Save Tiger !! Save Man-kind !!

Saving the tiger means saving mankind..

Saving the tiger means saving mankind..

Not only is tiger a beautiful animal but it is also the indicator of the forest's health. Saving the tiger means we save the forest since tiger cannot live in places where trees have vanished and in turn secure food and water for all.

If we make sure tigers live, we have to make sure that deer, antelope and all other animals that the tiger eats (its prey base) live. To make sure that these herbivores live, we must make sure that all the trees, grass and other plants that these prey animals need for food are protected. In this way, the whole forest gets saved! Saving the tiger means saving its entire forest kingdom with all the other animals in it.

Also forests catch and help store rainwater and protect soils. In this way we protect our rivers and recharge groundwater sources. Areas with less trees lead to floods, killing people and destroying homes. It takes away the precious soil, leaving behind a wasteland. The soil jams up our lakes and dams, reducing their ability to store water. By destroying the tiger's home, we not only harm tigers, but also ourselves.

The tiger thus becomes the symbol for the protection of all species on our earth since it is at the top of the foodchain. This is why we sometimes call the tiger, an apex predator, an indicator of our ecosystem's health

You must watch this video and please help the tigers .. Remember Indians only 1141 tigers left in india. Please help them !! they are crying for help !!!

How to save tigers in India:

Over the past century the number of tigers in India has fallen from about 40,000 to less than 4,000 (and possibly as few as 1,500). Relentless poaching and clearing of habitat for agriculture have been the primary drivers of this decline, though demand for tiger skins and parts for "medicinal" purposes has become an increasingly important threat in recent years.

However the news is not all bad. Research published last year showed that if protected and given sufficient access to abundant prey, tiger populations can quickly stabilize. With India's large network of protected areas and continued funding from conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society, the findings provide hope that tigers can avoid extinction in the wild.

Camera trap shot of a tiger in India's Nagarahole National Park. Photo by U. Karanth/Wildlife Conservation Society.

Now a new study offers further evidence the tigers can be saved. Writing in the journal Biological Conservation, a team of scientists showed that parks in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal can sustain nearly twice the number of tigers they currently support if small conservation measures are adopted.

The History's masterpiece : The DINOSAURS

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrate animals for over 160 million years, from the lateTriassic period (about 230 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous period (about 65 million years ago), when the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event caused the extinction of most dinosaur species. The fossil record indicates that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassicperiod, and most paleontologists regard them as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived until the present day.

Dinosaurs were a varied group of animals. Paleontologists have identified over 500 distinct genera and more than 1,000 different species of dinosaur, and remains have been found on every continent on Earth. Some dinosaurs were herbivorous, others carnivorous. Some were bipedal, other squadrupedal, and others were able to shift between these body postures. Many species developed elaborate skeletal modifications such as bony armor, horns or crests. Although generally known for their large size, many dinosaurs were human-sized or even smaller. Most major groups of dinosaurs are known to have built nests and laid eggs, suggesting an oviparity similar to that of modern birds.

The term "dinosaur" was coined in 1842 by the English paleontologist Richard Owen, and derives from Greek δεινός (deinos) "terrible, powerful, wondrous" + σαῦρος (sauros) "lizard". Through the first half of the twentieth century, most of the scientific community believed dinosaurs to have been sluggish, unintelligent cold-blooded animals. Most research conducted since the 1970s, however, has indicated that dinosaurs were active animals with elevated metabolisms and numerous adaptations for social interaction.

If you want to experience the world of dinosaurs , if you want to live in the past i.e in the dinosaur world, just download this software and install it. you can explore the whole wide world of the mighty dinosaurs.

Just copy the below link and paste it in your address bar of your browser. It will automatically start downloading . No need of worrying. I ensure you that it is virus free. So feel free to download.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/games/dinosaur_world/game/dinosaur_world_low.exe

Dinosaur Facts:-

The longest known Acrocanthosaurus to be found was 11.5 meters in length.

