Scientists: Over 160 bn alien planets may exist in Milky Way

AP This 2011 handout photo provided by the European Southern Observatory, shows the Milky Way above the La Silla Observatory.

Alien planets are incredibly common in our own galaxy Milky Way and it may be having as many as 160 billion planets, a six-year-long study has suggested.

According to the study, published in the journal Nature, there are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy and each of them hosts at least 1.6 planets on average, bringing the number of likely alien worlds to more than 160 billion.

And large numbers of these exoplanets are likely to be small and rocky, roughly like Earth, since low—mass planets appear to be much more abundant than large ones, it claimed.

“This statistical study tells us that planets around stars are the rule, rather than the exception,” said study author Arnaud Cassan of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics.

“From now on, we should see our galaxy populated not only with billions of bright stars, but imagine them surrounded by as many hidden extra solar worlds,” Cassan told SPACE.com.

Till date, astronomers have discovered over 700 planets beyond our own solar system, with 2,300 “candidates” found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope awaiting confirmation.

In the new study, the researchers looked at data gathered by a variety of Earth-based telescopes, which scanned millions of stars from 2002 to 2007 for microlensing events.

The team closely analysed about 40 of these events and discovered that three betrayed the presence of an alien planet around a star. One of these planets is a bit more massive than Jupiter, one is comparable to Neptune and the third is a so-called “super-Earth” with a mass about five times that of our home planet.

Considering how perfectly aligned multiple bodies must be to yield an exoplanet detection via microlensing, that’s a pretty impressive haul, researchers said.

The astronomers used all of this data and information about seven additional planets detected by other microlensing efforts, to put a number on their planet-detection efficiency -- and, by extension, the number of alien worlds that may populate the Milky Way.

The team determined that about one-sixth of our galaxy’s stars harbour Jupiter-mass planets, half have Neptune-like worlds, and nearly two-thirds host super-Earths.

And that’s just in the stretch of orbital space from 0.5 to 10 astronomical units -- distance from Earth to the sun -- from each star, the limit of the study’s sensitivity.

“Moreover, we confirm that low-mass planets, such as super-Earths (up to 10 Earths) and Neptune-like planets are much more abundant than giant planets such as Saturn and Jupiter (with estimates that there are six to seven times more low-mass than giant planets),” Cassan said.

Further, according to the researchers’ calculations, every planet in the Milky Way harbours an average of 1.6 planets in the 0.5-10 AU range, which in our solar system corresponds roughly to the swath of space between Venus and Saturn.

Since astronomers estimate that our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars, that works out to at least 160 billion alien planets.

However, the true number of alien worlds may be quite a bit larger than 160 billion, as some planets hug their host stars more closely than 0.5 AU, and others are more far-flung than 10 AU. And a great many likely have no host star at all, the researchers added.

Gestures will work to your Laptop

Laptop makers are planning to launch a lightweight and thin laptop that can act according to human facial expressions and commands. The art Altrabuks's possible that Intel's chip manufacturing.

Mooley Eden, Vice President of Intel on Monday displayed cutting-edge prototype 'Nikiski' laptop along with 'Altrabuks' offered by Linovo, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba, LG and HP, which is equipped with Windows 8 software

Nikiski transparent touchpad below the keyboard panel has been engaged. The screen on the laptop off via touch pad panel is visible from outside. Without opening the whole laptop as a tablet that can be tapped.

Mooley Eden said, "We Altrabuks cutting down prices available to the common people". Hopes that the show will offer nearly 50 Altrabuks.

Save your Facebook Account from Spying

Now you can save your facebook account from syping. Researchers have designed a new screen which allows users to decide what type of information they want to share with which member. Researchers have created an interface that will help Facebook users to keep their private information secret.

Signing up for a game or application, Facebook members could overrule their global privacy settings. But now Penn State University researchers have devised a sign-up interface to tackle the problem.

Researchers claim that many Facebook app developers may try to profit from their games and tools by selling the data with advertisers and other companies. The information could also be leaked to identity thieves.

