BIG SUN-DIVING COMET DISCOVERED

What's up in space

spaceweather/Metallic photos of the sun by renowned photographer Greg Piepol bring together the best of art and science. Buy one or a whole set. They make a stellar gift. MAGNETIC QUIET: The solar wind blowing around Earth is thin and steady, which means it is doing little to rattle our planet's magnetic field. Geomagnetic storms are unlikely during the next 24 hours. EMERGING BLAST SITE: A farside sunspot that exploded and hurled a bright CME into space on Sept. 23rd is now rotating onto the Earthside of the sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the emerging blast site during the early hours of Sept. 26th: Because the sunspot is still near the sun's eastern horizon, foreshortening prevents a clear view of its core magnetic structure. The events of Sept. 23rd, however, suggest that this could be a potent active region. Stay tuned for updates as the sunspot turns toward Earth. Solar flare alerts: text, voice. BIG SUN-DIVING COMET DISCOVERED: Astronomy forums are buzzing with speculation about newly-discovered Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). Currently located beyond the orbit of Jupiter, Comet ISON is heading for a very close encounter with the sun next year. In Nov. 2013, it will pass less than 0.012 AU (1.8 million km) from the solar surface. The fierce heating it experiences then could turn the comet into a bright naked-eye object. (continued below) Comet ISON photographed by E. Guido, G. Sostero & N. Howes on Sept. 24. [more] Much about this comet--and its ultimate fate--remains unknown. "At this stage we're just throwing darts at the board," says Karl Battams of the NASA-supported Sungrazer Comet Project, who lays out two possibilities: "In the best case, the comet is big, bright, and skirts the sun next November. It would be extremely bright -- negative magnitudes maybe -- and naked-eye visible for observers in the Northern Hemisphere for at least a couple of months." "Alternately, comets can and often do fizzle out! Comet Elenin springs to mind as a recent example, but there are more famous examples of comets that got the astronomy community seriously worked up, only to fizzle. This is quite possibly a 'new' comet coming in from the Oort cloud, meaning this could be its first-ever encounter with the Sun. If so, with all those icy volatiles intact and never having been truly stressed (thermally and gravitationally), the comet could well disrupt and dissipate weeks or months before reaching the sun." "Either of the above scenarios is possible, as is anything in between," Battams says. "There's no doubt that Comet ISON will be closely watched. Because the comet is so far away, however, our knowledge probably won't develop much for at least a few more months." Meanwhile, noted comet researcher John Bortle has pointed out a curious similarity between the orbit of Comet ISON and that of the Great Comet of 1680. "Purely as speculation," he says, "perhaps the two bodies could have been one a few revolutions ago." Stay tuned for updates. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery Realtime Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery [previous years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011] Near Earth Asteroids Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. On September 27, 2012 there were 1332 potentially hazardous asteroids. Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid Date(UT) Miss Distance Mag. Size 2012 SZ2 Sep 19 8.2 LD -- 38 m 2012 RK15 Sep 24 8.2 LD -- 88 m 2012 SL50 Sep 27 2.8 LD -- 23 m 2012 SY49 Sep 28 2.6 LD -- 31 m 1998 UO1 Oct 4 60.1 LD -- 2.1 km 2005 GQ21 Oct 12 77 LD -- 1.0 km 1998 ST49 Oct 18 28.7 LD -- 1.3 km 1991 VE Oct 26 34 LD -- 1.1 km 2001 CV26 Oct 30 68 LD -- 2.4 km 2007 PA8 Nov 5 16.8 LD -- 2.4 km 2010 JK1 Nov 25 9.3 LD -- 56 m 2009 LS Nov 28 55.2 LD -- 1.1 km Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.

New Planet Found, Smaller Than Earth, Orbiting Distant Star

 Were finding stuff everyday. One day we might find what were looking for or..... something were not looking for!

Share if you care!

abcnews/Thirty-three light-years away, in the constellation Leo the lion, astronomers say they have found a world considerably smaller than Earth, orbiting a dim red-dwarf star.

That's something to think about. While scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 700 so-called exoplanets since 1995, most of them have been giant -- many considerably larger than Jupiter. This new world, say the researchers who found it, may be only 5,200 miles across, about two thirds as large as Earth.
"People have been picking at the low-hanging fruit, since Jupiter-sized planets are easier to see," said Kevin Stevenson, the young researcher at the University of Central Florida who led the team making the find. "Now we're really pushing the limits of what our telescopes can find."
The newly found world is, for now, called UCF-1.01, and Stevenson and his colleagues found it with NASA's Spitzer space telescope in Earth orbit. It orbits a star called GJ 436. They spent a year watching it to confirm that it was indeed a distant world. They are publishing their find online Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal.
UCF-1.01 is probably not a very nice place. Stevenson and his group calculated that it whips around its host star in only 1.4 Earth-days, at a distance of about 1.6 million miles (we're 93 million miles from our sun). Temperatures on its surface probably exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the possibility that some of it is molten, covered in lava. Any atmosphere would have boiled away long ago, said the researchers.
They could not see it directly -- its sun is nothing but a dot in a telescope -- but they could see a tiny dip in the star's brightness as the disc of UCF-1.01 passed in front of it. For now, they cannot even calculate its mass; current technology is not good enough for a reliable number.

Nobody will be launching a mission to UCF-1.01 anytime soon; there are other worlds, including moons of Jupiter and Saturn, that look much more promising as homes for living things. Still, the find suggests that if this world could be detected, others -- perhaps in the so-called habitable zones around their host stars -- may soon be found as well.

"The discovery was completely by accident," said Stevenson in a telephone interview with ABC News. They were looking at another, much larger planet orbiting the same star, "and there were these spurious signals we could not explain."