Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in our galaxy, and is close to passing beyond the limits of our solar system.  This week, the team announced that Voyager 1 has entered the “magnetic highway,” a region between the heliosphere and interstellar space. Scientists coined the new term “magnetic highway” to describe the place where the Sun’s magnetic field lines connect with interstellar magnetic field lines. As Stone said at yesterday’s meeting, “The new region isn’t what we expected, but we’ve come to expect the unexpected from Voyager.”

Voyager has three instruments on board to measure changes in the magnetic environment—one that detects the low-energy particles that come from the solar wind within the heliosphere; one that detects the high-energy particles from interstellar space (remnants from supernovae explosions millions of years ago); and a magnetometer, which measures the strength and direction of magnetic fields.

How do the scientists know the magnetic highway isn’t just interstellar space? First, both low- and high-energy particles are detected.  Also, the magnetic field from the Sun runs east to west, and that should change dramatically once the spacecraft enters interstellar space.

Voyager 1 first merged onto this highway in late July, but then quickly exited. The same thing happened in early August, and finally Voyager entered for good in late August. Stone predicts that interstellar space can’t be too far for Voyager 1. “We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space,” Stone said. “Our best guess is it’s likely just a few months to a couple years away.” (Hopefully well before the spacecraft’s power is due to shut off in 2025.)

Because Voyager 1 is now located about 11 billion miles away from the Sun, the signal from the spacecraft takes approximately 17 hours to travel to Earth. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles away from our sun, headed in a completely different direction. While Voyager 2 has seen changes similar to those seen by Voyager 1, the changes are much more gradual. Scientists do not think Voyager 2 has yet reached the magnetic highway.

The latest Mars rover, Curiosity, will soon begin its adventure on the Red Planet! Curiosity will land in Gale Crater this August 5th.

With less than a month before Curiosity’s landing, Dr. David Blake gave a Benjamin Dean Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences on July 9th, 2012. A senior staff scientist in the Exobiology Branch at NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Blake designed one of Curiosity’s science instruments, CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy).

CheMin will use X-ray diffraction to measure the mineral structure in samples of Mars dust: an X-ray beam shot through a dust sample will scatter in a distinctive pattern that depends on the arrangement of atoms and molecules present in the sample. CheMin also measures the energy of individual X-ray photons to determine what elements make up the sample.

Other important instruments onboard Curiosity will photograph the rover’s surroundings, drill into rock samples, look for traces of organic compounds, and conduct a variety of experiments that earned Curiosity its original name, “Mars Science Laboratory.”

The 900-kilogram roving laboratory requires a landing sequence different from previous, smaller rovers’ landings. Smaller rovers descended to the Martian surface protected by giant airbags, bouncing to a stop before deflating the airbags and beginning operations. Curiosity needs to complete an elaborate series of steps nicknamed the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” so called because NASA engineers have no way to control what happens during the seven minutes it takes the spacecraft to traverse the thickness of the Martian atmosphere. Dr. Blake showed the audience an interesting clip of the simulated landing process…

After its eight-month journey from Earth, the capsule is racing toward Mars. The Aeroshell, on the outside, includes a heat shield that protects the craft during its initial entry into the Martian atmosphere. At a designated point in its descent, the Aeroshell deploys a parachute. The heat shield drops away, and the Sky Crane carrying the rover then separates and executes a controlled descent under its own power before deploying a cable to lower the rover down to a carefully selected landing site. Flight engineers have refined Curiosity’s landing site during the eight-month voyage, pinpointing a relatively small area inside Gale Crater.

For the first few months that Curiosity is surveying Mars, Dr. Blake will live on “Mars time.” The days on Mars are about 40 minutes longer than our 24-hour Earth day, and scientists and engineers will adjust to the longer day, working on the same schedule as the rover. But all this extra time definitely adds up: Dr. Blake compares it to shifting a time zone a day for the duration of the switch, and when he practiced living on Mars time for a week, he didn’t relish the experience.

