WASHINGTON: A hot, gaseous and fast-spinning planet has been found orbiting a dying star on the edge of the Milky Way, in the first such discovery of a planet from outside our galaxy, scientists said this week.

Slightly larger than the size of Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, the newly discovered exoplanet is orbiting a star 2,000 light years from Earth that has found its way into the Milky Way.

The pair are believed to be part of the Helmi stream, a group of stars that remains after its mini-galaxy was devoured by the Milky Way some six to nine billion years ago, said the study in Science Express.

Bringing extragalactic planets in reach

"This discovery is very exciting," said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. "Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighbourhood.

The 30-year-old black hole provides a unique opportunity to watch this type of object develop from infancy, the authors said in a report to appear in the New Astronomy journal.

Thought to be the youngest black hole in our cosmic ‘neighbourhood,’ it could help scientists better understand how huge stars explode, which ones leave behind black holes or neutron stars, and how many black holes there may be in our galaxy and others.

Nearest example of black hole birth

"If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed," said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study.

Mark Edward Kelly (born February 21, 1964, in Orange, New Jersey) is an American astronaut. Kelly is the commander of STS-134 Endeavour, the final planned mission of the American space shuttle program.[1]

... Kelly is married to U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

His twin brother, Scott J. Kelly, is also a NASA astronaut. The Kelly brothers are the only twins and the only siblings who have both traveled in space.[4]

From Wikipedia Google Cache...
From AOL:
Giffords' Astronaut Husband to Command Last Shuttle Flight

His twin brother, Scott, is currently commander of the space station

New evidence has shown that Enceladus, a tiny moon floating just outside Saturn's rings, is home to a vast underground ocean, which is probably fizzy like a soft drink and could be friendly to microbial life.

For years researchers have been debating whether Enceladus, is wet or not, and a close encounter with the moon by NASA's Cassini probe in 2005 kicked off an investigation into its unusual conditions.

"Geophysicists expected this little world to be a lump of ice, cold, dead, and uninteresting," said Dennis Matson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Boy, were we surprised!"

Nasa’s Kepler space telescope has found evidence of an incredible 1,200 new planets, including an odd new solar system containing five planets in orbit closer to the sun than Mercury.

The discovery by the state-of-the-art Nasa device greatly increases the chance of finding life on other planets.
Kepler was launched in 2009 and has been orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, conducting a planet census and searching for Earth-like planets.

Another expert was moved to quote Mary Poppins when asked about the mysterious solar system containing five planets in close orbit to a sun.
Nasa scientist Jack Lissauer said: ‘We really were just amazed at this gift that Nature...has given us. And with six transiting planets, five so close to their star, and getting the size and masses of these five fairly small worlds, there's only one word that I can think of that adequately describes the new finding we're announcing – supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’

CME IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on March 10th around 0630 UT. Solar wind conditions, post-impact, are favorable for geomagnetic activity. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

impact images: from Joseph Shaw of Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska; from William Helms of Fairbanks, Alaska

X-FLARE: March 9th ended with a powerful solar flare. Earth-orbiting satellites detected an X1.5-class explosion from behemoth sunspot 1166 around 2323 UT. A movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a bright flash of UV radiation plus some material being hurled away from the blast site:

animated image

A first look at coronagraph images from NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft suggests that the explosion did propel a coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth. This conclusion is preliminary, however, so check back later for updates.

After four years without any X-flares, the sun has produced two of the powerful blasts in less than one month: Feb. 15th and March 9th. This continues the recent trend of increasing solar activity, and shows that Solar Cycle 24 is heating up. NOAA forecasters estimate a 5% chance of more X-flares during the next 24 hours.

On Christmas Eve, 2009, the startling hypothesis that our Solar System, the Sun and all its planets, are moving into a potentially dangerous and destabilizing interstellar energy cloud, was resoundingly sustained. In their research paper, "A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System," published the December 24, 2009 issue of Nature, a highly respected scientific journal, M. Opher et al report on data transmitted from Voyager, the twin spacecraft that have been exploring the outer reaches of the Solar System since 1977.

"We have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system. This magnetic field holds the interstellar energy cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all," says Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. He explains that this energy cloud is at least twice as strong as had previously been predicted and that the Solar System has begun to pass into it, adding that this field "is turbulent or has a distortion in the solar vicinity."

In fact, most scientists had either minimized the possible significance of the interstellar energy cloud or dismissed the whole notion of its existence altogether. But not Dr. Alexei Dmitriev, the esteemed Russian space physicist whom I visited in Akademgorodok, a clandestine scientific research city outside of Novosibirsk, Siberia. In my recent book, Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization's End, I detailed Dmitriev's conclusions, based on his team's analysis of Voyager data, that the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are inexplicably excited -- immense storms, mammoth eruptions, plasma arcs jetting from the planets' surface to their moons. He reasoned that this turbulence is caused by an external injection of energy into the planets' atmospheres: to wit, an interstellar energy cloud which the leading edge of the Solar System has now entered.

The Nature article does not examine the earthly ramifications of moving into the energy cloud beyond suggesting that we could face an increase in cosmic rays, which could affect everything from space travel to rainfall. But the prescient Dmitriev, who has been publishing on the subject for the past fifteen years, observes that passage into this interstellar cloud has already begun to perturb the Sun, causing solar outbursts that are leading to hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes of unprecedented ferocity here on Earth. He is on record as predicting that we will face global catastrophe in "not tens but ones of years." When pressed, Dmitriev guesstimates that the Solar System will remain within this turbulent energy cloud for something on the order of three millennia.

The confirmation of Dmitriev's interstellar energy cloud hypothesis marks the third time that major predictions made in Apocalypse 2012 have been validated since it was published in 2007. Much of the book concerned the potential impacts of solar turbulence on climatic and seismic events, on the global satellite network and also the electrical power grid. Lo and behold, in December, 2008, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a 100+ page report detailing the grave vulnerability of the electrical power grid to solar blasts, which, by scientific consensus, are next expected to climax in late 2012 or early 2013. The NAS concludes that up to 130 million people could find themselves without electricity for months or years due to solar mega-storms shorting out the grid. Without telecommunications, water or gasoline (the pumps are electric), refrigeration, and basic law enforcement or military security, civilization as we know it would be brought to its knees.

Apocalypse 2012 also reported extensively on evidence that the Earth's protective magnetic shield is showing signs of realignment and deterioration, a hypothesis emphatically validated in December, 2008, THEMIS, a squadron of five NASA research satellites unexpectedly flew through a giant, pole-to-equator breach in our planet's magnetic field. The astrophysicists attached to the THEMIS project were utterly astonished by the e data, with David Sibeck, the project leader, going so far as to declare that "it was as though the Sun rose in the west." The shields are down, Scotty, and the Sun is going to begin pummeling us big time in late 2012 or early 2013.

Our space neighborhood is changing, and not for the better. We need to take precautions to defend our home planet, our way of life, starting right now.