Giant Planet Darker Than Black Paint

A planet blacker than coal? That’s what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA’s Kepler telescope. Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet ~ named TrES-2b ~ reflects almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

"Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint ~ this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said. "If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets."

The Kepler spacecraft was specifically designed to find planets outside our solar system. But at such distances ~TrES-2b, for instance, is 750 light-years from us ~ it's not as simple as snapping pictures of alien worlds. Instead, Kepler uses light sensors called photometers that continuously monitor tens of thousands of stars as it looks for the regular dimming of stars.

Such dips in stellar brightness may indicate that a planet is transiting, or passing in front of a star, relative to Earth, blocking some of the star's light. In the case of the coal-black planet, blocking surprisingly little of that light.

Image shows TrES-2b, mostly black with a reddish glow.

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Forget the Moon, Go To Mars Instead

Satellite photo of Mars.

Buzz Aldrin, the second human to walk on the moon, is openly questioning NASA’s priorities.

“As I approach my 80th birthday, I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path,” he recently told Popular Mechanics magazine. “And that’s exactly what I see today. The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020 ~ a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago. Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour.”

He admits the moon is interesting scientifically, but believes Mars holds much more potential for a human colony.

“It’s much more terrestrial,” he tells the New York Times. “ It has a thin atmosphere and a day/night cycle that is very similar to ours. It has seasons. Russia perhaps is still entertaining the possibility that the moons of Mars might have access to ice or water.”

His comments come just as the Obama administration is reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight program. Aldrin hopes the review committee will heed him and other NASA critics and scrap the Ares rockets currently under development. He recommends NASA adapt existing satellite-launching rockets to carry a crew capsule so that NASA could spend its time, money, and energy establishing a Martian outpost.

Click here for the Discover magazine article.

Outlying Moons Suitable for Exploration

Depiction of surface of Saturn moon Titan.

NASA’s leading candidates for extraterrestrial life are now Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus or perhaps Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. Scientists are weighing the possibilities in anticipation of picking a destination for a $4 billion space mission set for around 2020.

According to the BBC, the potential Saturn mission would follow up the remarkable discoveries made by the Nasa/Esa Cassini-Huygens mission which continues to operate at the ringed planet. Cassini has sent back data that indicates Titan is akin to a primitive ~ albeit frozen ~ Earth. It has a thick atmosphere and is rich in organic (carbon-rich) molecules.

But Nature News says the arguments for exploring Jupiter’s moons are just as compelling. In 1995, the Galileo probe began an 8-year tour of Jupiter’s system, during which it snapped the first close-ups of Europa’s scarred surface. Analysis of a magnetic anomaly soon revealed the moon’s most astonishing feature: that eggshell of ice is thought to enclose a warm, salty ocean. Scientists immediately clamoured to return.

Click here for the Discover magazine article.