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The two newest planets spied by the Kepler space telescope are locked in a forever back-and-forth.

When Kepler’s scientists saw a star 2,000 light years away dim slightly, they knew there was the chance it was the telltale signature of a planet passing in front. But when the calculations were done and the confirmation came in, they found a surprise—what they’d seen was actually two stars transiting in front of the star.

NASA says it’s the first time they’ve ever caught such a sight, and today the scientists officially announced the finding with a study in Science. While other studies have found multiple planets around a single star–in fact, it happened earlier this week–those studies have used different planet-detection techniques like the wobble method.

The two worlds, both gas giants, do more than orbit the same star on the same plane, though. They push and pull each other in a motion that keeps the two exoplanets close to arithmetic celestial perfection. Kepler-9B, the larger, orbits the star in 19.24 days on average, the astronomers saw. Kepler-9c, the smaller, completes a revolution in an average of 38.91 days. But every time the scientists checked, 9b’s orbit was getting 4 minutes longer, while 9c’s shrank by 39 minutes.

That suggests the planets are in the midst of a gravitational push-pull that keeps the orbits close to a 2-to-1 ratio, in what’s known as a planetary resonance. In our own solar system, Pluto and Neptune are in a similar resonance (2-to-3), which is why little Pluto can’t be kicked out its orbit. The same thing applies to the Kepler-9 system [MSNBC].

While the ratio at the moment slightly exceeds 2 to 1, Kepler-9b’s growing orbital time and 9c’s shrinking one mean the system is moving back toward 2 to 1. Like a pendulum it will swing to a ratio just smaller than 2 to 1, and then swing back as the two planets’ gravities keep each other constantly in check.

Study leader Matthew Holman says that the larger, inner world has a mass about 80 times that of Earth. Its smaller counterpart tallies about 54 Earth masses.

“The variation in transit times depend upon the masses of the planet,” Holman told reporters in a news conference announcing the findings. “The larger the mass the larger the variations. These variations allows us to determine the mass of the objects and we can confirm that they are planets” [Universe Today].

There’s something else in the Kepler-9 system, too: a candidate for a small planet just about one and a half times the size of Earth. However, while the two large planets are now confirmed—bringing Kepler’s exoplanet count to seven—the possible super-Earth remains with the hundreds of candidates in Kepler’s files that must be confirmed through further studies.

Image: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Source: Astronomers Find 2 Giant Exoplanets Locked in an Endless Dance

An anonymous reader writes “Some specific bacteria colonies from Beer (the place, not the beverage) left for several days outside the ISS actually survived extreme temperatures, UV and other radiations, lack of water and all the like. They were later brought back to Earth for examination: such resistant bacteria may be the base of life support systems or bio-mining on colonies off Earth, and of course for terraforming, eventually. No clue in the article about how dangerous those bacteria might have become after the exposure or when they’ll start eating their examiners.”

Source: Bacteria From Beer Lasts 553 Days in Space

Sponges are just about the simplest animals on the Earth. And they might be the oldest ones we know, too.

Adam Maloof and colleagues published a study in Nature Geoscience this week about their find that could push back the oldest known animal life by 70 million years. In Australia, Maloof says, the team found remains of ancient sponges dating to about 650 million years ago.

The prior oldest known hard-bodied animals were reef-dwelling organisms called Namacalathus, which date to approximately 550 million years ago. Disputed remains for other possible soft-bodied animals date to between 577 and 542 million years ago [Discovery News].

At 650 million years old, the sponges would predate the Cambrian Explosion—a huge blossoming of diversity in animal life—by 100 million years. These organisms would also predate an intense moment in our planet’s history known as “Snowball Earth,” according to paleobiologist Martin Brasier. It’s even possible that they helped cause it.

A few million years after the sponges were around a glaciation extended to the equator, wiping out large swathes of life. Brasier argues that in the absence of more complex creatures that can recycle debris, like worms, the carbon in early life forms got buried in a constantly growing carbon sink, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and causing global cooling. Sponges would have contributed to such a cooling sink, he says [New Scientist].

According to Maloof, his team found the fossils by sheer accident: They were digging around in Australia for clues about the climate of the past, and first wrote off the finds as mere mud chips.

“But then we noticed these repeated shapes that we were finding everywhere – wishbones, rings, perforated slabs and anvils. By the second year, we realised we had stumbled upon some sort of organism, and we decided to analyse the fossils. No-one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the ’snowball Earth’” [BBC News].

