Super Earth

                                                            First light from a Super-Earth spotted !
According to NASA's scientists who are studying the alien planet using Spitzer Space Telescope that light from a "super Earth" has been detected for the first time. The light from Jupiter-like gas giants has been seen before. But the new finding proves that researchers can now detect the infrared glow from smaller, more Earth-like worlds.

The planet called 55 Cancri e, falls into a class of planets termed super Earths, which are more massive than our planet Earth but lighter than giant planets like Neptune. The planet is about twice as big and eight times as massive than Earth. It orbits a bright star, called 55 Cancri, in 18 hours. Like the majority of known extrasolar planets, 55 Cancri e was discovered by detecting variations in its star's radical velocity.

 Since the planet's discovery in 2004, scientists have unearthed a number of its properties. Dubbed 55 Cancri e, the planet lies roughly 40 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, the Crab. The planet has a perpetually sun-facing side that is about 1725° C. Despite the high temperatures, it is still a waterworld - a planet with atmospheres extremely high in water vapour. High temperatures and pressures on waterworlds turn the water into states of matter that do not exist on Earth such as hot ice or superfluid water.

Why is it called Super-Earth ?
Compared with our planet Earth, 55 Cancri e has radius around two times as that of Earth. Its mass is about 7.8 Earth masses, thus classifying it as the Super-Earth.

It was initially unknown whether 55 Cancri e was a small gas giant like Neptune or a large rocky terrestrial planet. The high density on this planet suggests that the planet has a "rock-iron" composition supplemented by a significant mass of water, gas or other light elements. A scientist of the California Institute of Technology said, "One of the best ways to get information on a planet is to study the light that is emitted and to do that you have to be able to detect the light in the first place".

Now that scientists have demonstrated how to use Spitzer to spot and characterize small planets, they will be able to use similar techniques to explore other super-Earths.

Life on Titan

What is Titan ?? Titan is the largest moon on planet Saturn and the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere. It is the only object other than Earth on which the traces of  surface liquid have been found. It has a diameter around 50% larger than that of the Earth's moon. Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system after planet Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Its atmosphere is largely composed of nitrogen, minor components leads to the formation of ethane and methane clouds and nitrogen-rich organic smog.

"Life on Titan" is at present an open question and a topic for scientific discussion. Titan is far colder than Earth because its distance from the sun is more and its surface seems to lack liquid water as the water ice does not melt. The surface temperature is about 94K (-179^oC or -290^oF). It has also been suggested that life could exist in the liquid methane and ethane that form rivers and lakes on Titan's surface just as the life exists on Earth with water. The creatures which would live on Titan would inhale H₂ in place of O₂, react it with acetylene instead of glucose and exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide. Moreover, its surface is thick and chemically active and is known to be rich in organic compounds.
One of the scientists has proposed that the hypothetical organisms on Titan use hydrogen and acetylene as the  energy sources. In 2007 a committee chaired by John A. Baross, an astrobiologist considered that if life is an intrinsic property of chemical reactivity then life should exist on Titan. Indeed, for life not to exist on Titan, we would have to argue with the fact that life is not an intrinsic property of the reactivity of carbon containing molecules under conditions where they are stable.
Conditions on Titan could become far more habitable in the future. Six billion years from now, as the sun becomes a red giant the surface temperature could rise enough for stable oceans of water/ammonia mixture to exist on the surface.

Amazing Facts about Space

• Astronauts get taller when they are in space.
• The first creature in space was Laika, a little Russian dog.
• The path of the moon's orbit around the earth would easily fit inside the sun.
• Any free moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere, because of its surface tension.
• If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently struck together. 
• The planet Uranus was originally named as George, in honour of King George of Britain.
• Venus is the only planet that spins backwards.
• One day on planet Pluto is about the length of a week on earth.
• A day in Mercury planet lasts approximately as long as 59 days on Earth.
• The red color of Mars is due to Mars is due to oxidized(rusted) iron in its soil.
• The slowest rotating planet is Venus. It takes 243.01 days to turn around.
• The Sun has sunspots, dark spots on the sun's surface 2000 degree cooler than the rest of the surface.