Hasta La Gadget!

Astronomers have directly detected the light signature of a planet orbiting another sun-like star for the first time, according to Space.com.

The planet is about 10 times as massive as Jupiter, and orbits between two other giant planets–all of which circle around HR 8799, a very young star about 130 light-years from Earth.

The finding is significant not just for historical and planet discovery reasons, but also because the light signature can tell scientists the chemical makeup of the planet–which would lead to an understanding of how the planet was formed.

To find the planet, the team of astronomers used a ground-based telescope: the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. In the future, the report said the light signatures could help scientists figure out which planets could support life. (Image credit: ESO/HR 8799)

The Hubble Space Telescope, with its newly-added infrared Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), has discovered new “primordial” galaxies 13.2 billion years old–the oldest ever discovered, and just 500 to 600 million years after the Big Bang, the Space Telescope Science Institute reports.

“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement.

Five separate international teams of astronomers have analyzed the
WFC3’s new images, first taken from the Ultra Deep Field in August
2009. Many are presenting papers this week at the 215th meeting of the
American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

Nine years for a trip is a long time by just about any measure. But it’s already halfway over for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which is currently on track for a 2015 arrival with Pluto. (You know, the non-planet.)

Space.com reports that the craft is now 1.53 billion miles from Earth, and 1.53 billion miles from Pluto. It will first pass Pluto on July 14th, 2015 before dipping into the Kuiper Belt.

“This is the first of several milestones over the next 10 months that mark the halfway points in our journey to the solar system’s frontier, where Pluto lies,” said Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and New Horizons principal investigator, in the article.

On a personal note, I was fortunate enough to see Alan Stern speak at the Hayden Planetarium in New York back in 2005, right before the craft launched in January 2006. At the time, he characterized the spacecraft as about the size of a Mini Cooper, and had targeted the summer 2015 date back then as well. (Image credit: NASA)

Scientists believe they have found evidence of dark matter, the invisible substance believed to comprise three-quarters of the matter in the universe, in a defunct iron mine in northern Minnesota. The tentative detection of two dark-matter particles, known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) for their tendency to pass unimpeded through ordinary matter, was made by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) project and announced by several laboratories, partners in a consortium that manages the project.

 Despite the announcement, project scientists acknowledge that there is still about a 25 percent chance that the detections were caused by some other unrelated effect, and that they will need at least five detections before they can definitively state they have found this mysterious form of matter.

NASA has revived the $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from its months-long slumber following a computer glitch, Space.com reports.

The MRO has unexpectedly rebooted several times over the past year. Back in August, the MRO fell into safe mode once again. But rather than rebooting it right away, NASA engineers spent the past several months figuring out what the root cause of the problem was. In the meantime, the craft’s safe mode preserved it from additional damage.

“The patient is out of danger, but more steps have to be taken to get it back on its feet,” said Jim Erickson, the spacecraft’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., in the article.

NASA repaired the orbiter by uploading a software upgrade that patched a “potentially mission-killing scenario” in the spacecraft’s computer: back-to-back reboots.