Keep up to date with Curiosity’s progress here!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and volunteers for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It was a weekend full of aliens and black hole theories at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. Scientists, professors, artists, authors, and science enthusiasts gathered for SETIcon II, a conference organized by the SETI Institute to learn about and celebrate recent developments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The conference consisted of a series of panels discussing everything from potential asteroid resources to Hollywood Sci-Fi movies.

Each discussion had a diverse set of panelists that complimented each other—each speaker with a different background, adding different perspectives to each panel. For example, in a panel titled “Black Holes in Space—Hearts of Darkness”, Robert J. Sawyer, Andre Bormanis, Alex Filippenko, and Leonard Mlodinow discussed theories about black holes while also calling upon movies and books to identify and clarify any misconceptions.

Alex Filippenko, Seth Shostak, Richard Rhodes, and Marc Okrand even discussed religion (with much sensitivity… especially because SETI has been accused of being a religion) during the “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” panel.

The panelists Cynthia B. Phillips, Mark R. Showalter, and Charles Lindsay informed the audience about planetary art in “The Magnificence and Majesty of the Outer Solar System” while a slideshow of the artfully embellished planets played in the background.

In addition to the regular excitement about science, the conference was heavily fueled by Kepler’s recent success. The Kepler telescope is currently looking for planets in the habitable zone, because these planets are likely to be more earth-like and therefore more likely to be suitable for life.

The telescope has already found over 2,000 transiting planets, an abundance that led NASA to approve the extension of the Kepler mission until 2016. The panelists could not hide their enthusiasm: such success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is worthy of celebration.

The conference also included an evening honoring Jill Tarter, director of the search for intelligent life and inspiration for Jodie Foster’s role in the movie, “Contact”.

Whether a Battlestar Galactica enthusiast or a NASA researcher, it was truly a conference for everyone.

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and volunteers for the Morrison Planetarium.

The two Voyagers are almost in interstellar space, at the edge of our Solar System. In a sense, they are the Star Trek Enterprise of satellites, “boldy going where no one has gone before.” Voyager 1 lies about 11 billion miles from the Sun; Voyager 2, a bit behind at 9 billion miles from the Sun. At these distances, on the boundary of the Sun’s influence, the two spacecraft provide amazing new discoveries.

The press conference at AGU on Monday described the kind of twilight zone Voyager 1 currently inhabits. The spacecraft has sped outside the heliosphere, a “bubble” of gas blow into space by our Sun. But Voyager 1 has not yet reached interstellar space. It’s detecting small amounts of both solar wind and interstellar wind and appears to be in a “stagnation region,” described in a press release as “a kind of cosmic purgatory.”

(More on the interstellar winds: supernovae explosions cause these winds and they tend to come from a direction near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.)

The two spacecraft travel one billion miles every three years, and researchers are unsure when they will reach interstellar space. Ed Stone, the Voyager Project Scientist from Caltech, estimates it could take anywhere from a few months to a few years. We can only hope that at least one of the spacecraft reaches interstellar space before they are both powered off. Power for all instruments exists through 2020, with both spacecrafts shut down by 2025.

The press conference participants (and many in the audience) gushed about the productivity of the two middle-aged spacecraft.

Last week’s Science publication reports on the spacecrafts’ detection of Lyman-alpha emissions coming from the Milky Way. Nature News describes:

Lyman-alpha emissions are produced when ultraviolet light hits neutral hydrogen atoms, splitting them into protons and electrons. When the two recombine, they can form an atom in an excited state that emits ultraviolet light at a characteristic wavelength, known as the Lyman-alpha band.

Because this high energy occurs in star-forming regions, scientists believe that these detections suggest the birth of stars in both our galaxy and beyond. The Lyman-alpha emissions from sources other than our Sun are virtually undetectable from within the solar system, so these detections come as exciting news for astronomers.

Previous studies have noted that a “dynamical instability” (which is to say, a complex interaction of gravitational effects of different planets on one another) affected the orbits of giant planets when the solar system was a mere 600 million years old. As a result, the giant planets and smaller bodies scattered away from each other… A little bit of self-segregation.