Animal News

Rarest of the Rare: List of Critically Endangered Species

The list of a dozen animals includes an eclectic collection of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Some are well known, such as the Sumatran orangutan; while others are more obscure, including vaquita, an ocean porpoise. The list appears in the 2010-1011 edition of State of the Wild -- a Global Portrait.

Threats to each species vary widely. In the case of the vaquita, fishermen's nets are catching them and inadvertently causing them to drown. Meanwhile, the Grenada dove -- the national bird of the small island nation -- has been severely impacted by habitat loss. Other species suffer from illegal trade, as in the case of the ploughshare tortoise.

"The Rarest of the Rare provides a global snapshot of some of the world's most endangered animals," said State of the Wild Kent Redford, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Institute. "While the news is dire for some species, it also shows that conservation measures can and do protect wildlife if given the chance to work."

The list of endangered species includes:

• Cuban crocodile: Currently restricted to two small areas of Cuba.
• Grenada dove: The national bird of Grenada is threatened by habitat loss.
• Florida bonneted bat: Thought to be extinct in 2002; a small colony has since been discovered.
• Green-eyed frog: Only a few hundred of these small amphibians are left.
• Hirola: Also called Hunter's hartebeest; the hirola is a highly threatened African antelope.
• Ploughshare tortoise: With only 400 left, the ploughshare tortoise is threatened by the illegal pet trade.
• Island gray fox: Living on the California Channel Islands, this is the smallest fox in the United States.
• Sumatran orangutan: This population has declined 80 percent during the past 75 years.
• Vaquita: This small ocean porpoise is drowning in fishing nets.
• White-headed langur: Only 59 of these monkeys remain on a small island off Vietnam.

The 2010 list highlights positive news, with two species on the road to recovery thanks to conservation efforts: Rober's tree frog whose population has grown due to captive breeding in zoos; and Przewalski's horse, which is starting to rebuild numbers after being re-introduced into the wild.

The 2010-2011 State of the Wild includes a special section devoted to the impact of human conflicts on wildlife and wild places. It considers how conservation can contribute to peace-building and reconstruction in post-conflict areas.

Invasive Fish and Mussels Team Up to Transfer Toxic Substances Into Great Lakes Walleyes

The links between zebra mussels, round gobies and contaminated Saginaw Bay walleyes is a disturbing example of unanticipated problems that can occur when non-native species get loose in the Great Lakes, said University of Michigan fishery biologist David Jude, lead author of a paper on the topic published online April 9 in theJournal of Great Lakes Research.

"This zebra mussel-to-goby link in Great Lakes contaminated areas is one of the main conduits of PCB transfer to top aquatic predators such as the walleye, and it plays a substantial role in PCB transfer to birds, mammals and reptiles in the region as well," said Jude, a research scientist at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment.

Between 2005 and 2007, Jude's team collected walleyes, round gobies and various other fish species, as well as zebra mussels and zooplankton, in the Tittabawassee River, the Saginaw River and Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay. Then they measured levels of PCBs in all those organisms -- the first such study in the Saginaw Bay region.

"Though the levels of PCBs in Saginaw Bay walleyes have declined sharply in recent years, these toxic substances continue to show up at levels high enough to warrant concern," Jude said.

The highest levels were seen in the largest walleyes, which contained an average of 1,900 nanograms of PCBs per gram -- just under the 2,000 nanogram Environmental Protection Agency threshold for mandatory fish-consumption advisories. A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are manmade chemicals that were once used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications. But the manufacture of PCBs was banned in the United States in 1979, and EPA now classifies the chemicals as probable human carcinogens.

Beginning in the 1940s, factories, chemical manufacturers and municipal wastewater treatment plants discharged PCBs into the Saginaw River; many of the PCBs settled into river-bottom sediments. The contamination led to advisories against human consumption of selected species and sizes of fish from the Saginaw River, as well as many species of fish in the Bay.

