Found! 3 Super-Earth Planets That Could Support Alien Life | Gliese 667C | Space.com

This artist’s impression shows the view from the exoplanet Gliese 667Cd looking towards the planet’s parent star (Gliese 667C). Image released on June 25, 2013.
CREDIT: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The habitable zone of a nearby star is filled to the brim with planets that could support alien life, scientists announced today (June 25).

An international team of scientists found a record-breaking three potentially habitable planets around the star Gliese 667C, a star 22 light-years from Earth that is orbited by at least six planets, and possibly as many as seven, researchers said. The three planet contenders for alien life are in the star’s “habitable zone” — the temperature region around the star where liquid water could exist. Gliese 667C is part of a three-star system, so the planets could see three suns in their daytime skies.

The three potentially rocky planets in Gliese 667C’s habitable zone are known as super-Earths — exoplanets that are less massive than Neptune but more massive than Earth. Their orbits make them possible candidates for hosting life, officials from the European Southern Observatory said in a statement.

via Found! 3 Super-Earth Planets That Could Support Alien Life | Gliese 667C | Space.com.

Eyes on the Sky: June 24 – June 30

Here is this weeks Eyes on the Sky Video

NASA – Five Years of Stereo Imaging for NASA’s TWINS

 

Artist concept of the elliptical orbit of the TWINS spacecrafts.

Since 2008, NASA’s two TWINS spacecraft have been providing a sterescopic view of the ring current — a hula hoop of charged particles that encircles Earth. Credit: J. Goldstein/SWRI

Surrounding Earth is a dynamic region called the magnetosphere. The region is governed by magnetic and electric forces, incoming energy and material from the sun, and a vast zoo of waves and processes unlike what is normally experienced in Earth-bound physics. Nestled inside this constantly changing magnetic bubble lies a donut of charged particles generally aligned with Earth’s equator. Known as the ring current, its waxing and waning is a crucial part of the space weather surrounding our planet, able to induce magnetic fluctuations on the ground as well as to transmit disruptive surface charges onto spacecraft.

On June 15, 2008, a new set of instruments began stereoscopic imaging of this mysterious region. Called Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers or TWINS, these satellites orbit in widely separated planes to provide the first and only stereo view of the ring current. TWINS maps the energetic neutral atoms that shoot away from the ring current when created by ion collisions.

In five years of operation, the TWINS maps have provided three-dimensional images and global characterization of this region. The observatories track how the magnetosphere responds to space weather storms, characterize global information such as temperature and shape of various structures within the magnetosphere, and improve models of the magnetosphere that can be used to simulate a vast array of events.

“With two satellites, with two sets of simultaneous images we can see things that are entirely new,” said Mei-Ching Fok, the project scientist for TWINS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This is the first ever stereoscopic energetic neutral atom mission, and it’s changed the way we understand the ring current.”

via NASA – Five Years of Stereo Imaging for NASA’s TWINS.