Mars One starts search for the first humans on Mars in 2023

Mars One has launched its astronaut selection program for the first humans to set foot on Mars and make it their home. Mars One invites would-be Mars settlers from anywhere in the world to submit an online application — the first of the four rounds in the selection procedure. Round One will run for over five months and end on 31st August 2013. Applicants selected at the end of this round will include the first crew that will land on Mars in 2023. Mars One selection committees will hone the search for the first crew in three subsequent rounds and further training.
We are very excited about launching the selection program. Round One is where we open the doors to Mars for everyone on Earth. This is an international mission and it is very important for the project that anyone anywhere can ask themselves: Do I want this? Am I ready for this? If the answer is yes then we want to hear from you,” said Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One. In the past year, Mars One has received 10,000 messages from prospective applicants from more than 100 countries. Mars One expects an unprecedented number of applications and even more Internet users visiting the application website to support their favorite candidates. Applicants are given the choice of publicly sharing and promoting their application page. While Mars One experts will choose which candidates progress to Round 2, everyone will have the opportunity to know the aspiring settlers and give them their vote of confidence. Applicants will pay a small administration fee that varies across nations according to their per capita GDP. The variable fee makes the program equally accessible for applicants from all nations and also reduces the number of insincere entries.

Mars One is looking for applicants who are both mature and interesting. Beyond Round Four,in the seven-year period preceding their flight to Mars,all the potential settlers will be given the skills they will need on Mars and on their journey there. No particular academic or professional background is considered a prerequisite for selection. “Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria,” said Norbert Kraft, Mars One’s Chief Medical Director and former NASA senior researcher. “For this mission of permanent settlement we are more concerned with how well each astronaut lives and works with others and their ability to deal with a lifetime of challenges.” Throughout the astronaut selection program, Mars One will select applicants who have good physical and mental health and show five key character traits: Resilience, Adaptability, Curiosity, Ability to trust others, and Creativity/Resourcefulness. In the last stage when 24-40 candidates have been fully trained and qualified, the final decision of choosing the first settlers will be decided by an audience vote. “In a 1000 years, everyone on Earth will still remember who the first humans on Mars were, just like Neil Armstrong has etched in our memories forever. This makes the selection of the first crew to a different planet a very important election; in my opinion more important than most elections. We hope the whole world will join Mars One in our democratic search of the envoys of mankind to Mars, ” Lansdorp said.

NASA’s Kepler discovers its smallest ‘habitable zone’ planets to date

NASA‘s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth. The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus. Scientists do not know whether life could exist on the new-found planets, but their discovery signals we are another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth around a star like our sun.

WISE uncovers millions supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of millions of new-found supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called “hot DOGs” — dust-obscured galaxies that burn brightly with infrared light, thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. The latest findings are helping astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black holes at their centers grow and evolve together.

For example, the giant black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, has 4 million times the mass of our sun and has gone through periodic feeding frenzies where material falls towards the black hole, heats up and irradiates its surroundings. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut down star formation in galaxies. In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away. About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light.

These extreme objects can pour out more than 100 trillion times as much light as our sun. They are so dusty, however, that they appear only in the longest wavelengths of infrared light captured by WISE. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope followed up on the discoveries in more detail and helped show that, in addition to hosting supermassive black holes feverishly snacking on gas and dust, these DOGs are busy churning out new stars.

“These dusty, cataclysmically forming galaxies are so rare WISE had to scan the entire sky to find them,” said Peter Eisenhardt, lead author of the paper on the first of these bright, dusty galaxies, and project scientist for WISE at JPL. “We are also seeing evidence that these record setters may have formed their black holes before the bulk of their stars. The ‘eggs’ may have come before the ‘chickens.’” More than 100 of these objects, located about 10 billion light-years away, have been confirmed using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the Gemini Observatory in Chile, Palomar’s 200-inch Hale telescope near San Diego, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. The WISE observations, combined with data at even longer infrared wavelengths from Caltech’s Submillimeter Observatory atop Mauna Kea, revealed that these extreme galaxies are more than twice as hot as other infrared-bright galaxies. One theory is their dust is being heated by an extremely powerful burst of activity from the supermassive black hole.

“We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies,” said Jingwen Wu of JPL, lead author of the study on the submillimeter observations.