Members who sign up for an app must agree to new terms of information disclosure that are often different from their main Facebook privacy settings, they say.

Heng Xu said "The only way to find out how the information is going to be used is to go to each app's website and review the terms of use. And many people won't do that".

The sign-up screen currently is a general agreement that shows information third-party developers are requesting. If the member does not agree, the member cannot use the app.

The screen designed by the researchers allows members to decide what types of information they are comfortable sharing and with whom they want to share it.

Privacy settings allow members to determine how much information the member wants to display or share with their members of their network and Facebook.

This data can include birthdate, hometown and current city, as well as pictures the members uploaded to their pages.

Members may not consider data like hometown or birthdates vital information, but Heng said that hackers can use such information to guess social security numbers.

"Facebook has used feedback from the 800 million people who use the site to develop a strict application permissions process, where applications have to ask you what information they need in order to run."

Now, insert your friend's pictures into chat with new Facebook gimmick

 Facebook has introduced a new gimmick that allows you to instantly make photos, logos and other images appear in chat windows.

The new feature works in three simple steps.

Go to the personal profile, official page, or event you want to use as an emoticon. Then take a look at the URL and find the username or profile ID number at the end of it.

Now, any time you're chatting and want to refer to a mutual friend, a brand, or public figure, place that name or number between double brackets and press enter.

The bracketed number or letters will appear as a tiny profile picture.

For a picture of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, users can simply type in [[zuck]].o make a Coca Cola symbol appear, write [[cocacola]] and so on.

The function is a step forward from 'tagging' friends by making their name a link, The Daily Mail reports.

It could mean the end of emoticons, in which colons, brackets and other symbols are used to create smiley faces.

source: yahoo

Russians launch space super-telescope

RUSSIA today launched into space its Spektr-R radio telescope planned to be the most powerful ever, the first deep space observatory sent up by Moscow in a quarter of a century.

Spektr-R will scour the fringes of the universe for black holes, mysterious quasar radio sources and also the fast-rotating stellar remnants known as pulsars, Russian space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.

The instrument, dubbed the "Russian Hubble" after the iconic US space telescope but many thousands of times more powerful, will give astronomers new opportunities for looking billions of light years back in time to the young universe and unlocking the mysteries of black holes.

"It will allow us to look into the furthest reaches of the universe with a very sharp resolution and receive data about extra-galactic phenomena," said the project's constructor Viktor Khartov of the Lavochkin institute outside Moscow.

"The whole world is waiting for this," he added, quoted by Russian news agencies.

The observatory, a project first conceived three decades ago under the Soviet Union, successfully blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit rocket, Roskosmos said.

It will have a highly elliptical orbit of around 340,000km, and an official working life of five years, although its creators hope it may last even longer.

The far-Earth orbit will bring it within 50,000km of the moon, allowing it to use the lunar gravity to change the orbit angle and see more of the sky.

Boasting a 10m diameter antenna that will unfurl from carbon-fibre petals, Spektr-R's creators say that it will be able to produce images with a resolution 100,000 times that of the famed US Hubble Space telescope.

The first images from the telescope are expected to be released by the end of the year.

According to the project's website, the aim of the observatory is to examine objects like supermassive black holes and young stars "with an unprecedented high angular resolution in the centimetre and decimetre wavelength bands."

Working with ground based telescopes, Spektr-R will be able to create a virtual base for receiving data 340,000-km long by using a technique known as inferomety which combines signals from different sources.

The telescope, which official Russian news agencies said is the first such launched by Moscow for 25 years, comes as Russia is seriously returning to deep space exploration after years of absence.

It is due in November to finally launch its eagerly-awaited Fobos-Grunt probe, which will seek to return a soil sample from the Martian moon Fobos to Earth and also observe the Red Planet.

"The main point is that Russia is returning to scientific programmes in space after a long break," Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said after the launch, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary year of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight, Russia is hoping to show it remains a global power in space science despite a string of setbacks over the last years.

With the end of the US space shuttle programme, it has now become the sole nation capable of transporting humans to the International Space Station (ISS).

source:  theaustralian