What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other Planets: related news

What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other Planets

It has liquid water, plate tectonics, and an atmosphere that shelters it from the worst of the sun's rays. But many scientists agree our planet's most special feature might just be us.

Earth and Moon From an Alien's Perspective

krygny writes "NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft (whose extended mission is called EPOXI) has created a video of the moon transiting Earth as seen from 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds. 'Our video shows some specific features that are important for observations of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars,' said Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center... 'A "sun glint'" can be seen in the movie, caused by light reflected from Earth's oceans, and similar glints to be observed from extrasolar planets could indicate alien oceans. Also, we used infrared light instead of the normal red light to make the color composite images, and that makes the land masses much more visible.'" Here are links to the two videos, one red-green-blue and the other infrared-green.

Asteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other PlanetsSun's Not Screwy, Scientist SaysReport: How to Get Samples from Mars

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Asteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other PlanetsSun's Not Screwy, Scientist SaysReport: How to Get Samples from MarsCosmic Baby Boom Baffles Astronomers

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Star Vies to be BrightestThe Science Behind the Aug. 1 Solar EclipseParticles Retain Weight for Billions of YearsAsteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other PlanetsSun's Not Screwy, Scientist SaysReport:

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Young Galaxies Surprisingly MagneticStar Vies to be BrightestThe Science Behind the Aug. 1 Solar EclipseParticles Retain Weight for Billions of YearsAsteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other PlanetsSun'

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What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other PlanetsSun's Not Screwy, Scientist SaysReport: How to Get Samples from MarsCosmic Baby Boom Baffles Astronomers

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An Alien View of the Moon Transiting Earth

Ever wonder what an approaching alien spacecraft would see as it comes within tracking range of our Earth/Moon system? NASA's EXPOXI mission, which uses the old Deep Impact spacecraft, has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds. "Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us," said astronomer Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission, called EPOXI. The video is pretty amazing and there's actually two versions of the video; the first one uses a red-green-blue filter, showing

Nuclear Decay May Vary With Earth-Sun Distance

KentuckyFC writes "We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain two puzzling experiments from the 1980s that found periodic variations over many years in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226. Now a new analysis of the raw data says that changes in the decay rate are synchronized with each other and with Earth's distance from the sun. The physicists behind this work offer two theories to explain why this might be happening (abstract). First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies.

Journey to the Center of the Earth with THQ's New Game for Nintendo DS(TM)

Handheld Gamers Can Experience All of the Excitement from the Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D Film From New Line Cinema AGOURA HILLS, Calif.--(Business Wire)-- THQ Inc. (NASDAQ: THQI) today announced that Journey to the Center of the Earth(TM) has shipped to retailers worldwide. The game is based on the upcoming film Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D by New Line Cinema and is available exclusively for Nintendo DS(TM). In Journey to the Center of the Earth, players can use the Nintendo DS stylus to search for a passage to the surface of the earth while navigating through all seven of the exotic underground worlds from the movie. A wide variety of mini-games will allow players to rock climb, dig for dinosaur bones and raft across an ancient sea.

NASA's Kepler Telescope Set to Use 3PAR in the Search for Distant Earth-Like Planets

3PAR INC ("PAR-N") - NASA's Kepler Telescope Set to Use 3PAR in the Search for Distant - Earth-Like Planets 3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced that NASA Ames Research Center has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage for a mission that will send the Kepler Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun to find planets in solar systems outside our own. Set to launch in February of 2009, the mission will use 3PAR Utility Storage to store digital images taken with the powerful telescope and its camera. NASA Ames chose the resilient 3PAR storage system to meet its strict cost and performance requirements while maintaining massive scalability and avoiding the need for a full-time, dedicated storage expert. "Even rocket launches have budget constraints," said Chris Middour, Deputy Manager for the Kepler Operations Science Center an

Early Mars Was All WetYoung Galaxies Surprisingly MagneticStar Vies to be BrightestThe Science Behind the Aug. 1 Solar EclipseParticles Retain Weight for Billions of YearsAsteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!What Makes Earth Special Compare

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Asteroid Apophis may hit the Earth in 2036 - astronomer

ST. PETERSBURG. June 30 (Interfax) - The asteroid Apophis may hit planet Earth in 2036, Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute Andrei Filkenstein told the media on Monday. "Apophis will reach the orbit of geostationary satellites in 2029. It may hit Earth later, as it makes a number of revolutions," he said. "It is highly probable that the asteroid will hit the Earth in 2036 if its trajectory passes through a 1.5-kilometer 'gate'," he said. There is no way to stave off this danger so far, but scientists have suggested a number of worthy ideas, the astronomer said. te md

Apollo Astronaut Mitchell Says Aliens Have Visited Earth

This story has been spreading like wildfire across the internet, as well as other news sources, which is not surprising given the topic. In a radio interview in the UK, and in a subsequent article in the Daily Register, former Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell said he believes there is life on other planets. OK, that's not much of a bombshell. But then he went on to say that aliens have visited Earth, and our governments have been covering it up. That was the shocker. Mitchell said he was “privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the U.F.O. phenomena is real.” While he didn't offer any real facts or say that he has actually seen aliens, he said big organizations will soon be offering full disclosure.

