More exciting discoveries from the Kepler telescope: A planetary system of the kind never seen before, with two planets in the same orbit around their star. They circle their sun every 9.8 days, one of them ahead of the other. In the night sky of one of the planets, the other planet must seem like a constant light, almost a second sun (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show).
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A huge alien planet has a strange hot spot on its side, and astronomers don’t know what it is. The planet resembles Jupiter, because it’s a hot gas giant, and one side of it is constantly boiling under its parent star. But the warmest part of it isn’t facing its sun, it’s facing AWAY from it. NASA’s Michael Werner says, "This is a very unexpected result. Spitzer (NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope) is showing us that we are a long way from understanding these alien worlds." Meanwhile, if we ever start up our space program up again, we’ll be able to use the moon as a base of operations, because it turns out there is lots of water there.read more
Some may harbor intelligent life – It has now been found that there must be many small, rocky planets in our galaxy, and probably spread across the universe. This means that the likelihood of there being intelligent life elsewhere could be very substantial, and a radio survey of such plants could become possible, that might lead to the discovery of signals from civilizations using technology similar to our own.
The powerful new Keper satellite space observatory has discovered more than 700 of these planets. Will we be hearing from any of them soon? Probably only if the inhabitants think it’s safe.
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It’s about time we discovered if there’s life anywhere else in the galaxy. India’s lunar spacecraft has discovered that there are thick deposits of ice near the moon’s north pole, meaning that if astronauts set up a colony there, they would have plenty of water (but they’ll have to boil it first, since But other compounds, such as hydrocarbons, are mixed up in the lunar ice) And NASA has found evidence that liquid water lies beneath the surface on the Saturn moon of Enceladus, meaning that life may exist there.
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