Space telescopes may soon start detecting air-breathing aliens in exoplanets

September 13th, 2009 LONDON - There are thousands of habitable moons orbiting planets in other solar systems trillions of miles from our own, British scientists say. On the basis of mathematical calculations, scientists at the University College London have said that it should be possible to spot these moons using a space telescope launched by NASA.

August 29th, 2009 LONDON - If scientists have their way, then space missions in the future might see astronauts being sent to 'gravity holes'. Gravitational "sweet spots" called Lagrange points lie at least 1 million kilometres away.

August 19th, 2009 LONDON - The SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescope has produced its first scientific results, but unfortunately it's still waiting for a response from the aliens. The project, called the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) after benefactor and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, went live in 2007.

August 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet. The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations.

August 7th, 2009 LONDON - The planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has found its first extrasolar planets, in the form of three alien worlds that had been previously discovered with ground-based telescopes. According to a report in New Scientist, the finds confirm that Kepler's instruments are sensitive enough to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars.

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.

May 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Since the early 1990s, astronomers have discovered more than 300 planets orbiting far away stars, nearly all of them being gas giants like Jupiter. Now, powerful telescopes, similar to NASA's recently launched Kepler Mission, will help spot much smaller rocky extrasolar planets, or exoplanets with water, more similar to earth.

May 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using instruments aboard the Deep Impact spacecraft, a team of astronomers and astrobiologists has devised a technique to tell whether an Earth-like exoplanet harbors liquid water, which in turn could tell whether it might be able to support life. "Liquid water on the surface of a planet is the gold standard that people are looking for," said Nicolas Cowan, a University of Washington doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of a paper explaining the new technique.

May 9th, 2009 LONDON - Former US President Ronald Reagan believed that aliens were spying on Earth for decades and wanted to invade America, claims a new book. Reagan, who was President from 1981 to 1989, confided his fear to a pal, telling him that he had seen flying saucers three times, said author Darwin Porter.

April 29th, 2009 LONDON - Two new studies have suggested that exoplanets which venture near their host stars are doomed to premature deaths - even before they get close enough to be ripped apart by the stars' gravity. According to a report in New Scientist, the studies say that a star's gravity can put a nearby planet on a 'fast track' to spiralling into the star and may also cause the planet to lose much of its atmosphere.

April 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA has developed a flash on-line game about telescopes, featuring its next-generation spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope. The game, called "Scope it Out!" includes an introduction to telescopes and four matching games where you can compare simple telescopes to both Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope.

April 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - If a scientific team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is right, we may be able to find extraterrestrial life even before it leaves its home planet - by looking for left (or right) handed light. The technique the team has developed for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly.

April 3rd, 2009 LONDON - In a live 24-hour webcast today, anyone on the Internet will get a unique opportunity to explore some of the most advanced astronomical observatories both on and off the planet, as part of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) initiative 'Around the World in 80 Telescopes'. The webcast would start with a broadcast from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii at 10am BST, night time in Hawaii, moving around the globe for whistle-stop tours of the international observatories, while the large telescopes are exploring night skies, observing distant galaxies, searching for extrasolar planets around other stars, or studying our own solar system.

March 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astrophysicists, using telescopes on the ground and in space, has uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy classified as a Blazar. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Hollywood actress Reese Witherspoon is desperate to shed her fragile image by acting in action flicks. The 'Man In The Moon' actress has revealed that lending her voice to 3D animation flick Monsters Vs Aliens made her inclined towards signing more explosive projects.