Scientists discover black hole so big it contradicts growth theory

Scientists say they have discovered a black hole so big that it challenges the theory about how they grow.

Scientists said this black hole was formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.

But with measurements indicating it is 12 billion times the size of the Sun, the black hole challenges a widely accepted hypothesis of growth rates.

"Based on previous research, this is the largest black hole found for that period of time," Dr Fuyan Bian, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University (ANU), told Reuters on Wednesday.

"Current theory is for a limit to how fast a black hole can grow, but this black hole is too large for that theory."

The creation of supermassive black holes remains an open topic of research. However, many scientists have long believed the growth rate of black holes was limited.

Black holes grow, scientific theory suggests, as they absorb mass. However, as mass is absorbed, it will be heated creating radiation pressure, which pushes the mass away from the black hole.

"Basically, you have two forces balanced together which sets up a limit for growth, which is much smaller than what we found," said Bian.

The black hole was discovered a team of global scientists led by Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, China, as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provided imagery data of 35 percent of the northern hemisphere sky.

The ANU is leading a comparable project, known as SkyMapper, to carry out observations of the Southern Hemisphere sky.

Bian expects more black holes to be observed as the project advances.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

Mars One mission: Watch the trailer for £4bn colonisation programme

Five Britons have been shortlisted for a one-way trip to Mars as they hope to become the first humans to step foot on the Red Planet.

Four women and a man from the UK are among the final 100 candidates for the Mars One Project which plans to set up a permanent human settlement on the planet by 2024.
More than 200,000 people applied for the controversial privately-funded mission that organisers have estimated will cost £3.9 billion and is set to be filmed for a reality television series.

Hannah Earnshaw, 23, a PhD student in astronomy at Durham University, is among the British hopefuls, who include students and researchers in physics and astrophysics, a science lab technician and a manager for Virgin Media.

She said: "Human space exploration has always interested me so the opportunity to be one of the people involved was really appealing. The future of humanity is in space.
"My family is pretty thrilled. They're really happy for me. Obviously it's going to be challenging, leaving Earth and not coming back. I've had support from my friends and family and we can still communicate via the internet."

Ms Earnshaw said she will now be tested in groups on her response to stressful situations before finding out at the end of the year if she has made the list of 24 people chosen for the mission.
There will then be eight or nine unmanned trips to Mars before the first group of four astronauts will be launched into space in 2024, she said.

Ms Earnshaw said she was "not surprised" by scepticism surrounding the project. Last year researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reportedly found that any manned mission to Mars would result in the crew dying after 68 days, while critics have pointed out that the estimated cost of Mars One is a fraction of the amount proposed by Nasa.

Ms Earnshaw said: "It's a very ambitious mission and requires lots of things going right for humans to leave the planet. But this project is encouraging other people to talk about the wider implications.
"It's definitely feasible. Space travel is risky but at the same time, there is a time scale in place."

The other British hopefuls are Dr Maggie Lieu, 24, a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Birmingham, Oxford University student Ryan MacDonald, 21, from Derby, Alison Rigby, 35, a science laboratory technician, from Beckenham, Kent, and Clare Weedon, 27, a systems integration manager for Virgin Media, from Addlestone, in Surrey.

In total, 50 men and 50 women have been shortlisted from around the world, including 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Oceania.

They were selected from a pool of 660 candidates after taking part in online interviews with the mission's chief medical officer Norbert Kraft, where they were tested on their understanding of the risks involved, team spirit and motivation to be part of the expedition.

Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, said: "The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars. These aspiring martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be."

Candidates that were not selected will have a chance to re-apply in a new application round that will open in 2015.



Credits: Telegraph.co.uk

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive?

Scientists have found life on Earth in extreme environments like this Yellowstone hot spring, but alien life might be more elusive.

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? That was a central question posed at a session here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science). All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets might break free from that mold, making it difficult for us to identify. We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life right under our noses.

All life as we know it follows a standard protocol, known as the “central dogma,” using DNA and RNA to store genetic information, and translating that into proteins. And all living things rely on the same handful of chemical elements. So, when searching for life in remote or extreme environments scientists typically look for signs of the kind of life we’re familiar with. But, “if we have other organisms out there that do things just slightly differently, we might miss the boat,” geobiologist Victoria Orphan of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena told attendees.

