Science Glance
Astronomers have detected a rocky "super-Earth" planet orbiting a nearby star in a region where life could possibly exist, a finding that led one of the team from UC Santa Cruz to predict there must be billions more of them in the Milky Way.
"Detecting this planet so near implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets," said Steven Vogt, a veteran UC Santa Cruz planet hunter who is a member of the discovery team and is now completing a new telescope called the Automated Planet Finder at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose.
Imagine you could step out of our Milky Way a few million light-years and take a look back. This is the sort of view you might see. That is because this dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is of a galaxy that is thought to resemble our own.
Scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the world's first atomic X-ray laser. The researchers aimed SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source at a capsule of neon gas, setting off an avalanche of X-ray emissions to create the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved.
NASA's prolific planet-hunting spacecraft has hit the jackpot again, discovering 11 new planetary systems with 26 confirmed alien planets among them.
A "treasure trove" of fossils - including some collected by Charles Darwin - has been re-discovered in an old cabinet. The fossils, lost for some 165 years, were found by chance in the vaults of the British Geological Survey HQ near Keyworth, UK.
The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it's a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they're even finding them in the strangest of places. And they've only begun to count.
