Rahinur Rahaman

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Astronomers have found a rocky planet in a distant solar system, in a discovery that raises hopes of finding alien life.

Corot 7b is similar in size to Earth, but daytime temperatures of 1,500C mean it is far too hot for anything to flourish there.

However the discovery suggests there may be planets with more hospitable conditions throughout the galaxy.

Corot 7b orbits a star 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros.

Although scientists have found more than 330 planets outside our own solar system before – including 12 thought to be solid – this is the smallest, and the first one confirmed to be made of rock.

“This is a day we’ve been waiting for a long time,” – said “Sara Seager”, an expert in distant planets at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It’s the first definitive rocky world beyond our solar system, and it’s opening a new gate for our research. We’re really, really excited about it.”

Scientists believe that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on.

The new planet orbits relatively closely to its star – just 1.5 million miles away. The Earth, in contrast, is around 93 million miles from the Sun.

The researchers say its mass is five times that of the Earth.

“This is science at its thrilling and amazing best,” – said Swiss astronomer “Didier Queloz”, the leader of the team that made the observations.

Most of the “exoplanets” outside our own solar system are gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn. Only around a dozen rocky planets have been spotted.

However, this is the first time scientists have been able to get an accurate figure for an exoplanet’s density – proof, they say, of a rocky planet.

To get their measurements, the astronomers used a high accuracy radial velocity planet searcher (HARPS) – which is a spectrograph attached to the European Southern Observatory’s telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile.

They used 70 hours of observations to measure its density.

“We basically live on a rock ourselves,” – said co-discoverer “Artie Hatzes”, director of the Thuringer observatory in Germany. “It’s as close to something like the Earth that we’ve found so far. It’s just a little too close to its sun.”

The planet – which was found earlier this year -  is so close to the sun it completes one solar orbit in 20 hours. By comparison, Mercury – the closest planet to our sun – completes its year in 88 days.

“It’s hot, they’re calling it the lava planet,” – “Dr Hatzes” said.

Corot 7b is too far away to see through conventional telescopes. Instead, astronomers worked out its mass, size and density by measuring the “wobble” of its parent star caused by the planet’s gravitational pull.

Details of the planet’s mass and density were announced at the European Planetary Science Congress in Barcelona, and will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Source: Mail Online

A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone.”

This discovery was the result of more than a decade of observations using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world’s largest optical telescopes. The research, sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation, placed the planet in an area where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.

To astronomers, a “potentially habitable” planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one where humans would thrive. Habitability depends on many factors, but having liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope. The spectrometer allows precise measurements of a star’s radial velocity (its motion along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets induce complex wobbles in the star’s motion, and astronomers use sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits and masses.

“Keck’s long-term observations of the wobble of nearby stars enabled the detection of this multi-planetary system,” said Mario R. Perez, Keck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Keck is once again proving itself an amazing tool for scientific research.”

Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. The team’s new findings are reported in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal and posted online at:

“Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said Vogt. “The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.”

The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside of our own. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly-circular orbits.

The new planet designated Gliese 581g has a mass three to four times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere.

Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has two previously detected planets that lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly-discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet’s surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet’s surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the “terminator”).

This book is aimed at novice to advanced web developers who want to take control of the JavaScript on their pages and produce great, interactive Rich Internet Applications without the need to write all the client-side code necessary to achieve such applications from scratch.

All web developers who yearn to create usable web applications that delight, rather than annoy, their users by leveraging the power that jQuery brings to them will benefit from this book.

Although novice web developers may find some sections a tad involved, this should not deter them from diving into this book. We’ve included an appendix on essential JavaScript concepts that help in using jQuery to its fullest potential, and such readers will find that the jQuery library itself is novice-friendly once they understand a few key concepts—all without sacrificing the power available to the more advanced web developers.

Whether novices or veterans of web development, client-side programmers will benefit greatly from adding jQuery to their repertoire of development tools. We know that the lessons within this book will help add this knowledge to your toolbox quickly.