The analysis itself was no picnic. To perform an x-ray or CT examination of fossils, you need to be looking at a fossil that has a different density than the surrounding rock. But the sponges were essentially the same density, forcing Maloof’s team to get creative.

To get around this problem, the researchers used what Maloof called a “serial grinder and imager.” One of 32 collected block samples from the formation was shaved off 50 microns at a time — about half the width of a human hair — and then photographed after each minute shaving. The images were then stacked to create complete three-dimensional models of two of the sponge fossils [Discovery News].

However, there may be controversy to come on this finding. The Australian reports on geologists from that country pooh-poohing the find by their American rivals and saying they have better and older fossils.

Image: Matoof Lab (sponge in blue)

Source: Study: 650-Million-Year-Old Sponges May Be World’s Oldest Animals

astroengine writes “In the wake of recent solar activity, some space cadets were very quick to point out a causal link between geomagnetic storms and the wildfires currently ravaging the landscape surrounding Moscow. Of course, this is patently false. But is there a scenario when the onset of a solar storm could have secondary effects, sparking fires in already arid regions? Possibly. What’s more, it already happened, 150 years ago.”

Source: Can Solar Storms Cause Wildfires?

Way up in the Great White North, beneath Canada’s Baffin Island, lies material from the very beginning of the planet.

The search for primordial stuff—rocks that have survived 4.5 billion years since the formation of the Earth without being changed by forces that shook and scrambled our planet—is one of geology’s long-running quests. In Nature this week, Matthew Jackson says he may have done it. Jackson’s team found lava rocks in Canada with a signature that matches that of the newly formed Earth, suggesting there is material below the snowy surface that has endured unchanged throughout the planet’s history.

They have the highest proportion of the isotope helium-3 relative to helium-4 of any rocks known. This suggests that the rocks came from a “primitive” region of Earth, as, unlike helium-4, helium-3 can’t be replenished and thus must have come from the original building blocks of the planet. What’s more, the ratio of two isotopes of the element neodymium match what geochemists would expect for a residue from Earth’s early ocean of molten magma [ScienceNOW].

It’s the magma pocket deep in the Earth’s interior that’s thought to be an unchanged remnant of the early, molten Earth, not the lava rocks it produced: Curiously, the surface rocks are only about 60 million years old. So if Jackson’s team is correct, this pocket of primordial mantle still fueled eruptions recently (in geologic terms). That’s a surprise:

“Even if a vestige of such material remained, it seems unlikely that it would be found in any samples from Earth’s surface or the shallow subsurface that are available to geologists,” observed David Graham of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who wrote a commentary in the same issue of Nature. “Yet that is what (this) new evidence suggests” [Discovery News].

What goes on deep down in the Earth is, as you’d imagine, difficult to prove. So after the question of whether Jackson is correct, there’s the question of how this primitive material survived and ended up where it did.

But regardless of how it happened, this ancient sample of the planet’s internal makeup will provide important information to geologists trying to piece together the early history of the Earth and its inner workings, Graham said [Los Angeles Times].

Image: Don Francis

Source: Found: Primordial Magma From the Hot Dawn of the Earth

daem0n1x writes “It appears that some countries in oil-poor Europe are making a successful transition to renewable energy at a fast and steady pace. This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines. Portugal has no oil, but lots of sun and wind. Five years ago, the government decided, against many dissenting voices, to invest massively in taking advantage of the country’s natural resources in clean energy. The results are here. It used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it.”

Source: Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover

This week brings the annual return of the Perseids, one of the most stunning meteor showers of the year, visible from just about anywhere.

WHAT: The height of the Perseid shower comes every August, because that’s the time our planet passes through a certain debris path.

The Perseids are created by the tiny remnants left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. The Earth passes through this material once a year, creating a spectacular show as the cometary particles burn up in the atmosphere [Discovery News].

WHERE: Like the Orionid meteors, which come around in October, the Perseids are so named because of the constellation from which they appear to originate.

If you trace the Perseid meteor trails backward, they meet within the constellation Perseus the Hero; this is how the shower got its name [Astronomy].

WHEN: Tonight (Wednesday) through Friday night we’ll see the height of Perseid visibility once the sky reaches full darkness, from 11 p.m. to midnight wherever you might be until the first light of dawn. On Friday night the crescent moon will set before twilight ends, giving stargazers a dark sky to gaze at.

Swift-Tuttle’s debris zone is so wide, Earth spends weeks inside it. Indeed, we are in the outskirts now, and sky watchers are already reporting a trickle of late-night Perseids. The trickle could turn into a torrent between August 11th and 13th when Earth passes through the heart of the debris trail [NASA Science News].