Biologists have proposed the existence of a “shadow biosphere” an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to. Most of life’s diversity on our planet is too small to see, making microbes the most likely place to look for these new types of life. Already, new discoveries are shaking our beliefs about what life is. Recently discovered giant, amoeba-infecting viruses blur the line between life and nonlife although they rely on their hosts for essential biological functions, the bacteria-sized viruses have complex genomes. Such unexpected discoveries suggest that we shouldn’t define what we are searching for by what we know is already out there, Orphan said.

But it’s hard to search for something if you don’t know what it is. One general hallmark to look for, said planetary scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is a system that is out of equilibrium. Life takes in and uses energy, altering its environment in the process. Without life, for example, our planet would not have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, as chemical reactions tend to deplete oxygen. The proliferation of left-handed amino acids is another example we see on Earth; life is made up of left-handed amino acids, but not their mirror-images. Such a lopsided situation is an indication of an environment out of whack and perhaps life.

However, what we can search for also depends on what’s practical. As a result, NASA’s strategy for searching out life on other planets has generally been to “follow the water,” looking for life similar to that on Earth, Porco said, because that's what we know how to find. Porco called on other scientists on the panel to come up with a “working definition” of life that could give planetary scientists guidance as to what else they should look for. For example, on other worlds, life might form in liquid hydrocarbons instead of water, such as on Saturn's moon, Titan. Different markers might reveal life in hydrocarbon seas.

Rather than searching for new forms of life on Earth or in the stars, other scientists study the question from the bottom up, looking for possible precursors of life. Chemist David Lynn of Emory University in Atlanta points out that misfolded proteins like the those implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's show some similarities to life, namely that they can generate diversity in the different ways that they fold, and can undergo chemical evolution, in which those folded proteins are selected not genetically, but chemically. Such precursors could form complex chemical networks, which might be the foundation of radically different life elsewhere in the universe.

Biochemist John Chaput of Arizona State University, Tempe, takes the approach of working backward from the central dogma, asking if early life could have used a simpler precursor to RNA and DNA. He studies threose nucleic acid, which is not found in nature but can be synthesized in the lab. It forms a similar structure to DNA, but with a different backbone and would've been simpler to produce and replicate on primordial Earth. “Life did not choose DNA or RNA out of chemical necessity,” he said. “There may have been many alternative paths to the evolution of life.”

Credits: ScienceMAG

We should make first contact: scientists say it is time to search for aliens

Space experts in the US say it is time to try actively to contact intelligent life on other worlds - but others argue it might be dangerous

Humans should start sending messages to planets in habitable zones in the hope that alien life-forms might hear us, scientists have said.

Space experts at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life (SETI) project said the time has come to stop passively listening for signs of intelligence in other worlds and actively start seeking contact.

Kepler Space Telescope captured tens of thousands of stars in the constellation of Cygnus and Lyra

SETI was founded 20 years ago to monitor the cosmos for signals of alien life and involves astrophysicists from institutions like Harvard University and the University of California. However as early 1960 scientists were scanning space for clues to other civilizations. 

Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, said we should now start devising a message to send to planets which have recently been discovered in the "goldilocks zone" – areas of space where it is neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist.

Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone

"For over a half century, scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have sought evidence of the existence of other civilizations by searching for intentional radio signals," he said

"As we move into the next half century we should expand our strategies, so we are not only passively listening, but also transmitting intentional, information-rich signals.
"With recent detections of Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars, we have natural targets for such transmission projects.
"We should repeatedly target a set of nearby stars over the course of several months or years.”

The Kepler Telescope

NASA’s Kepler Telescope has so far found more than 3,800 planets in habitable zones which could hold liquid water, and life. Experts say targeting them with a signal is the best hope of making contact with new worlds.

However the content of a message has been hotly debated. To find out what humans would like to say to aliens, SETI founded a site called Earth Speaks and asked people to devise an interstellar message.