In the ancient Chinese classic text Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) says, “The tree which fills the arms grew from the tiniest sprout; the tower of nine stories rose from a (small) heap of earth; the journey of a thousand [miles] commenced with a single step.” I wrote Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration to help you take the first steps of your Oracle Database journey. It’s the book I wish I’d had when I first started using Oracle Database so many years ago. It’s the book that I would have liked to have given to the many IT colleagues and friends who, over the years, have asked me to teach them the basics of Oracle Database.

I started my own journey more than 10 years ago when my manager at the time, Bill Schwimmer, gave me the chance to become an Oracle Database administrator back in the days of Oracle 7. Books on Oracle Database were fewer then, and I relied on printed copies of the manuals, which I had to share with the rest of the team; this was in the days before Google, when Netscape Navigator had just appeared on the scene.

Today the Oracle Database manuals can be downloaded for free from the Oracle website. But their size has grown tremendously over the years. The Oracle Database 7.3 SQL reference manual had about 750 pages; the 11g version is twice that size. You definitely don’t want to be carrying a printed copy of that in your backpack!

The book that you have in your hands is not an exhaustive reference manual by any stretch of the term; it is a more manageable introduction to key Oracle Database administration topics, including planning, installation, monitoring, troubleshooting, maintenance, backups, and performance tuning—to name just a few. You’ll be getting the benefit of my experience not just the party line found in the manuals. For example, for reasons explained inside, I emphasize the Statspack tool instead of Automatic Workload Repository (AWR).

In this book, you’ll find information that you won’t find in other books on Oracle Database. Here you’ll find not just technical information but guidance on the work practices that are as vital to your success as technical skills. The most important chapter in the book is “The Big Picture and the Ten Deliverables.” If you take the lessons in that chapter to heart, you can quickly become a much better Oracle database administrator than you ever thought possible.

This book is meant to be used by Oracle professionals as well as students, but it is not a SQL primer. Readers of this book are expected to have previously used Oracle, SQL*Plus, and, to some extent, PL/SQL. This book can be used for individual study or reference, in advanced Oracle training settings, and in advanced database classes in schools. It is meant for those familiar with SQL programming since most of the topics present not only the syntax, queries, and answers, but also have an analytical programming perspective to them. This book will allow the Oracle user to use SQL in new and exciting ways.

This book contains nine chapters. It begins by reviewing some of the common SQL functions and techniques to help transition into the newer tools of Oracle 10g. Chapter 1 reviews common Oracle functions. Chapter 2 covers some common reporting tools in Oracle’s SQL*Plus. Chapter 3 introduces and discusses Oracle 10g’s analytical functions, and Chapter 4 discusses Oracle 10g’s aggregate functions that are used as analytical functions. Chapter 5 looks at the use of analytical functions in reporting—for example, the use of GROUP BY, ROLLUP, and CUBE. Chapter 6 discusses the MODEL or SPREADSHEET predicate in Oracle’s SQL. Chapter 7 covers the new regular expressions and string functions. Chapter 8 discusses collections and object-oriented features of Oracle 10g. Chapter 9 introduces by example the bridges between SQL and XML, one of the most important topics Oracle professionals are expected to know today.

This book also has two appendices. Appendix A illustrates string functions with examples, and Appendix B gives examples of some important statistical functions available in Oracle 10g.

Overall, this book explores advanced new features of SQL in Oracle 10g from a programmer’s perspective. The book can be considered a starting point for research using some of the advanced topics since the subjects are discussed at length with examples and sample outputs. Query development is approached from a logical standpoint, and in many areas performance implications of the queries are also discussed.


For any Internet marketer today, one of the most important things you’ll have is your list. The earning potential is definitely high if you have a great list and know how to use it. Wondering how you should build your list? Here is a look at some of the top list building techniques you should use to build up your business.

Tech#1 – Build a Good Landing Page

One of the best list building techniques you need to remember is to build up a good landing page on your site. What is a landing page? This is a page where visitors arrive when they click other links. Maybe they clicked on your pay per click ad or arrived at the page by clicking on a link from one of the articles you have up somewhere.

