Dying giant star may have fuelled life in our solar system

September 16th, 2009 Found: Firm place to stand outside solar systemWASHINGTON — Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand — if only it weren't so broiling hot. As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system.

September 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A group of European astronomers said Wednesday that they had found the first known rocky planet outside the solar system. The find by European Southern Observatory scientists in Garching, Germany, is an important step forward in answering the question of whether humans are alone in the universe, because it is the first of the more than 300 known exoplanets - as planets outside the solar system are known - that is not large and gaseous.

August 26th, 2009 LONDON - In a new study, a team of scientists has described how aluminium radioisotopes can now offer precise timing of events 4.5 billion years ago, and thus have been dubbed as the 'stopwatch for the solar system'. According to a report by BBC News, the study shows that the rate of decay of isotopes can now be relied upon to give accurate measures of time for that period.

August 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has made the most high-resolution images of a dying giant star to date. Led by Keiichi Ohnaka at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, the astronomers, for the first time showed how the gas is moving in different areas over the surface of a distant star known as Betelgeuse.

July 31st, 2009 LONDON - Did far-off comets housing vast oceans of water during the first million years of formation harbour some kind of primitive life? The existence of water in comets bolsters support for a possible connection between life on Earth and comets. The theory, known as Cometary Panspermia and pioneered by Chandra Wickramasinghe and the late Sir Fred Hoyle, argues that life was introduced to Earth by comets.

July 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has found that comets contained vast oceans of liquid water in their interiors during the first million years of their formation, which may have fuelled life on Earth. According to Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, the watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply.

July 21st, 2009 SYDNEY - A team of international astrophysicists has found a new explanation for the early composition of our solar system. The team has found that radioactive nuclei found in the earliest meteorites, dating back billions of years, could have been delivered by a nearby dying giant star, six times the mass of the sun.

July 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Two University of Hawaii astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system, which makes them solar systems in the making. The astronomers in question are doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of scientists has analyzed 22 interstellar meteorite grains to suggest the stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict. The analysis was done by University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

June 11th, 2009 London, June 11 (ANI: A new analysis of craters of the Moon has suggested that the shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system. According to a report in New Scientist, several large impact scars on the moon appear to be around 3.9 billion years old, suggesting that the Earth and other objects of the inner solar system were heavily pounded at that time.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, scientists have determined that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has mysteriously shrunk over the past 15 years. Long-term monitoring by UC (University of California) Berkeley's Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt.

May 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A long-proposed tool for hunting planets has finally discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting one of the smallest stars known. The technique, called astrometry, was first attempted 50 years ago to search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

April 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Billions of planets are orbiting stars outside our solar system, but many have disappeared after being plucked by the gravitational pull of their stars, according to a study. Computer models over the last year or so have only predicted that gravitational forces might pull a planet into its parent star and this is such planet destruction has already occurred, said Washington University (WU) astronomer Rory Barnes.

April 21st, 2009 Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planetHATFIELD, England — In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size.

March 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Indian scientists have developed a solar water heating system that will effectively pay for itself five times over, with an estimated working life of about twenty years. The solar hot water system used in the study is installed at the Jijau hostel, part of the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University campus, in Akola, Maharashtra state, India.