First Rocky Planet Outside Solar System Found

First Rocky exoplanet discovered!

WASHINGTON —  Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there’s a firm place to stand — if only it weren’t so broiling hot.

As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can’t be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet.

Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.

“We basically live on a rock ourselves,” said co-discoverer Artie Hartzes, 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.”

So close that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.

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

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This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It’s in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

In addition, the planet is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth’s and it has a mass about five times the Earth’s.

Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they’ll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.

“The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe,” Boss said.

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Violent Star Explosion Breaks Records

Biggest explosion in the Universe...ever!

Light from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago has been detected, becoming the most distant object in the universe ever observed.

The light from the distant explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, first reached Earth on April 23 and was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite. Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be associated with the formation of star-sized black holes as massive stars collapse.

Within hours, telescopes around the world were turned on the burst — the most violent explosions in the universe — observing its fading afterglow to glean clues about its source and location.

Two teams, one using the European Southern Observatory’s 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope, located in La Silla, Chile, and the other using the 3.6-meter Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in Spain, pinpointed the distance to the blast, dubbed GRB 090423, at more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. (The previous record holder, GRB 080913, was 12.8 billion light-years distant.)

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This enormous distance means that the gamma-ray burst occurred just 630 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, when the universe was only four percent of its current age.

‘Spine-tingling’ discovery

In recent years, astronomers have been detecting gamma-ray bursts, galaxies and quasars at ever farther distances, closer to the birth of the universe’s first stars and galaxies. So it was only a matter of time before they detected such an early explosion, said Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the U.K. Tanvir worked on the ESO team.

“We have been looking for a burst like this for several years, so we of course expected that we’d get lucky one day — but it was a “spine-tingling” moment to realize that this was finally it,” Tanvir told SPACE.com.

Astronomers hope that observations of this and other gamma-ray bursts just as far away (and thought to represent some of the earliest stellar populations) will shed light on the so-called “cosmic dark ages,” a time before the first stars and galaxies ignited.

“This explosion provides an unprecedented look at an era when the universe was very young and also was undergoing drastic changes,” said Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “The primal cosmic darkness was being pierced by the light of the first stars and the first galaxies were beginning to form. The star that exploded in this event was a member of one of these earliest generations of stars.”

Cosmic dark ages

After the Big Bang, the universe had cool rapidly as it expanded. About 400,000 years later, free electrons and protons (negative and positive charges, respectively) combined to form neutral atoms, leaving the universe awash in a background radiation that we currently can detect in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum (the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background).

The universe stayed in this neutral stage until the first stars and galaxies light it up. The photons from these stars knocked electrons free from the atoms, “re-ionizing” the universe. But detecting the most distant galaxies and quasars from this period is difficult, and so astronomers are hoping that distant gamma-ray bursts such as GRB 090423 will give them information about this re-ionization period.

It will likely take many more gamma-ray bursts to say anything definitive about this cosmic dark age though.

At present, we have only a few observations from these early epochs. Thus, even a single, new data may provide useful constrain to our models of the early Universe. However, to be frank, a decisive step forward for our knowledge of this period of the Universe’s history requires the collection of a relatively large sample of distant [gamma-ray bursts],” Ruben Salvaterra of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy told SPACE.com. Salvaterra worked on the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo team.

Both team’s observations are detailed in the Oct. 29 issue of the journal Nature.

Asked how long he thought this distance record would hold, Tanvir replied, “Based on past experience, it could certainly be a few years before it’s broken, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if it was tomorrow.” He said he did expect the next record holder to be another gamma-ray burst.

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Mum’s the Word for NASA’s Secret Space Plane X-37B

Artist concept of the X-37 advanced technology flight demonstrator re-entering Earth's atmosphere. (NASA)

You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Florida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land on autopilot on a California runway would be big news. But for the U.S. Air Force X-37B project — seemingly, mum’s the word.

There is an air of vagueness regarding next year’s Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane. The X-37B will be cocooned within the Atlas rocket’s launch shroud — a ride that’s far from cheap.

SLIDESHOW: A Glimpse at NASA’s Secret Plane

While the launch range approval is still forthcoming, SPACE.com has learned that the U.S. Air Force has the X-37B manifested for an April 2010 liftoff.