Your landing page should be designed to make visitors take action. You don’t want them to go away until they signup for your list. This means you need to make this page persuasive and make sure that the signup forms are easily available to them.

Tech#2 – Offer Something for Free

Another of the great list building techniques you can use to build your business is to offer something for free. Whether it is an ecourse, an ebook, members only content, or even an Internet giveaway, something that is free is a great motivator to site visitors.

Sometimes people who would not have originally signed up for your list will go ahead and give you their email address if they know they are going to get something in return.

Tech#3 – Use Popup Windows

You can also use popup windows as one of your list building techniques. These are special windows that pop up on their screen, asking for their information. You can have them pop up when visitors arrive on the site, when they go to leave the site, or when they try to access certain materials on your site.

One popular option is to offer content but to have a popup that requires their email information before they are able to access the content they are interested in. While you don’t want to make pop ups annoying, they are a great way to get email addresses from visitors to your site.

Tech#4 – Improve Your Website Ranking

If you want to build a great list, improving your website ranking is one of the best list building techniques you can use. Work on the search engine optimization of your website to make sure it is performing well in the search engines.

This way people can easily find your website. If you do well in the search engines, you’ll get more people coming to your site, which will lead to more signups for your email list.

Our galaxy – the Milky Way – is a spiral galaxy with arms extending from the center like a pinwheel. Our solar system is in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. Our Sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. And our galaxy is just one of roughly 100 billion in the visible universe.

Sun

The Sun is a star, a hot ball of glowing gases at the heart of our solar system. Its influence extends far beyond the orbits of distant Neptune and Pluto. Without the Sun’s intense energy and heat, there would be no life on Earth. And though it is special to us, there are billions of stars like our Sun scattered across the Milky Way galaxy.

Mercury:

Sun-scorched Mercury is only slightly larger than Earth’s Moon. Like the Moon, Mercury has very little atmosphere to stop impacts, and it is covered with craters. Mercury’s dayside is super-heated by the Sun, but at night temperatures drop hundreds of degrees below freezing. Ice may even exist in craters. Mercury’s egg-shaped orbit takes it around the Sun every 88 days.

Venus:

Venus is a dim world of intense heat and volcanic activity. Similar in structure and size to Earth, Venus’ thick, toxic atmosphere traps heat in a runaway ‘greenhouse effect.’ The scorched world has temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Glimpses below the clouds reveal volcanoes and deformed mountains. Venus spins slowly in the opposite direction of most planets.

Earth:

Earth is an ocean planet. Our home world’s abundance of water – and life – makes it unique in our solar system. Other planets, plus a few moons, have ice, atmospheres, seasons and even weather, but only on Earth does the whole complicated mix come together in a way that encourages life – and lots of it.

Earth’s Moon:

Our moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet’s wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate, and creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years. The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth and the debris formed into the most prominent feature in our night sky.

Mars:

Mars is a cold desert world. It is half the diameter of Earth and has the same amount of dry land. Like Earth, Mars has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons and weather, but its atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist for long on the surface. There are signs of ancient floods on Mars, but evidence for water now exists mainly in icy soil and thin clouds.

Asteroids:

Asteroids are rocky, airless worlds that orbit our Sun, but are too small to be called planets. Tens of thousands of these ‘minor planets’ are gathered in the main asteroid belt, a vast doughnut-shaped ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids that pass close to Earth are called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).

Meteors & Meteorites:

Little chunks of rock and debris in space are called meteoroids. They become meteors — or shooting stars — when they fall through a planet’s atmosphere; leaving a bright trail as they are heated to incandescence by the friction of the atmosphere. Pieces that survive the journey and hit the ground are called meteorites.

Jupiter:

Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system — with dozens of moons and an enormous magnetic field — forms a kind of miniature solar system. Jupiter does resemble a star in composition, but it did not grow big enough to ignite. The planet’s swirling cloud stripes are punctuated by massive storms such as the Great Red Spot, which has raged for hundreds of years.