Indeed, the opening shot of the Perseids appeared as a bright fireball over Alabama on August 3.

WHAT YOU NEED: Your two eyes, and a place away from the city lights. For more cool Perseid details, check out Astronomy’s coverage.

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter

Image: flickr / aresauburn

Source: Perseid Meteor Shower: Where & When to Catch the Sky Show

ideaMUX writes “NASA’s solar dynamics observatory recently detected an M-class flare hurling a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. The CME is not fully directed toward Earth, but some of the plasma cloud may be visible in the magnetosphere tonight, causing a geomagnetic disturbance and possible aurora. NASA said M-class flares are medium-sized, and can cause brief radio blackouts that affect Earth’s Polar regions. Minor radiation storms sometimes follow M-class flares.”

Source: Polar Flares To Be Visible Tonight

Listen, people of Earth: Everything’s going to be fine. All we have to do is survive another century or two without self-destructing as a species. Then we’ll get off this rock, spread throughout space, and everything will be all right.

If this is not your idea of “optimism,” then you are not Stephen Hawking. The esteemed physicist garnered headlines, and some eye-rolls, after telling Big Think last week that humanity needs to leave the Earth in the future or face extinction.

He’s not knocking climate scientists’ attempts to figure things out on Earth–he’s just thinking long term. “There have been a number of times in the past when our survival has been touch-and-go,” explains Hawking at Big Think, mentioning the Cuban Missile Crisis, and “the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future…. Our population and our use of the finite resources of the planet earth are growing exponentially along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill,” while “our genetic code still caries our selfish and aggressive instincts” [The Atlantic].

Combined with Hawking’s statement earlier this year that it might be dangerous to contact aliens because they could come and wipe us out, the physicist’s latest warning makes it feel like he’s increasingly a member of the gloom-and-doom crowd. But not so. He’s just the kind of person who thinks on the long, long term.

Let’s jump back to another publicly engaged scientist: Carl Sagan’s message in Cosmos that the stars await… if we don’t destroy ourselves.

Sagan was pushing urgency and vigilance, not gloominess. The same, I think, is true of Hawking—it’s why he calls himself an “optimist” despite his dire warnings of treacherous times ahead. Indeed, he says, if humanity can just get past the next 200 years without driving itself to extinction, then we’re good to go. Once we spread to different locations in space, no event contained to a single world—even a catastrophic one like all-out nuclear war or a massive asteroid strike—could do in the species by itself.

Hawking concludes the Big Think message about the necessity of a human future in space by saying, “That is why I’m in favor of manned, or should I say ‘personed’, space flight.” That is: Putting people back on the moon or take them to Mars wouldn’t be just a vainglorious gesture. The next phase of humanity demands it.

He’s far from the only one thinking far into the future. Take DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, who, in his book Death from the Skies!, discusses audacious plans for our ancestors to take way, way down the line to survive the slow dying and then death of the sun. (For a culture so plugged into now, it seems laughable to consider something billions of years down the line. But where Hawking may be proven wrong in his 100-200 years statement, he is clearly correct about the options for humanity’s long-term future: We’ll either leave the Earth or die before we get the chance.)

Or, if you want to go all the way to the far end of the optimism spectrum, take another future-obsessed theoretical physicist: Michio Kaku, whom I interviewed about his TV show Sci-Fi Science for the September issue of DISCOVER, on newsstands now. The outline of a Type I, or global, civilization is now emerging on the Earth, he says, with the Internet and even type I sports—like the FIFA World Cup. And whether or not you agree humans are doomed if they don’t leave the Earth for points beyond, he believes our future is out there.

“It’s not guaranteed we’ll [even] hit Type I,” he says. “But I’m optimistic.”

Image: NASA

Source: Hawking: If Humans Survive a Couple Centuries, We’ll Get Off This Rock

Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times reports that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a list of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by September 30 after discussions with provincial and municipal officials to identify industrial operations with outdated, inefficient technology. The goal of the factory closings is ‘to enhance the structure of production, heighten the standard of technical capability and international competitiveness and realize a transformation of industry from being big to being strong,’ the ministry says. The current Chinese five-year plan calls for using 20 percent less energy this year for each unit of economic output than in 2005 but surging production by heavy industry since last winter has put in question China’s ability to meet this target. In addition to the energy-efficiency objective in the current five-year plan, a plan announced by President Hu Jintao late last year called for China to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of economic output by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.”

Source: China To Close 2,000 Factories In Energy Crackdown