As a mini-space plane, this Boeing Phantom Works craft has been under development for years. Several agencies have been involved in the effort, NASA as well as the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and various arms of the U.S. Air Force.

Over the last few months, I’ve been in touch with DARPA, Boeing, the Pentagon, the U.S. Air Force Space Command, as well as NASA itself. Either you get a “not in our portfolio” or are given a “go to” pass to another agency. Just a few weeks ago, I even commandeered a face-to-face “no comment” from a top Pentagon official for Air Force space programs about X-37B.

Tight-lipped factor

The tight-lipped factor surrounding the space plane, its mission, and who is in charge is curious. Such a hush-hush factor seems to mimic in pattern that mystery communications spacecraft lofted last month aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, simply called PAN. Its assignment and what agency owns it remains undisclosed.

But in a brief burst of light eking from the new era of government transparency, I did score this comment from NASA.

While the program is now under the U.S. Air Force, NASA is looking forward to receiving data from the advanced technology work.

“NASA has a long history of involvement with the X-37 program. We continue to monitor and share information on technology developments,” said Gary Wentz, chief engineer Science and Missions Systems Office at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We are looking forward to a successful first flight and to receiving data from some advanced technologies of interest to us, such as thermal protection systems, guidance, navigation and control, and materials for autonomous re-entry and landing.”

Full NASA Coverage on FoxNews.com

The vehicle itself is about 29 feet long with a roughly 15-foot wingspan and weighs in at over five tons at liftoff. Speeding down from space, the craft would likely make use of Runway 12/30 — 15,000 feet long by 200 feet wide — at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Vandenberg serves as an emergency space shuttle landing strip, as a second backup after California’s Edwards Air Force Base – which has also been noted as a landing spot for the X-37B.

Once in orbit, what such a vehicle might enable depends on the eye of the beholder. Intelligence gathering, kicking off small satellites, testing space gear are feasible duties, as is developing reusable space vehicle technologies.

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Space test platform

Just last month, a U.S. Air Force fact sheet noted that the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), located in Washington, D.C. “is working on the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle to demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force.”

The mission of the RCO is to expedite development and fielding of select Department of Defense combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities.

“The problem with it [X37-B] is whether you see it as a weapons platform,” said Theresa Hitchens, former head of the Center for Defense Information’s Space Security Program, now Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland.

“It then becomes, if I am not mistaken, a Global Strike platform. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about Global Strike as a concept,” Hitchens told SPACE.com.

The implications of the program as a possible space weapon are surely not lost on potential U.S. competitors, Hitchens said, who may well see anti-satellites (ASATs) as a leveler.

“Would this thing be vulnerable to ASATs? Yes, if it stayed on orbit any length of time,” Hitchens added. “While I see value of such a platform as a pop-up reconnaissance or even communications platform, if weaponized it becomes yet another reason for other nations to consider building dangerous ASATs,” she cautioned.

Another mission question is, to what extent the X-37B might play into the recent announcement that NASA is partnering with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a technology roadmap for the commercial reusable launch vehicle, or RLV, industry.

All that said, and after years in the making, the X-37B is approaching its first globe-trotting, milestone making and historic flight – that much is known.

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Phew! NASA Downgrades Asteroid-Strike Threat

LOS ANGELES — NASA says the chances of an 885-foot (270-meter) asteroid striking Earth in 2036 have been downgraded.

Scientists initially believed there was a 1-in-45,000 chance that Apophis could hit the planet on April 13, 2036. But NASA said Wednesday the threat has been dropped to 1-in-250,000 after it recalculated the asteriod’s path.

Earth got a scare in 2004, when initial readings suggested the newly discovered Apophis seemed to have a chance of hitting in 2029. Further observations ruled out any possibility of an impact.

Apophis is scheduled to make a close but harmless approach in 2029.

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Out There: Water, Water EVERYWHERE !

Water water EVERYWHERE !

It’s now official that water has been found on the moon, and scientists have long seen it on Mars as well. In fact, water is all over the solar system and the rest of the galaxy – and since water is key to life as we know it, these discoveries raise the hope that we are not in fact alone.

