There may be alien life out there, after all: Using the Harps telescope in Chile, a European observatory has announced "major" alien planet findings: 50 previously unknown "exoplanets" that could harbor life. These new worlds include 16 "super-Earths." Astronomers have also discovered a diamond in the sky.
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It now appears that as many a 10% of rocky planets in the universe may have moons like our own. This configuration is essential for the development of higher life forms because the rotating moon retards orbital winds on the dominant planet. Without the influence of the nearby moon, those winds would blow at a continuous speed upwards of 200 MPH. This finding means that there are billions of such planets in our galaxy alone. It completely changes the equation regarding higher life forms, making them statistically much more probable.
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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