In 2000-01, the mouth of the Saginaw River was dredged to remove accumulated sediments contaminated with PCBs, metals and various hazardous compounds. Since then, the level of PCBs has dropped precipitously in Saginaw Bay walleyes.

In addition to the U-M scientists, Jude's team includes researchers from Grand Valley State University and the University of Saskatchewan. The team compared its results to the findings of a similar study conducted in the same area in 1990, prior to the dredging project.

Jude's team found that the average concentration of PCBs in Saginaw River walleyes dropped 65 percent between 1990 and 2007, a result that is consistent with previous studies that also showed significant declines. Much of the change can likely be attributed to the dredging project, though changes in the food web and other factors may also have played a role, Jude said.

The walleye is the top predator in the Saginaw Bay ecosystem, and the bay's world-class walleye fishery is a key part of the $7 billion-a-year Great Lakes fishery.

Twenty years ago, Saginaw Bay walleyes fed mainly on alewives, another non-native fish species. But alewives have been nearly eliminated from Lake Huron, a decline blamed largely on predation by salmon and the proliferation of invasive zebra and quagga mussels, which have depleted two of the alewives' main food sources.

As alewives declined, the zebra mussel/round goby/walleye link enabled substantial amounts of PCBs to continue moving up the food chain and into Saginaw Bay walleyes.

Walleyes prey on round gobies, which in turn gorge on bottom-dwelling zebra mussels that suck up massive amounts of lake water. Each fingernail-size zebra mussel filters up to a liter of water a day -- taking in any toxic substances present in the water. Some of those contaminants are incorporated into the mussels' tissues and shells, and round gobies eat the little mollusks shell and all.

"Zebra mussels can accumulate relatively high concentrations of PCBs, which can then be transferred to round gobies and eventually to walleyes," Jude said.

The Saginaw Bay/Saginaw River region is designated an International Joint Commission Area of Concern, due to contamination of sediments with persistent inorganic and organic pollutants. It is one of 14 Areas of Concern in Michigan.

Authors of the Journal of Great Lakes Research paper are Jude and Stephen Hensler of the University of Michigan, Richard Rediske and Jim O'Keefe of Grand Valley State University, and John Giesy of the University of Saskatchewan.

Support for the study was provided by the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment and the U-M Office of the Vice President for Research.

Eating Like a Bird Helps Forests Grow

A new study examines complex interactions in the middle of the pyramid, where birds, bats and lizards consume insects. These predators eat enough insects to indirectly benefit plants and increase their growth, Smithsonian scientists report. "Our findings are relevant to natural communities like grasslands and forests, but also to human food production, as these insect-eating animals also reduce insect pests on crop plants," said Sunshine Van Bael, scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Previous theory on food webs suggested that the effects of insect-eaters on plants would be weak, because animals like birds not only feed on herbivores -- which is good for the plants- but may also benefit them by feeding spiders and predatory insects. If a bird eats a lot of spiders, for example, caterpillars could be "released" from spider predation and then consume more plant material. The authors found that previous theory did not hold true; in fact, the birds simply ate the spiders and the caterpillars.

The authors reviewed more than 100 studies of insect predation by birds, bats or lizards from four continents. They found that the identity of the predator didn't make much of a difference. Together, by eating herbivores and their insect predators, they reduced damage to plants by 40 percent, which resulted in a 14 percent increase in plant biomass.

"It's no longer apt to say that one 'eats like a bird'," said Van Bael, "Our study shows that birds, bats and lizards act as one big vacuum cleaner up in the treetops. Everything's on the menu."

Nevertheless, there is still a lack of experimental work on the overlap in diets of the insects that birds, lizards and bats are eating, and the insects that the predatory insects, themselves are eating. "Our study shows that birds, bats and lizards protect plants, underscoring the importance of conservation of these species in the face of global change," summed up lead author Kailen Mooney, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California-Irvine.