The inner planets

Although the moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, new observations from three different spacecraft have uncovered what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.

On Mars, giant cracks were recently found etched across crater basins that hinted at ancient lakes, and liquid water is thought to have been common across a vast region of ancient Mars billions of years ago. Craters recently even revealed that more water ice is buried closer to the red planet’s equator than would be expected, “which implies there was more water in the atmosphere of Mars in the not too distant past,” explained Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

But liquid and frozen water are not limited to Earth’s closest neighbors in space.

Even hellish Venus may once have been lush with oceans. Although space probes in the 1960s found the surface of Venus was now hot enough to melt lead, images collected from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft suggest hints of past oceans. A runaway greenhouse effect – a far magnified version of the global warming seen occurring on Earth – apparently led its seas to evaporate away. “Its water, by absorbing heat, might have actually helped contribute to its greenhouse warming,” Meyer said.

The outer worlds and beyond

Most moons of the solar system’s gas giants are also rich in water.

• On Saturn’s moon Titan, “cryovolcanoes” are thought to erupt with cold slurries of water ice and ammonia.
• Another Saturnian moon, Enceladus, is thought to have an ocean beneath its icy shell that likely feeds jets of water ice seen spurting from that moon.
• Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, Neptune’s Triton and the Uranian moons Titania and Oberon are also thought to potentially harbor hidden seas.

The outer worlds themselves are rather icy. Neptune and Uranus are often dubbed “ice giants” because they are rich with water, ammonia, and methane. Pluto is thought to consist roughly of 30 percent water ice. Beyond them lie the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud and the scattered disk, home to untold numbers of comets and icy dwarf planets such as Eris.

In fact, water is often found as ice or gas around stars and in the clouds between them. Signs of water have even been seen on planets outside our solar system.

What does it mean?

The fact that water is so water is abundant should not be such a surprise. “Water is ridiculously common, one of the most common molecules in the universe,” said Nicolas Cowan, an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

What seems rare is finding water in liquid form. In space, it either vaporizes if it is too hot or freezes if it is too cold .

“The only time you ever find it stable as a liquid is when you get enough atmosphere down to provide enough pressure to keep it liquid,” Cowan explained.

Scientists looking for aliens consider liquid water “the Holy Grail, the thing that people really want to find,” Cowan said. “Water is the main requirement we can see that life on Earth seems to have.” Although life also needs a source of energy of some kind, in many ways, “you don’t have to worry too much about that,” Meyer added, since Earth shows that life can live off many different kinds of energy, from the sun or heat or chemicals.

Other life forms

Of course, alien life might not require water at all. Although it makes sense for life to require carbon, “since carbon chemistry is amazingly complex, affording one the opportunity to become complex enough to start life,” Meyer explained, “you could have a liquid medium for carbon-based chemistry besides water – ammonia, for instance.”

The most exciting aspect of the water that researchers are uncovering in the solar system might be how it can support humanity, not aliens.

“If we find water in sufficient quantities that it makes sense for us to use it, we can go to there and make rocket fuel out of it by separating hydrogen from oxygen, make use of resources in situ rather than shipping everything from Earth,” Meyer said.

Still, don’t rule out extraterrestrial life in the solar system. All the water discovered on Mars is challenging what scientists know of the red planet – enough perhaps to “dream up scenarios where the surface of Mars was a more habitable place in the distant past, with critters retreating to the subsurface to still live,” Cowan noted.

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Magnetic Fields Guide Star Birth

Magnetic Fields effect starbirth

The picture of star formation just got a little more complicated: Cosmic magnetic fields, which can channel condensing interstellar gas, play a more important role in the birth of stars that previously thought, a new study suggests.

The simplified story of stellar birth involves giant clouds of gas and dust collapsing inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until nuclear fusion ignites a newborn star.

But in reality, there’s much more to the story: When a molecular cloud collapses, only a small fraction of the cloud’s material forms stars, and scientists haven’t been sure why that is.

Since gravity favors star formation because it draws material together, some other force must be hindering the process, scientists reason. The two leading candidates are turbulence and magnetic fields.

