magnetic activity on the solar surface. This magnetic activity can also inhibit the flow of heat to the surface in a process called convection, creating darkened areas on the face of the sun called sunspots.

The huge active region on the sun right now, called AR11339, is about 80,000 km long, several times wider than the Earth.

"This large and complex active region just rotated onto the disk and we will watch it for the next 10 days," astronomers with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite wrote in an update.
Later on the same day as the flare, in another area of the sun, a burst of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection released from the surface.

More from Space.com
Strangest alien planets
Ten extreme planet facts

This eruption came from the back side of the sun and is headed toward the planet Venus, so should not pose any risk to Earth.

Because NASA has a suite of spacecraft observing the sun at all times from many directions, the agency was able to observe the coronal mass ejection as well as the solar flare.

Scientists say we probably haven't seen the last of activity from this dynamic region of the sun.
"The large, bright active region remains potent," officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "Odds are good there's more to come."

And recent events are just part of a larger ramping up of action on the sun lately, as our star moves toward the peak of activity in its 11-year cycle around 2013.

Comets a water source for thirsty early Earth

Excellent discover in the space
Source: Yahoo 7 News
Ben Hirschler, Reuters
October 6, 2011, 3:11 am

LONDON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found the first comet with ocean-like water in a major boost to the theory that the celestial bodies were a significant source of water for a thirsty early Earth.

 

The intense heat of the planet immediately after it formed means any initial water would have quickly evaporated and scientists believe the oceans emerged around 8 million years later.

The puzzle is where the water, which is vital for life on Earth, came from.

Reuters ©                           Enlarge photo

Past analysis of water-ice from far-flung comets suggested they could have delivered no more than 10 percent of today's oceans because the chemical "fingerprints" did not match up.

But research from Paul Hartogh of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and colleagues published on Wednesday showed a comet called 103P/Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as the Earth's oceans.

The finding substantially increases the amount of water that could have originated from comets, which are made up of rock and ice with a characteristic tail of gas and dust. Previous models of the early Earth implied most water came from asteroids.

In the case of Hartley 2, researchers using infrared instruments on the Hershel Space Observatory found that ice on the comet has a near identical "D/H" ratio to seawater. D/H measures the proportion of deuterium -- or heavy hydrogen, which has an extra neutron -- compared to ordinary hydrogen in water.

"It was a big surprise when we saw the ratio was almost the same as what we find in the Earth's oceans," Hartogh told Reuters.

"It means it is not true any more that a maximum of 10 percent of water could have come from comets. Now, in principle, all the water could have come from comets."

Hartogh, whose research was published online in Nature, believes Hartley 2, whose current orbit around the sun does not extend much beyond Jupiter, started life in a different part of the solar system than other comets studied.

It probably formed in the Kuiper belt, which lies about 30 to 50 times further from the sun than the Earth, while the others come from the Oort Cloud, some 5,000 times further away.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Thousands of ticking time bomb stars set to explode

Look and read this important article about the universe

Source: space.com and yahoo 7 news

Thousands of ticking time bomb stars set to explode at any moment are hidden throughout our galaxy, according to a new study.

When massive stars reach the end of their lives, they can explode in fiery fits called supernovas. Astronomers calculate that about three stars explode in a specific category of supernova called Type 1a every thousand years in the Milky Way.

That means that within a few thousand light-years of Earth there should be dozens of stars on the verge of exploding.

Yet while scientists know these stars are out there, they've had trouble so far identifying which stars are nearing the explosion point. But the new research offers hope of finding the ticking time bombs more easily by looking for features that had previously been ignored.

"We haven’t found one of these 'time bomb' stars yet in the Milky Way, but this research suggests that we've been looking for the wrong signs," astrophysicist Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. "Our work points to a new way of searching for supernova precursors."

Unsolved mysteries

Di Stefano and her colleagues offer a new model for how these stars explode that could explain some niggling unsolved mysteries.

More from Space.com

Strangest alien planets
Ten extreme planet facts

The reigning theory behind Type 1a supernovas is that they are caused when old, dense stars called white dwarfs slowly steal mass from nearby companion stars until they reach a tipping point, becoming too massive to fight against the inward pull of gravity, and collapse.

This weight limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, is called the Chandrasekhar mass.
But if that is the case, scientists would expect to find these companion stars left over after supernovas fade from sight.

They also predict small amounts of hydrogen and helium gas would have been left nearby, representing material that wasn't sucked into the white dwarf, or that was dislodged from the companion in the explosion.