Saturn:

Adorned with thousands of beautiful ringlets, Saturn is unique among the planets. All four gas giant planets have rings – made of chunks of ice and rock – but none are as spectacular or as complicated as Saturn’s. Like the other gas giants, Saturn is mostly a massive ball of hydrogen and helium.

Uranus:

Uranus is the only giant planet whose equator is nearly at right angles to its orbit. A collision with an Earth-sized object may explain Uranus’ unique tilt. Nearly a twin in size to Neptune, Uranus has more methane in its mainly hydrogen and helium atmosphere than Jupiter or Saturn. Methane gives Uranus its blue tint.

Neptune:

Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is the last of the hydrogen and helium gas giants in our solar system. More than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth, the planet takes almost 165 Earth years to orbit our Sun. In 2011 it will complete its first orbit since its discovery in 1846.

Pluto:

Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system’s ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. This new class of worlds may offer some of the best evidence about the origins our solar system.

Comets:

Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust roughly the size of a small town. When a comet’s orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of kilometers.

Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud:

In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed that certain comets come from a vast, extremely distant, spherical shell of icy bodies surrounding the Solar System. This giant swarm of objects is now named the Oort Cloud, occupying space at a distance between 5,000 and 100,000 astronomical units. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the mean distance of Earth from the Sun: about 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.) The outer extent of the Oort Cloud is considered to be the “edge” of our solar system, where the Sun’s physical and gravitational influence ends.

The Oort Cloud probably contains 0.1 to 2 trillion icy bodies in solar orbit. Occasionally, giant molecular clouds, stars passing nearby, or tidal interactions with the Milky Way’s disc disturb the orbit of one of these bodies in the outer region of the Oort Cloud, causing the object to streak into the inner solar system as a so-called long-period comet. These comets have very large, eccentric orbits and have been observed in the inner solar system only once.

Dwarf Planets:

What is a planet? We’ve been asking that question at least since Greek astronomers came up with the word to describe the bright points of light that seemed to wander among fixed stars. Our solar system’s planet count has soared as high as 15 before it was decided that some discoveries were different and should be called asteroids.

Many disagreed in 1930 when Pluto was added as our solar system’s ninth planet. The debate flared again in 2005 when Eris – bigger than Pluto – was found deep in a zone beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. Was it the 10th planet? Or are Eris and Pluto examples of an intriguing, new kind of world?

The International Astronomical Union decided in 2006 that a new system of classification was needed to describe these new worlds, which are more developed than asteroids, but different than the known planets. Pluto, Eris and the asteroid Ceres became the first dwarf planets. Unlike planets, dwarf planets lack the gravitational muscle to sweep up or scatter objects near their orbits. They end up orbiting the Sun in zones of similar objects such as the asteroid and Kuiper belts.

Our solar system’s planet count now stands at eight. But the lively debate continues as we enter another exciting decade of exploration and discoveries.

Beyond Our Solar System:

Before 1991, the worlds of our own solar system were the only known planets. Astronomers did not believe that our sun’s environment was the only planet producer in the universe. But they had no evidence of planets outside our solar system.

How quickly things change.

In 1991 radio astronomers detected the first extrasolar planets orbiting a dying pulsar star. Although the deadly radiation from the pulsar would not sustain life, it was the first example of a star other than our Sun producing planets.

Since then more than 450 planets have been found orbiting other stars. Some of them are orbiting extremely close to their parent star like the 51 Peg planetary system, while others are found to be at distances comparable to where Mars and Jupiter orbit in our solar system.

This beautiful image shows a distant galaxy which may give astronomers a new insight into our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Taken with the powerful HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile it shows the beautiful barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in infrared light.

NGC 1365 is a member of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, and lies about 60 million light-years from Earth.

This remarkable new image of the galaxy clearly shows its distinctive ‘bar’ of stars at the centre, a common feature that  astronomers believe the Milky Way may also contain at its core.