Two super-Earths found inside the habitable zones

There are tens of billions of these light planets around red dwarf stars in our galaxy alone, it has just been announced by an international team using observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-meter telescope at ESO‘s La Silla Observatory in Chile .A recent announcement , showing that planets are ubiquitous in our galaxy used a different method that was not sensitive to this important class of exoplanets. The HARPS team has been searching for exoplanets orbiting the most common kind of star in the Milky Way — red dwarf stars (also known as M dwarfs ). These stars are faint and cool compared to the Sun, but very common and long-lived, and therefore account for 80% of all the stars in the Milky Way. “Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” says Xavier Bonfil (IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble, France), the leader of the team. “Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”

The HARPS team surveyed a carefully chosen sample of 102 red dwarf stars in the southern skies over a six-year period. A total of nine super-Earths (planets with masses between one and ten times that of Earth) were found, including two inside the habitable zones of Gliese 581  and Gliese 667 C respectively. The astronomers could estimate how heavy the planets were and how far from their stars they orbited. By combining all the data, including observations of stars that did not have planets, and looking at the fraction of existing planets that could be discovered, the team has been able to work out how common different sorts of planets are around red dwarfs. They find that the frequency of occurrence of super-Earths [3] in the habitable zone is 41% with a range from 28% to 95%. On the other hand, more massive planets, similar to Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System, are found to be rare around red dwarfs. Less than 12% of red dwarfs are expected to have giant planets (with masses between 100 and 1000 times that of the Earth). As there are many red dwarf stars close to the Sun the new estimate means that there are probably about one hundred super-Earth planets in the habitable zones around stars in the neighbourhood of the Sun at distances less than about 30 light-years. “The habitable zone around a red dwarf, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface, is much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun,” says Stephane Udry (Geneva Observatory and member of the team). “But red dwarfs are known to be subject to stellar eruptions or flares, which may bathe the planet in X-rays or ultraviolet radiation, and which may make life there less likely.” One of the planets discovered in the HARPS survey of red dwarfs is Gliese 667 Cc. This is the second planet in this triple star system and seems to be situated close to the centre of the habitable zone. Although this planet is more than four times heavier than the Earth it is the closest twin to Earth found so far and almost certainly has the right conditions for the existence of liquid water on its surface. This is the second super-Earth planet inside the habitable zone of a red dwarf discovered during this HARPS survey, after Gliese 581d was announced in 2007 and confirmed in 2009. “Now that we know that there are many super-Earths around nearby red dwarfs we need to identify more of them using both HARPS and future instruments. Some of these planets are expected to pass in front of their parent star as they orbit — this will open up the exciting possibility of studying the planet’s atmosphere and searching for signs of life,” concludes Xavier Delfosse, another member of the team. http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/

In Search for Alien Life, Researchers Enlist Human Minds

With new Web-based software called SETILive, an army of independent citizen-scientists are being enlisted to help with the hunt for unusual signals. The software, which can be found at setilive.org, was designed by Zooniverse, a team of programmers and scientists who have created Web-based systems to enable citizen participation in research in fields like astronomy and marine biology. SETILive was switched on late last month.

In two weeks, more than 40,000 volunteers have signed up, and more than one million radio samples have been analyzed. (Another Zooniverse project, Galaxy Zoo, has enabled more than 600,000 amateur astronomers to help with classifying an immense number of deep-sky objects since 2007.)

Thanks to the remarkable revelations of the Kepler satellite mission, the searchers have a target list. Kepler has revealed thousands of planets relatively close to our solar system. Now, rather than sweeping the entire sky, the array of 42 antennas, spread over the countryside in the mountain valley here in Northern California, dart electronically from target to target, capturing snippets of what the watchers hope might be evidence of alien life.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/science/in-search-for-alien-life-researchers-enlist-human-minds.html?_r=1

Mysterious giant objects discovered in center of our galaxy

The Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope has just picked up “crazy-energetic photons,” says Dave Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “And it’s detecting so many of them we’ve been able to produce the first all-sky map of the very high energy universe.” “About a third of the new sources can’t be clearly linked to any of the known types of objects that produce gamma rays,” Thompson says. “We have no idea what they are.” Among them are super massive black holes called blazars, the seething remnants of supernova explosions, and rapidly rotating neutron stars called pulsars. Some of the gamma rays seem to come from “Fermi bubbles” — giant structures just discovered two years ago that emanate from the Milky Way’s center and span some 20,000 light years above and below the galactic plane. Exactly how these bubbles formed is another mystery, but they may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy, astronomers say.  http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/16mar_theedge/

Elusive Higgs boson in sight?