Some small bodies migrated into the Kuiper Belt and others traveled farther inward, producing impacts on the terrestrial planets and the Moon. The giant planets shifted around as well. Jupiter, for example, scattered most small bodies outward and moved inward.

Jupiter played one of the biggest roles in the solar system’s youth. Scientists believe it protected smaller planets, like our own, from colliding with each other. Scientists explain the giant world’s protective status through the “jumping Jupiter” theory. “They proposed that Jupiter’s orbit quickly changed when Jupiter scattered off of Uranus or Neptune during the dynamical instability in the outer solar system,” says David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute.

But when Nesvorny ran computer simulations of this “jumping Jupiter” theory, he ran into a problem. While Jupiter did in fact jump through interactions with Uranus or Neptune, the simulations also showed that Uranus or Neptune got knocked out of the solar system.

So Nesvorny wondered whether the early solar system could have had five giant planets instead of four. By running the simulations with an additional giant planet with mass similar to that of Uranus or Neptune, things suddenly fell in place.

Nesvorny believes that jumping Jupiter ejected one planet from the solar system, leaving the four gas giant planets we know and love behind. Thankfully, Jupiter jumped, leaving the terrestrial planets (including Earth) undisturbed.

“The possibility that the solar system had more than four giant planets initially, and ejected some, appears to be conceivable in view of the recent discovery of a large number of free-floating planets in interstellar space, indicating the planet ejection process could be a common occurrence,” says Nesvorny.

This research appears in a recent edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Image: Southwest Research Institute

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

This image was left out of the lot—but it is one of the coolest pictures of the sun I’ve ever seen.

Earth-sized exoplanets are plentiful, read the headlines yesterday. UC Berkeley researchers, publishing in the journal Science, report ^“that 23% of stars harbor a close-in Earth-mass planets (ranging from 0.5 to 2.0 Earth masses).” As the 80beats blog in Discover reports, “As is always the difficulty with planet hunting, ‘Earth-size’ is not ‘Earth-like.’” Most of these are too close to their parent star—hot, hot—to be inhabitable. Nature’s The Great Beyond has a great, concise blog post about the news, “There’s no place like home?”—check it out for more info.

Another science headline that caught our eye this week was from the BBC, “Sea urchins tolerate acid water.”

Sea urchins are likely to be able to adapt to increasingly acidic oceans resulting from climate change, according to new research.

Are they the cockroaches of the sea? We asked our sea urchin scientist (actually, Curator and Department Chair of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology here at the Academy), Rich Mooi, about the news article. He was unable to find the actual research online, and found many holes in the BBC’s piece:

I cannot see how the idea that these urchins will “adapt” to dropping pH or “tolerate acid water” can be reconciled with the finding that the larvae deposit less calcium carbonate under lower pH conditions.  Successful metamorphosis and subsequent development of the skeleton in the young adult is heavily dependent on the amount of calcium carbonate that the larvae start out with…

The article quotes the researchers on the subject of carbon sinks and carbon budgets, suggesting that “echinoderms currently contribute more than 5% to the total removal of inorganic carbon from the surface ocean to the deep sea.”  This is an overestimate of rather large proportions….

Overall, this study only used the larvae of a single, shallow-water species of common urchin.  The results are interesting as far as that goes, but the broader implications of the work need so much more investigation that the article seems more sensational than is justified.

So don’t believe everything you read…

What did you find unbelievable in science news this week? Let us know.

Named Kepler 9, this new system qualifies as the first multiple system discovered by the transit method.  A planet “transits” a star when it passes in front of the star, causing a drop in the star’s brightness. The length of time and amount of dimming can provide information on the transiting planet’s mass and size. Knowing the mass and size, scientists can calculate the planet’s density to determine its composition—gaseous or rocky.

Earlier this week, European scientists announced the discovery of a multiple planet system (using spectroscopy, not the transit method) with between five and seven planets. Although the sizes of five of the planets have been confirmed, their masses are unknown.