NGC 1365 is one of the best known and most studied barred spiral galaxies and is sometimes nicknamed the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy because of its perfect form, with the straight bar in the middle and two very prominent outer spiral arms.

The galaxy is too remote for single stars to be seen in this image and most of the tiny clumps visible in the picture are really star clusters.

Scientists believe that the Milky Way could also be a barred spiral galaxy. Such galaxies are quite common — two thirds of spiral galaxies are barred according to recent estimates, and studying others can help astronomers understand our own galactic home.

While the bar of a galaxy consists mainly of older stars long past their prime, many new stars are born in stellar nurseries of gas and dust in the inner spiral close to the nucleus.

The bar also funnels gas and dust gravitationally into the very centre of the galaxy, where astronomers have found evidence for the presence of a super-massive black hole.

The huge bar disturbs the shape of the gravitational field of the galaxy and this leads to regions where gas is compressed and star formation is triggered.

Many huge young star clusters trace out the main spiral arms and each contains hundreds or thousands of bright young stars that are less than ten million years old.

Closer to the centre there is also a second spiral structure and the whole galaxy is laced with delicate dust lanes.

This galaxy is an excellent laboratory for astronomers to study how spiral galaxies form and evolve.

The new infrared images from HAWK-I are less affected by the dust that obscures parts of the galaxy than images in visible light and they reveal very clearly the glow from vast numbers of stars in both the bar and the spiral arms.

NGC 1365, including its two huge outer spiral arms, spreads over around 200 000 light-years.

Different parts of the galaxy take different times to make a full rotation around the core of the galaxy, with the outer parts of the bar completing one circuit in about 350 million years.

Source: Main Online

Scientists have used a Nasa supercomputer to work out what our solar system would look like to alien astronomers searching for other planets.

New simulations have tracked the interactions of thousands of dust grains to how this view might have changed as our planetary system matured.

And astronomers hope that the new view could help them learn how to spot planets orbiting distant stars.

The dust originates in the Kuiper Belt, a cold-storage zone beyond Neptune where millions of icy bodies – including Pluto – orbit the Sun.

Kuiper Belt objects occasionally crash into each other, and this relentless bump-and-grind produces a flurry of icy grains.

But tracking how this dust travels through the solar system is not easy because small particles are subject to a variety of forces in addition to the gravitational pull of the sun and planets.

The grains are affected by the solar wind, which works to bring dust closer to the sun, and sunlight, which can either pull dust inward or push it outward. Exactly what happens depends on the size of the grain.

‘Our new simulations also allow us to see how dust from the Kuiper Belt might have looked when the solar system was much younger,’ said Christopher Stark, Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

‘In effect, we can go back in time and see how the distant view of the solar system may have changed.’

‘The planets may be too dim to detect directly, but aliens studying the solar system could easily determine the presence of Neptune — its gravity carves a little gap in the dust,’ said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, who led the study.

‘We’re hoping our models will help us spot Neptune-sized worlds around other stars.’

The particles also run into each other, and these collisions can destroy the fragile grains. A paper on the new models, which are the first to include collisions among grains, appeared in the Sept. 7 edition of The Astronomical Journal.

‘People felt that the collision calculation couldn’t be done because there are just too many of these tiny grains too keep track of,’ Kuchner said. ‘We found a way to do it, and that has opened up a whole new landscape.’

With the help of NASA’s Discover supercomputer, the researchers kept tabs on 75,000 dust particles as they interacted with the outer planets, sunlight, the solar wind — and each other.

The size of the model dust ranged from about the width of a needle’s eye to more than a thousand times smaller, similar in size to the particles in smoke.

During the simulation, the grains were placed into one of three types of orbits found in today’s Kuiper Belt at a rate based on current ideas of how quickly dust is produced.

From the resulting data, the researchers created synthetic images representing infrared views of the solar system seen from afar.

‘One thing we’ve learned is that, even in the present-day solar system, collisions play an important role in the Kuiper Belt’s structure,’ Stark said.

