Habitable Planets

Looking for a new planet to colonize? A team of European astronomers says you've got options -- billions of them. Using results from the High Accuracy Radical Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the European Southern Observatory, the scientists say there are likely tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone that may be able to sustain life. They estimate that one hundred of those planets are in the sun's immediate neighborhood -- which in space-speak is 30 light years away.

Looking for a new planet to colonize? A team of European astronomers says you've got options -- billions of them. Using results from the High Accuracy Radical Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the European Southern Observatory, the scientists say there are likely tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone that may be able to sustain life. They estimate that one hundred of those planets are in the sun's immediate neighborhood -- which in space-speak is 30 light years away.

The first spacecraft dedicated to finding potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system is poised to blast off from Cape Canaveral tonight on a three-year mission to probe 150,000 stars in the most sweeping hunt for Earthlike objects ever undertaken by NASA.

The first spacecraft dedicated to finding potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system is poised to blast off from Cape Canaveral tonight on a three-year mission to probe 150,000 stars in the most sweeping hunt for Earthlike objects ever undertaken by NASA.

German and American astronomers have discovered a dust disk--the stuff from which planets are formed--around a binary star system, the first direct evidence that planets can form around double stars. It is, moreover, only the second dust disk that has been directly observed. The discovery broadens the possibility that habitable planets exist elsewhere in the universe because more than half of all stars in our galaxy are binaries.

Stephen H. Dole, 83, retired head of the human engineering group at the Rand Corp. and author of "Habitable Planets for Man," a standard text on what factors make up a human-habitable planet. Born in West Orange, N.J., Dole received his bachelor's degree in chemistry cum laude from Lafayette College. He went on to study at the U.S. Naval Academy Postgraduate School, Princeton University and UCLA. During World War II, Dole served in the Pacific Theater as a Navy communications officer.

I am an eighth-grader at Aliso Viejo Middle School. Last year, when we spent a brief two weeks studying the space program in science, we learned all about the first mission into space. We followed the triumph of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they took that famous first step, and the missions to the moon following Apollo 11. After that, things seemed to come to a standstill. All we did was go around and around the Earth like a carousel. We put a space station up, but after visiting it a few times we just let it fall back into our atmosphere.

Mickey Mouse has been discovered on Mercury!NASA's Messenger probe has been orbiting Mercury since last March and delivered more than 100,000 images of the planet -- and this is the one we get excited about. Messenger is the first spacecraft ever to orbit the planet closest to the sun. As NASA notes, this groundbreaking mission has given scientists information on the topography of the planet and the mysterious deposits at its permanently shadowed poles, as well as data on the structure of the planet's core.

NASA scientists have discovered a faraway planet that's smaller than Mercury - far tinier than they expected they could find when they launched the Kepler space telescope nearly four years ago. The hot, rocky world orbits a sun-like star that's about 210 light-years from Earth. Astronomers are excited about it because it's smaller than any planet in our solar system, said astrophysicist Thomas Barclay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "This is the smallest exoplanet that's ever been found," said Barclay, lead author of a report on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The smallest planet in the solar system keeps serving up big surprises. Scientists working on the Messenger mission to Mercury have found that the planet has unexpected inner layers and craters with tilted bottoms, and it may have been geologically active far later into its life than previously imagined. In the first of two studies released Wednesday by the journal Science, a team led by MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber scanned the surface of Mercury's northern hemisphere and found the planet's surface to be unusually flat when compared with the terrain of the moon or Mars.

The Living Cosmos Our Search for Life in the Universe Chris Impey Random House: 394 pp., $27.95 -- I used to feel confident that we had plenty of time to get off this planet before it burned up. You may know, or perhaps have forgotten, that in 5 billion years the sun will have become a red giant whose circumference will encompass the orbit of Mars. But Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, warns that only a billion years from now the swelling sun "will boil away the oceans."

Deep in the Santa Susanas, in the cradle of the space shuttle's giant engines, a crowd of about 45 scientists and a few of the merely curious had gathered to consider one of the Big Questions: Is E.T. really out there? Is he waiting for us to phone him? It's a question that worried the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and still titillates modern, technological man, said the speaker, Carolyn Mallory. She believes that E.T.s are alive.