The article I read was “Best Way to Measure Dark Energy Just Got Better” the article talked about a new way to measure the speed of which dark matter is pushing a galaxy away from use. They got new equipment to measures the red and blue shift of type 1a supernovas. They saw the color of the super nova and compared it to some constant and determined the speed the galaxies are moving away from us.

I believe that this is really important because we know that there is some other force accelerating the speed that the planets moving from each other. We know extremely little about dark energy so I think this is really cool because we can see the effects of dark energy even tho we can’t see it.

Real Aliens Yet?

This article briefly talks about a recent discovery made by a NASA scientist. Inside of a rare class of meteorite he found fossils of alien bacteria, using electron-scanning microscopes. Some of the micro-organisms are very similar to Earthly bacteria, but are not yet proven to be of Earth. The scientist released his findings very widely through the scientific community to be extremely-thoroughly analyzed before he published it, which is an extremely rare thing for a scientist to do at all.
This is a breakthrough in astronomy as the first supposed evidence for alien life ever. If this scientist is not full of bull, which I had expected until I finished reading, then this is an enormous landmark for science as a whole and would change many things in NASA. Also this discovery is claimed to be the one of the most thoroughly analyzed paper in all the history of astronomy. This article says there is a massive pile of evidence to back up these alien bacteria claims.

I found this article New Observations of the Giant Planet Orbiting Beta Pictoris on ScienceDaily.com.
Located 63.4 light years from the sun, Beta Pictoris is a relatively young star at about 12 million years old. The star is 75% more massive than the Sun. 25 years ago Beta Pictoris was the first star to be photographed with a “circumstellar disk”.
Have you ever imagined a planet inside the rings of a star?? Well, I never have! It's been recorded that there's a Giant exo-planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris inside it's rings. “With an orbital distance of 8 to 15 astronomical units (AU), β Pictoris b is the closest exoplanet to its star that has ever been imaged.” The planet is almost just as close to it’s host star as Saturn is to the sun. And that’s pretty close! β Pictoris b allows astronomers to study planet formation processes.
I just think this article is quite interesting because I never knew stars had disks let alone planets IN them! This article could be important because maybe the astronomers will find new information on the process of planet formation.

13.2 Billion Light Years Away

found this article on NASA’s website; it’s called NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe. What it’s about is the Hubble Space Telescope found a galaxy 13.2 billion light years away. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, which means this galaxy was created about 480 million years after the Big Bang. It broke the last record of oldest galaxy by about 150 million years. What they found is a mini galaxy which is to small to take a spiral shape. The individual stars are too hard to make out but evidence suggests that it is made up of really hot stars created more than 100 million years earlier from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter. The deep field picture that they found it in was taken in May of 2009, and took over a year to identify. It came up as an extremely small inferred dot.

This discovery is huge for science. It shows how early galaxies and stars were able to form after the big bang. Hubble has made some of the greatest discoveries ever. The next one to get even better pictures and make even more discovery is The James Webb Telescope. This discovery though is amazing, a galaxy that was created 13.2 billion years ago and we found it. We will learn so much more about how fast stars were able to be created after the big bang.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/farthest-galaxy.html

The Red Planet is closer than ever imagined

In an article that I read on Wired Science I learned that the Russian Federation has recently started funding of a plan to build nuclear powered rockets. This a momentous breakthrough in the future of space exploration. In this article I learned that if Russian President Dimitry Medvedev approves the plan for a nuclear powered rocket it would be built by 2012, and ready for use as early as 2015-2018. Through further research I learned that this plan has long sense been approved and the Russians, along with some slight co-cooperation from the EU, are well on their way to building this rocket.

If such a rocket is built than the future of space exploration is a very bright and fruitful one. At this current time modern rockets, such as this Russian Soyuz Rocket, can only propel objects into space and no farther. This means that objects in space have to relay on the gravitational pull of planets in order to travel through space. With the current technology it would take years to travel to Mars, and the crew would be forced to spend that time in cramped and miserable conditions. With a nuclear powered rocket scientists estimate that it will only take 6 months to reach Mars. Nuclear engines are more than twice as powerful as conventional engines, are drastically smaller, do not require conventional fuel and can run for more than 20 years with out maintenance. This translates to being able to lift large amounts of objects, or humans, in great comfort and distances in an extremely short time. If a nuclear powered rocket is built, than it is only a short matter of time before humans are on Mars.

A Ninth Planet Lurking in our Solar System?

Two researchers from the University of Louisiana, John Matese and Daniel Whitmire have long theorized that our Solar System contains a ninth planet. They believe that this planet, which they have named 'Tyche', is composed of hydrogen and helium, and is a dark, Jupiter-sized planet that lies at the very edges of out solar system past Pluto in the Oort Cloud.

In addition, they believe that this possible planet has it's own moon, and could be the culprit that is hurling comets towards the inner solar system, where we can observe them. The reason that they think this is because having observed these comets, they have found that they have very strange orbits. The cause for they're funny orbits could possibly be this mystery planet.

An article by The Daily Galaxy explains the scientists thinking well in this quote,

"By analyzing patterns that comets make in space the researchers were able to concur that 20 percent of comets in the Oort Cloud would "need a nudge from a distant object about the size of Jupiter.""

It is expected that we will know with in the next five to ten years wether or not Thyce is indeed hanging out there on the edges of our solar system, throwing giant balls of ice at us.

Clues on Planetary System Formation Reveled

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope most recent project has been studying a short lived disk of material surrounding a newly formed star, T Cha. This is a sun sized star that is 750 million years old and is 350 light years away. Astronomers have found a gap in the disk that they are thinking is either a brown dwarf or a planet. This is the first star that has a “might be planet” orbiting a transitional disk. The gap lies about 700 million miles away from the star. T Cha gives astronomers a chance to see how planetary systems form. Unfortunately, since it is so far away from Earth, they will have to tweek the VLT in order to get as much information as possible.