That’s because collisions tend to destroy large particles before they can drift too far from where they’re made. This results in a relatively dense dust ring that straddles Neptune’s orbit.

Source: Mail Online

This is the oldest light in the Universe.

This incredible image shows the remains of the fireball out of which our Universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

It provides scientists with new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang.

It was produced by a European space telescope called Planck and is the mission’s first ‘all-sky’ image which took six months to create.

While the Milky Way shows us what the local Universe looks like now, the microwaves in the background of this image show us what the Universe probably looked like close to its time of creation, before there were stars or galaxies.

‘This is the moment that Planck was conceived for,’ says ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood.

‘We’re not giving the answer. We are opening the door to an Eldorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our Universe came to be and how it works now.

‘The image itself and its remarkable quality is a tribute to the engineers who built and have operated Planck. Now the scientific harvest must begin.’

From the closest portions of the Milky Way to the furthest reaches of space and time, the new all-sky Planck image is an extraordinary treasure chest of new data for astronomers.

The main disc of our Galaxy runs across the centre of the image. Immediately striking are the streamers of cold dust reaching above and below the Milky Way.

This galactic web is where new stars are being formed, and Planck has found many locations where individual stars are edging toward birth or just beginning their cycle of development.

Less spectacular but perhaps more intriguing is the mottled backdrop at the top and bottom. This is the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’ (CMBR).

The microwave pattern is the cosmic blueprint from which today’s clusters and superclusters of galaxies were built. The different colours represent minute differences in the temperature and density of matter across the sky.

Somehow these small irregularities evolved into denser regions that became the galaxies of today.

The CMBR covers the entire sky but most of it is hidden in this image by the Milky Way’s emission, which must be digitally removed from the final data in order to see the microwave background in its entirety.

When this work is completed, Planck will show us the most precise picture of the microwave background ever obtained. The big question will be whether the data will reveal the cosmic signature of the primordial period called inflation.

This era is believed to have taken place just after the Big Bang and resulted in the Universe expanding enormously in size over an extremely short period.

Planck continues to map the Universe. By the end of its mission in 2012, it will have completed four all-sky scans. The first full data release of the CMBR is planned for 2012.

‘This image is just a glimpse of what Planck will ultimately see,’says Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck Project Scientist.

Source: Mail Online

Scientists have discovered a planet close in size to Earth in a galaxy outside our solar system.

As many as 300 so-called exoplanets – or planets outside our solar system – have been discovered, but most are much larger than Earth.

Gliese 581 e is about twice the mass of our planet and orbits a star 20.5 light years away in the constellation Libra.

It takes just 3.15 days to orbit the star Gliese 581.

The discovery was made by an international team of scientists who announced their findings at a conference during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire.

Xavier Bonfils, of Grenoble Observatory in France, said: ‘With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet (a planet found outside the Solar System) ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet.’

The planet is not in the so-called ‘habitable zone’ where liquid water oceans could exist and life could be sustained.

But researchers today also announced that another planet orbiting the same star, Gliese 581 d, which was first discovered in 2007, is now thought to be ‘well within’ the zone.

This planet, one of four found in the Gliese system, which has five times the mass of Earth, orbits its host star in 66.8 days.

Researcher Stephane Udry, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said: ‘Gliese 581 d is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star.

‘It could even be covered by a large and deep ocean – it is the first serious “water world” candidate.’

Lead researcher Michel Mayor, also of the Geneva Observatory, said: ‘The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the habitable zone – a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet’s surface.

‘It is amazing to see how far we have come since we discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star in 1995 – the one around 51 Pegasi.

‘The mass of Gliese 581 e is 80 times less than that of 51 Pegasi b. This is tremendous progress in just 14 years.’

The discoveries were the outcome of four years of observations using a 3.6 metre telescope at La Silla, Chile.

The previous record for the lightest exoplanet was a planet with with about four times the mass of the Earth.

The results of the study have been submitted for publication in the research journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Source: Mail Online