Magnetic fields (produced by moving electrical charges and present around stars and most planets, including Earth) channel flowing gas, making it hard to draw the gas in from all directions. Turbulence stirs the gas and induces and outward pressure that counteracts gravity.

“The relative importance of magnetic fields versus turbulence is a matter of much debate,” said astronomer Hua-bai Li of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Our findings serve as the first observational constraint on this issue.”

Li and his team studied 25 dense patches, or cloud cores, each one about a light-year in size. The cores, which act as seeds from which stars form, were located within molecular clouds as much as 6,500 light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or 6 trillion miles.)

The researchers studied polarized light, which has electric and magnetic components that are aligned in specific directions. From the polarization, they measured the magnetic fields within each cloud core and compared them to the fields in the surrounding, tenuous nebula.

The magnetic fields tended to line up in the same direction, even though the relative size scales (1 light-year cores versus 1,000 light-year nebulas) and densities were different by orders of magnitude. Since turbulence would tend to churn the nebula and mix up magnetic field directions, their findings show that magnetic fields dominate turbulence in influencing star birth.

“Our result shows that molecular cloud cores located near each other are connected not only by gravity but also by magnetic fields,” Li said. “This shows that computer simulations modeling star formation must take strong magnetic fields into account.”

The study will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

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India’s Lunar Mission Finds Evidence of Water on the Moon

Indian probe discovers water on the moon!

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.

The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”

The search for water was one of the mission’s main objectives, but it was a surprise nonetheless, scientists said.The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals. The M3 also made the unexpected discovery that water may still be forming on the surface of the Moon, according to scientists familiar with the mission.

“It’s very satisfying,” said Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the project director of Chandrayaan-1 at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore. “This was one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1, to find evidence of water on the Moon,” he told The Times.

Dr Annadurai would not provide any further details before a news conference at Nasa today from Dr Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist of Brown University who oversaw the M3.

Dr Pieters has not spoken about her results so far and was not available for comment last night, according to colleagues at Brown University. But her results are expected to cause a sensation, and to set the agenda for lunar exploration in the next decade.

They will also provide a significant boost for India as it tries to catch up with China in what many see as a 21st-century space race. “This will create a considerable stir. It was wholly unexpected,” said one scientist also involved in Chandrayaan-1. “People thought that Chandrayaan was just lagging behind the rest but the science that’s coming out, it’s going to be agenda-setting.”

Scientists have long hoped that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel.

Several studies havesuggested that there could be ice in the craters around the Moon’s poles, but scientists have been unable to confirm the suspicions.

The M3, an imaging spectrometer, was designed to search for water by detecting the electromagnetic radiation given off by different minerals on and just below the surface of the Moon. Unlike previous lunar spectrometers, it was sensitive enough to detect the presence of small amounts of water.

M3 was one of two Nasa instruments among 11 pieces of equipment from around the world on Chandrayaan-1, which was launched into orbit around the Moon in October last year. ISRO lost control of Chandrayaan-1 last month, and aborted the mission ahead of schedule, but not before M3 and the other instruments had beamed data back to Earth.

Another lunar scientist familiar with the findings said: “This is the most exciting breakthrough in at least a decade. And it will probably change the face of lunar exploration for the next decade.”

Scientists are eagerly awaiting the results of two American unmanned lunar missions, which were both launched in June, that could also prove the existence of water on the Moon.

Early results from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recorded temperatures as low as -238C (minus 396.4F) in polar craters on the Moon, according to the journal Nature. That makes them the coldest recorded spots in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto, and could mean that ice has been trapped for billions of years, the journal said. The LRO has also detected an abundance of hydrogen, thought to be a key indicator of ice, at the poles.

The other Nasa mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), is due to crash a probe into a polar crater on October 9 in the hope of sending up a plume of ice that can be examined by telescope.

“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in Nature.

Big bang

• The Moon is 4.6 billion years old, about the same age as the Earth

• It is thought to have formed from a giant dust cloud caused when a rogue planet collided with the Earth

• It is 238,000 miles from the Earth

• Gravity on the Moon is a sixth of that on Earth

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Biggest Black Hole Ever Found in Nearby Galaxy

Most massive blackhole ever!

PASADENA, Calif. —  The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87.