After 40 years of searching, physicists have the elusive Higgs boson in their sights. Wade Fisher, Michigan State University assistant professor of physics, presented the team’s results today at a physics conference in La Thuile, Italy. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical particle thought responsible for giving mass to matter, a critical but still unproven component of the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics. If a Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles before even the world’s best detectors and fastest computers can snap a picture of it. To find one, physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal. Fisher, who coordinates the Collider Detector at Fermilab and DZero teams at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, however, suggests the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered. “We see a distinct Higgs-like signature that cannot be easily explained without the presence of something new,” Fisher said. “If what we’re seeing really is the Higgs boson, it will be a major milestone for the world physics community and will place the keystone in the most successful particle physics theory in history.” The results, which have been collected over several years at Fermilab, are similar to those found by teams working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. But even though the results are close, scientists are not quite ready to claim a definitive discovery, said Dmitri Denisov, a DZero spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. “There is still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists,” he said. “Based on these exciting hints, we are working as quickly as possible to further improve our analysis methods and squeeze the last ounce out of our data.” http://news.msu.edu/story/elusive-higgs-boson-in-sight/

The Physics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

How advanced could they possibly be?

The late Carl Sagan once asked this question, “What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old… an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.” Although any conjecture about such advanced civilizations is a matter of sheer speculation, one can still use the laws of physics to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations. In particular, now that the laws of quantum field theory, general relativity, thermodynamics, etc. are fairly well-established, physics can impose broad physical bounds which constrain the parameters of these civilizations.

This question is no longer a matter of idle speculation. Soon, humanity may face an existential shock as the current list of a dozen Jupiter-sized extra-solar planets swells to hundreds of earth-sized planets, almost identical twins of our celestial homeland. This may usher in a new era in our relationship with the universe: we will never see the night sky in the same way ever again, realizing that scientists may eventually compile an encyclopedia identifying the precise co-ordinates of perhaps hundreds of earth-like planets. Today, every few weeks brings news of a new Jupiter-sized extra-solar planet being discovered, the latest being about 15 light years away orbiting around the star Gliese 876. The most spectacular of these findings was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured breathtaking photos of a planet 450 light years away being sling-shot into space by a double-star system. But the best is yet to come. Early in the next decade, scientists will launch a new kind of telescope, the interferome try space telescope, which uses the interference of light beams to enhance the resolving power of telescopes. For example, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), to be launched early in the next decade, consists of multiple telescopes placed along a 30 foot structure. With an unprecedented resolution approaching the physical limits of optics, the SIM is so sensitive that it almost defies belief: orbiting the earth, it can detect the motion of a lantern being waved by an astronaut on Mars! The SIM, in turn, will pave the way for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, to be launched late in the next decade, which should identify even more earth-like planets. It will scan the brightest 1,000 stars within 50 light years of the earth and will focus on the 50 to 100 brightest planetary systems. All this, in turn, will stimulate an active effort to determine if any of them harbor life, perhaps some with civilizations more advanced than ours. http://mkaku.org/home/?page_id=246

Planck satellite steps closer to the cosmic blueprint

The European Space Agency (ESA)’s Planck mission has revealed that our Galaxy contains previously undiscovered islands of cold gas and a mysterious haze of microwaves. These results give scientists new treasure to mine and take them closer to revealing the blueprint of cosmic structure. These results include the first map of carbon monoxide to cover the entire sky. Carbon monoxide is a constituent of the cold clouds that populate the Milky Way and other galaxies. Predominantly made of hydrogen molecules, these clouds provide the reservoirs from which stars are born. However, hydrogen molecules are difficult to detect because they do not readily emit radiation. Carbon monoxide forms under similar conditions and, even though it is much rarer, it emits light (at microwave frequencies) more readily and therefore is more easily detectable. So, astronomers use it to trace the clouds of hydrogen. Surveys of carbon monoxide undertaken with radio telescopes on the ground are extremely time consuming, hence they are limited to portions of the sky where molecular clouds are already known or expected to exist. “The great advantage of Planck is that it scans the whole sky, allowing us to detect concentrations of molecular gas where we didn’t expect to find them,” says Planck collaborator Jonathan Aumont from the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale. http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM0FLYXHYG_index_0.html

Large Hadron Collider could be world’s first time machine

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time. “Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.” One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time. According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past. “One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.” http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/03/hadron-collider-time-machine/