Amazing space photos. Photo: Getty Images

Yet none of these smoking gun clues appear to be present around known supernovas.
'''Slowing down'''
Perhaps, Di Stefano and her colleagues propose, white dwarfs are able to reach the Chandrasekhar mass but postpone the inevitable by spinning quickly.

As a star gobbles up more mass, it also increases its angular momentum, which causes it to spin up. This increased spin can act as a stabilizing force, allowing the white dwarf to tip the scales over the Chandrasekhar mass without exploding.

After the star stops eating its neighbor's mass, however, it will gradually slow down, and eventually succumb to gravity in a supernova.

Yet the spinning effect could give the star a buffer, perhaps of up to a billion years, between when the white dwarf stops accreting mass, and when it explodes. During this lag, the leftover gas from the companion star may dissipate, and the companion could evolve into a white dwarf itself.

Bomb squad

The new model suggests a new tack for hunting impending supernovas. According to the research, astronomers could start to look for white dwarf stars that have already reached the Chandrasekhar limit, and are in the process of spinning down. [Video: Supernovas: Destroyers and Creators]
"We don’t know of any super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarfs in the Milky Way yet, but we're looking forward to hunting them out," said co-author Rasmus Voss of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

The researchers reported their findings in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An out-of-this-world view. Photo: Getty Images

'Invisible' alien planet discovered

Impacting news from NASA's Kepler telescope was detected new planets in the universe UJWQ2TFPABYK

Source: Yahoo 7 News
space.com
September 9, 2011, 2:22 pm

For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports.
NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.

The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method — known as transit timing variation, or TTV — has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last.
"My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Finding two new planets

The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light.

Five bold claims of alien life

Ten strangest alien planets

Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius).

Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.

In our own solar system, scientists used similar methods to predict the existence of the planet Neptune. Astronomers noticed that Uranus did not orbit the sun exactly as expected, and surmised that an unseen planet was pulling on it. This prediction was borne out when telescopes confirmed Neptune in 1846.

Researchers know little about Kepler-19c at the moment. It takes the alien world 160 days or less to zip around its host star, and 19c's mass could range from a few times that of Earth to six times that of Jupiter, researchers said.

But 19c should start coming into clearer focus soon.

"It's a mystery world, but of course we don't expect it to remain a mystery," study co-author David Charbonneau, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told SPACE.com in an email. "Kepler, and large ground-based telescopes, should help us figure out its true identity soon enough!"
The study will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

A first for a new method

The new study isn't the first to report evidence of a new alien planet using the TTV method. Last year, for example, a different research team announced the possible discovery of a planet called WASP-3c using the technique.

But WASP-3c is still somewhat ambiguous, researchers said.
"The authors consider that result tentative, though, and are collecting more data to confirm that there are timing variations," study co-author Daniel Fabrycky, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com in an email. "The detection is much more certain in our case, as the data come from a single instrument and nearly every transit has been detected over a few cycles of the signal."
Ballard voiced similar sentiments, saying other potential TTV exoplanet finds — such as another possible world in the WASP-10 star system — aren't quite definitive.

"We are just claiming that the Kepler-19 system is the first robust discovery," Ballard told SPACE.com. "The detection we have is a better-sampled one, and it's also higher signal to noise."
Further, she added, in all other potential TTV finds, the "perturbed" alien planet has been a gas giant orbiting extremely close to its parent star — a so-called "hot Jupiter." But the Kepler mission has shown that hot Jupiters tend to be singletons, circling their stars alone.

"It puts doubt in my mind about the likelihood of an additional perturbing planet in a hot Jupiter system," Ballard said. "I'm not saying it's impossible, but it makes it a little more unlikely."
That's in contrast to Kepler-19b, which is a so-called "super-Earth" just 2.2 times wider than our own planet.

Hunting for alien Earths

Kepler's first TTV exoplanet discovery is in the books, but many more could be coming. Charbonneau, for example, estimated that Kepler might eventually discover hundreds of planets using the technique.

Many of these finds would likely not be possible using the traditional transit method, which requires a precise alignment of star, planet and spacecraft to work, he added.

The TTV technique is also sensitive enough to find smaller planets — those that are closer to Earth-size, some of which may even be Earth-like.

"That is the promise of transit timing variations," Ballard said. "I do believe it could discover Earth-mass planets, to say the least. Whether they're Earth-like, I don't know. That would require a lot more study."