The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun.

The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development.

“We did not expect it at all,” said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin.

The discovery was announced Monday at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Game changer

The finding “is important for how black holes relate to galaxies,” said team member Jens Thomas of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. “If you change the mass of the black hole, you change how the black hole relates to the galaxy.”

Because of this relationship, the revised mass could impact astronomers’ theories of how galaxies grow and form.

Higher black hole masses could also solve a paradox of the masses of faraway, developing galaxies called quasars.

These mysterious denizens of the early universe are very bright, developing galaxies with black holes surrounded by gas and dust, all rife with star formation.

Quasars are colossal, around 10 billion solar masses, “but in local galaxies, we never saw black holes that massive, not nearly,” Gebhardt said.

“The suspicion was before that the quasar masses were wrong,” he said. But “if we increase the mass of M87 two or three times, the problem almost goes away.”

Why M87 matters

M87 is 50 million light-years away. Nearly three decades ago, it was one of the first galaxies suggested to harbor a central black hole.

Now astronomers think that most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have supermassive black holes at their centers.

M87 also has an active jet shooting light out of the galaxy’s core, created where matter swirls closer to the black hole and approaches the speed of light, then combines with tremendous magnetic fields.

The spat-out material helps astronomers understand how black holes attract and gobble up matter, a sloppy process in which all is not consumed.

These factors make M87 “the anchor for supermassive black hole studies,” Gebhardt said.

While the new mass of M87 is based on a model, recent observations from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile support the model findings.

The study of M87’s mass will also be detailed later this summer in the journal Astrophysical Journal.

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Nearby Star May Be Getting Ready to Explode

Ready to go Nova !?

Bye-bye, Betelgeuse?

The nearby, well-known and very bright star may soon explode in a supernova, according to data released by U.C. Berkeley researchers Tuesday.

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter’s orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it’s just as bright as it’s ever been.

“To see this change is very striking,” said retired Berkeley physics professor Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. “We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size.”

Betelgeuse, whose name derives from Arabic, is easily visible in the constellation Orion. It gave Michael Keaton’s character his name in the movie “Beetlejuice” and was the home system of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Red giant stars are thought to have short, complicated and violent lifespans. Lasting at most a few million years, they quickly burn out their hydrogen fuel and then switch to helium, carbon and other elements in a series of partial collapses, refuelings and restarts.

Betelgeuse, which is thought to be reaching the end of its lifespan, may be experiencing one of those collapses as it switches from one element to another as nuclear-fusion fuel.

“We do not know why the star is shrinking,” said Townes’ Berkeley colleague Edward Wishnow. “Considering all that we know about galaxies and the distant universe, there are still lots of things we don’t know about stars, including what happens as red giants near the ends of their lives.”

Eventually, the huge star may become a nesting doll of elements, with a mixed iron-nickel core surrounded by onion-like layers of silicon, oxygen, neon, carbon, helium and hydrogen.

As the iron fuel runs out, it may explode into a supernova, blasting newly created elements out into the universe and leaving behind a small, incredibly dense neutron star.

All the heavier elements in the universe — including all the oxygen, carbon and iron in your own body — were created in such a way.

It’s possible we’re observing the beginning of Betelgeuse’s final collapse now.

If so, the star, which is 600 light-years away, will already have exploded — and we’ll soon be in for a spectacular, and perfectly safe, interstellar fireworks show.

• Click here for the U.C. Berkeley press release.

• Click here for an explanation of how that means Betelgeuse may be ready to blow.

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Star Trek and a New State of Matter: Transparent Aluminum

Hello Computer...

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that’s nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.

It’s an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie “Star Trek IV.”

The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.

The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.

To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser “knocked out” a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure, the researchers explain.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,” said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics.

“Transparent aluminum is just the start,” Wark said. “The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.”

Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.

The discovery was made possible with a high-powered synchrotron radiation generator called the FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminum turned transparent.

While the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

“What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminum into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser,” Wark said. “For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminum atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light.”

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From: Glynn, Melanie
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 12:43 PM
To: Ferrari, Robert; Lowe, Russ; Seigel, Harold
Cc: Steven Knauff
Subject: RE: Still