The smallest-ever planet outside our solar system has been spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope - a rocky planet similar in size to the Earth

While women tended to offer friendship, and even coffee and biscuits in their missives, men were more likely to talk about science and inquire about their civilisation. Overall the main theme was asking for help from aliens rather than seeking to impart the wisdom of Earth.

Mr Vakoch said humans have a "cosmic inferiority complex" and automatically assume that extra-terrestrials will be more technologically advanced than us and so have nothing to learn.
But he added: "Humankind has a range of experiences and insights that cannot be imagined by any other civilization.

"Though extraterrestrials may be more technologically advanced we are, they will never be more human. It’s the breadth of our human experience that we should be conveying in our interstellar messages."

The experts at SETI say that governments must start working together to devise the message. The equipment to send basic messages already exists and scientists say that reluctance ‘more political than technical.’

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI research, said some people resisted the approach, fearing it could alert our presence to dangerous extra-terrestrial races.

"It’s very controversial,” he said, “There are some people who think this might be dangerous.
"The idea that you are somehow endangering Earth I don’t think holds any water because we have been broadcasting into space willy nilly since the Second World War – televisions, FM radio and radar.

"These signals have been going into space for 70-somethng years so they are quite far out and any society that could come to Earth and incinerate Belgium, if they think they deserve it, is fully capable of picking up these broadcasts.”
But he admits that it is a gamble whether visiting aliens will come in peace.

“Nobody knows if they are friendly or not,” he added.

“You could be optimistic and think they are all friendly or figure they are like ones in the movies and hellbent on destruction. I suspect there is a whole range.

“Earth has been sitting around for 4 billion years with life on it and nobody’s thought to destroy it.

“It may be they want to proseltyse. The other thing is that they are just interested in the culture – that’s what’s special about us. Maybe they are interested in rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe they want Cliff Richard.”
However American scientist and futurist David Brin believes it is a mistake to try and contact alien worlds.

"We are the youngest of all technological races in the cosmos, like an orphan child who suddenly finds herself wandering a strange jungle that’s quiet, too quiet,” he said.

"Perhaps you have the kind of personality that says: "What the heck! I might as well shout and see what happens!"

"That’s all very well if the only one you are putting at risk is yourself. But when that risk is also imposed upon our children -- all of humanity and our planet – is it too much to ask that we discuss it first?"

The scientists were speaking at the annual Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS annual conference in San Jose.

Credits: Telegraph.co.uk

Drones and satellites spot lost civilizations in unlikely places

Satellite images have revealed traces of a vast ancient civilization in the Sahara desert.

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA--What do the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforest have in common? Until recently, archaeologists would have told you they were both inhospitable environments devoid of large-scale human settlements. But they were wrong. Here today at the annual meeting of the AAAS (which publishes Science), two researchers explained how remote sensing technology, including satellite imaging and drone flights, is revealing the traces of past civilizations that have been hiding in plain sight.

“Although [the Amazon and Sahara] seem so different, a lot of the questions are actually very similar,” says David Mattingly, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He studies a culture known as the Garamantes, which began building a network of cities, forts, and farmland around oases in the Sahara of southern Libya around 1000 BCE. The civilization reached its peak in the early centuries of the Common Era, only to decline after 700 CE, possibly because they had tapped out the region’s groundwater, Mattingly explains.

Many Garamantian structures are still standing in some form or another today, but very few have been visited by archaeologists. It’s hard to do fieldwork in the hot, dry, remote Sahara, Mattingly explains. “And that relative absence of feet on the ground leads to an absence of evidence” about the Garamantes and other cultures that may have thrived before the Islamic conquest of the region. But since many Garamantin sites haven’t been buried or otherwise destroyed, they show up in stunning detail in satellite photos. By analyzing such images, “in an area of about 2,500 square kilometers, we’ve located 158 major settlements, 184 cemeteries, 30 square kilometers of fields, plus a variety of irrigation systems,” Mattingly says. Not only have he and his team been able to select the most promising sites for on-the-ground fieldwork, they can also use the images to reconstruct the Garamantes’ regional footprint something that would have been very hard to do by excavating one site at a time.