If Life Exists on Venus, Could it be Blown to Earth?

We've heard about the possibility of extraterrestrial life arriving on Earth from another planet, asteroid or comet, but the mode of transport usually includes a chunk of rock falling through the atmosphere as a meteorite. But there could be another form of interplanetary transportation. What if there are microbial forms of alien life floating in the upper atmosphere of Venus (the planet's clouds contain compounds that could indicate presence of micro organisms)? Could they make the trip to Earth? Apparently it is possible, if Earth and Venus are correctly aligned, the solar wind may carry microbes from the upstream Venus to downstream Earth in a matter of days…

Comodo Firewall Pro, A Consumer Favorite, Powers Ahead Most Other Firewall Solutions In Downloads

Jersey City, NJ, July 11, 2008 - Comodo, a leading security company, recently announced that its Firewall Pro application continues to grow in popularity with consumers and Internet security industry experts which accounts for why tens of thousands of users every day are switching from other firewalls to Comodo Firewall Pro. Comodo Firewall Pro is free software that outperforms virtually all other firewall solutions - paid or free because Comodo Firewall Pro (V3.0) operates from a sophisticated, preventative, multi layered threat management approach. This approach is considered leading edge by the security industry and is seen as being far superior to most other traditional "detection" approaches used by other security vendors. As a result, Comodo Firewall Pro has garnered many awards and distinctions such as: * PC Magazine: Editor's Choi

NASA picks 3Par for deep space project: Kepler Telescope will help find earth-like planets

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ESA launches programme in support of Earth observation science

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Three-of-a-kind planets found - Premium content

Astronomers have discovered a family of three planets, ranging from just four to nine times as massive as Earth, orbiting a Sun-like star 42 light-years away. The planets zip around their star incredibly quickly — one does it in 4 days — which means they hug the star too closely for known types of life to be comfortable.

Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet

Raver32 writes "A team of astronomers announced they have discovered the smallest and potentially most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet. Five times as massive as Earth, it orbits a relatively cool star at a distance that would provide earthly temperatures as well, signaling the possibility of liquid water. "The separation between the planet and its star is just right for having liquid water at its surface," says astronomer and team spokesperson Stephane Udry of the Observatory of Geneva in Versoix, Switzerland. "That's why we are a bit excited." But researchers do not yet know if the planet contains water, if it is truly rocky like Earth, which might make it hospitable to life as we know it, or whether it is blanketed by a thick atmosphere. "What we have," Udry says, "is the minimum mass of the planet and its separation" from its star.

iPhone vs iPhone 3G - Size, Sound Compared

The iPhone 3G is 2.5 to 3 times faster with loading web pages and doing other stuff while on 3G as compared to Edge. But Apple did make major improvements in other areas. Specifically when it comes to the actual sound of the iPhone 3G.

VIEWS: an open source Virtual Earth wrapper for Silverlight

As the intense development of Silverlight has progressed, many have wondered why Microsoft has not created a version of Virtual Earth using the new technology. If you remember, there is Seadragon technology included in Silverlight 2 known as Deep Zoom—given that Virtual Earth is just a collection of images, it makes sense to put the zoom to use in something that aims to seamlessly render different views of the same images as efficiently as possible for a mapping site.

Our Solar System: An Island of Calm in a Violent Universe (and it's special, too)

We humans like to think we're special, but astronomically speaking we've been shot down quite severely and humbly put in our place. We're not at the center of our solar system, nowhere near the center of our galaxy and certainly not at the center of the universe. But now comes great news for the human psyche from scientists trying to explain solar system formation. As far as solar systems go, we have thought ours was just average and that all solar systems were like ours. But in looking at the 300 plus extrasolar planets that have been discovered and the systems they are in, none so far are anything like our home solar system. In fact, say scientists at Northwestern University, we may be special after all. In a study using computer simulations (this is the week for computer simulations, see here and here), researchers ran more than a hund

Earth like planets should be quite common in the universe

The common mantra that there is nothing special about our place in the universe is questioned today by a simulation of the birth of our Solar System.

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