Two extraordinary findings distinguish the Kepler 9 system. Scientists have confirmed two planets are gaseous and Saturn-sized and orbit their star in a 2-1 resonance—meaning one orbits the star twice as quickly as the other.  This indicates two things, according to Alycia Weinberger, from the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. First, these planets most likely formed at a greater distance from the parent star and migrated in: both now lie closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun, and eventually, the scientists hope to glean insight into the formation of the system through these two planets. Second, this resonance means that this system is a stable one, making it safer for a low mass planet (like Earth).

This leads us to the next remarkable finding in Kepler 9—an Earth-sized candidate planet! If confirmed, it will be the smallest planet observed to date. The size of the object is known, but more data is needed to confirm that it is in fact a planet. According to Bill Borucki, the Kepler Mission Science Principal Investigator, in a few more weeks they’ll be able to confirm if it’s a planet.  However it might take a few years to establish whether the planet resides in the habitable zone (the sweet spot in terms of distance from the parent star, not too hot and not too cold).

He reminded all of us to be patient. Humans have been wondering for thousands of years if a planet exists like Earth.  A few more years shouldn’t be too much to ask.

There were three sessions on Pluto over the weekend, including the very fun and informative “How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming” with Mike Brown on Sunday.

If you don’t know who Mike Brown is, known as @plutokiller on Twitter, he’s the guy responsible for demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet. But really, it’s only because he cares.

Brown studies objects in the Kuiper Belt—the stuff beyond Neptune—which now number in the 1200s. In fact, as tweeted just today by @plutokiller, one of the larger objects, Sedna, just got its own Wikipedia page. From Sunday’s discussion, Brown said, “It’s the coldest thing we know in the solar system and takes 12,000 years to go around the sun” Wow! By comparison, Pluto only takes 248 years to orbit the sun.

The Kuiper Belt was discovered in 1992 and it and its objects are truly to blame for Pluto’s demotion. There are several objects close to Pluto’s size, and one, Eris, is even larger. In addition, one third of the objects have moons. They all orbit the sun, but on very titled orbits. Eris’ orbit is tilted by 45 degrees.

But we didn’t really lose a planet, we gained a belt. We just have to change our definition of what the Solar System is according to Brown. Now instead of nine planets, we have eight planets, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt.

And in fact, this makes Pluto even more important. The dwarf planet and its neighbors have been around since the beginning of our Solar System. In fact, he said, the Kuiper Belt holds “the fossil record of the birth of the sun.” Who knows what we’ll find there in the next few years?

At the end of the session, we asked Andrew Fraknoi, who helped organized SETIcon, what Pluto had to do with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He admitted nothing, really, but that the organizers thought it would be fun. That it was!

Image credit: NASA and A. Feild (Space Telescope Science Institute)

In 2006, French scientists dug up micrometeorites in Antarctica that appear to have fallen to Earth about 50 years ago. Antarctica seems to be a hotbed for well-preserved meteorites and not just because of the cold.  There is little contamination from terrestrial sources there.

The micrometeorites appear to be from a comet. But it’s the astonishing amounts of two chemicals that is the basis of the researchers’ paper published in the current edition of Science and breaking news on the web today.

Looking at the large amounts of carbon and deuterium the meteorites contained, the scientists hoped to uncover the comet’s origin. While the deuterium could possibly mean it was interstellar, or from outside of the solar system, the scientists concluded that it was from within and possibly from the outer reaches of our solar system.

But that doesn’t answer all of the questions.

Scientific American quotes lead author and cosmochemist Jean Duprat as saying, “One of the main questions we are addressing with these particles is the birth of the solar system, the material out of which the planets are formed.”

Or, as Universe Today puts it, “the meteorites could provide information about the protoplanetary disk that formed our solar system.” And to go even further, New Scientist says that “the cosmic dandruff could help explain how the carbon needed for life wound up on Earth.”

An exciting discovery, to be sure, that may hold many future answers.

Image courtesy of J. Duprat CSNSM-CNRS