Satellite images are less helpful when it comes to the Amazon rainforest, where a thick canopy of vegetation blocks the view of most signs of ancient settlement. So José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the UK, has opted for drones to search for the region’s lost civilizations.

When ecologists look at the Amazon, they see “virgin wilderness” untouched by humans, Iriarte says. But thanks to the discovery of large-scale earthworks called geogylphs and terra preta “black earth” that was purposely enriched by humans in the past archaeologists have concluded that at least parts of the rainforest must have been home to large, agricultural settlements. “Now it’s time to start quantifying past human impact in different parts of the Amazon,” says Iriarte.

Iriarte’s drone will be outfitted with LiDAR equipment to map the ground through the trees, which is very helpful for revealing large geoglyphs that may be hidden beneath the canopy. But the unmanned aerial vehicle will also be equipped with tools that can analyze the distribution of the plants themselves. If past cultures “farmed” the rainforest by cultivating helpful crops in specific places, their practices may have shaped which species grow where, even today which could change the way we think about conservation in the Amazon. “The very biodiversity that we seek to safeguard may itself be a legacy of centuries or millennia of human intervention,” Iriarte says.

“These new technologies have just opened up these regions to us,” Mattingly says. But time is of the essence. Sites in both the Amazon and the Sahara are being built over by modern development, sometimes by people who don’t understand the archaeological importance of what they are destroying. Remote sensing data may be the only way to capture information about these sites before they are gone for good.

Credits: ScienceMag

These weird animals make scientists think that life could thrive on one of Jupiter's moons

Shrimp have taken over one of the most inhospitable places on Earth at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. Down there, the environment is so extreme that scientists think it could resemble conditions on Jupiter's watery moon, Europa. This begs the question: Do alien shrimp exist?

Living under such unwelcoming conditions comes at great cost: These shrimp are blind and sometimes eat each other when food is scarce.

Only first discovered in 2012, the shrimp are not well understood. But last November, a team of scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory made some surprising discoveries while studying the shrimp to better understand how life might exist on other celestial bodies in the solar system in particular, Europa.

Their secret to survival

These shrimp live four miles beneath the water's surface, where they endure bone-crushing pressures, frigid temperatures, and eternal darkness. Yet, these extreme, thumb-sized shrimp are thriving, which is what makes them some of the likeliest candidates to survive on Europa.

Their secret to survival is the hydrothermal vents peaking out from the seafloor. Some of the deepest in the world, these vents are produced by underwater volcanoes that spew boiling-hot water and sulfuric acid into the surrounding environment.

They live and feed off this sulfuric acid, because they have bacteria inside their mouths and gills that digest it. These bacteria are crucial to the shrimp's survival in the absence of sunlight — the bacteria convert the sulfuric acid into organic matter that then feeds the shrimp.

You can see the shrimp swarming along these vents in the image below — they remain close enough to the vents openings to access the sulfuric acid but far enough away so they avoid too high of a dose, which would be poisonous and potentially fatal.

Since they live where sunlight cannot penetrate, the shrimp have no need for eyes and are therefore blind. Instead, they have receptors on the back of their heads that measure changes in water temperature to help them navigate their surroundings, and, if needed, find their way closer to the hot vents.

These shrimp, called Rimicaris hybisae, have only been observed to live along these vents at the bottom of the Caribbean sea. Sometimes they will gather in groups as large as 180 shrimp per square foot.

Europa has an icy shell on the surface, but underneath is a vast ocean of salt water. Although Europa's ocean receives no sunlight, the moon has tectonic plates that likely warm the moons oceans and create hydrothermal vents like those at the bottom of Earth's oceans.

"Whether an animal like this could exist on Europa heavily depends on the actual amount of energy that's released there, through hydrothermal vents," said Emma Versteegh, a postdoctoral fellow at JPL, in a NASA statement.

While studying the shrimp, the JPL scientists discovered something morbid. Traditionally, these shrimp survive on the organic matter their local bacteria provide, but when the going gets tough, these shrimp will eat anything around, even each other.

Check out a video describing the JPL scientists' study with more amazing footage of these crazy, extreme little shrimpies:

YouTube: Extreme Shrimp May Hold Clues to Alien Life

Read more: Businessinsider.com