Co-authors of this study, published online by the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also include researchers from the University of Maryland, the University of Missouri -- St. Louis, the University of Toledo, and the Smithsonian´s Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoological Park. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.

Undersea Superhighway: Long-Distance Larvae Speed to New Undersea Vent Homes

One such "pioneer species,"Ctenopelta porifera, appears to have traveled over 300 kilometers to settle at the site on the underwater mountain range known as the East Pacific Rise. "Ctenopelta had never been observed before at the…study site, and the nearest known population is 350 km to the north," said Lauren S. Mullineaux, a senior scientist in WHOI's biology department.

The discovery -- in collaboration with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) -- clashes with the widely accepted assumption that when local adult life is wiped out in a hydrothermal eruption, it is replaced by a pool of tiny creatures from nearby vents. In this case, however, the larvae that re-settled the post-eruption vent area are noticeably different from the species that were destroyed and appeared to have traveled great distances to do so.

"This raises the question of how they can possibly disperse so far," says Mullineaux. The findings have implications, she says, for the wider distribution of undersea life. "If these new pioneers persist and cause a regime shift, that will expand their range and increase the regional diversity," Mullineaux says.

A report on the research by Mullineaux and her colleagues is published in the current (April 12) issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery of hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in 1977 revolutionized ideas about where and how life could exist. The seafloor vents gushing warm, mineral-rich fluids and teeming with life raised new question that researchers have been studying ever since, including: How can so much life thrive at the sunless seafloor? What is the nature of organisms at hydrothermal vents? How do animals migrate to other vent sites?

It was this last question that motivated Mullineaux and her team as they began their study of a vent area on the East Pacific Rise "to gather observations of currents, larvae and juvenile colonists…in order to understand what physical processes might facilitate dispersal," Mullineaux says. One of the group's primary challenges was to determine where the organisms around the vent came from.

As the scientists set out on their mission in 2006, "we got a surprise," said Mullineaux. "A seafloor eruption was detected at our study site…resulting in changes in topography and enormous disturbance to ecological communities.

"The eruption was, in essence, a natural experiment."

By the time the researchers arrived at the site, they found a scene quite unlike that usually observed at a hydrothermal vent. Normally, such fissures are teeming with life, supported by the hot chemicals that spew from the vents and provide food through microbial chemosynthesis, a deep-sea version of photosynthesis.

But at this spot on the East Pacific Rise, near 9 degrees North, there was no life. The eruption had wiped it out.

"Although the vents survived, the animals did not, and virtually all of the detectable invertebrate communities were paved over," said Mullineaux. "For us, this was an exciting event. In essence it was a natural clearance experiment that allowed us to explore how this elimination of local source populations affected the supply of larvae and re-colonization."

What they found went against the accepted assumption that most of the organisms to re-populate the area would come from relatively nearby. But instead, the new larval inhabitants came from considerable distance.

"These results show clearly that the species arriving after the eruption are different than those before," says Mullineaux, "with two new pioneer species, Ctenopelta porifera and Lepetodrilus tevnianus, prominent."

To the biologist, the most important finding is that "the processes of the larval stage -- as opposed to those of adult organisms--seem to control colonization," Mullineaux says. "We found that a pioneer colonization event by Ctenopelta radically changed the community structure."

But the question remained, how were these weak-swimming larvae propelled such vast distances to the decimated vent area? The answer may lie in a recently developed model by Mullineaux's colleagues Dennis McGillicuddy and Jim Ledwell of WHOI, Bill Lavelle of PMEL and Andreas Thurnherr of LDEO, all part of the LADDER team--LArval Dispersal on the Deep East Pacific Rise.

Seemingly the only way the emigrating larvae could get to their new home from so far away, Mullineaux says, would be to ride ocean-bottom "jets" traveling up to 10 centimeters a second, such as those identified in the work of McGillicuddy and Thurnherr.

Theoretically, however, even these ridge-crest jets might not quite be able to transport the larvae from 350 km within the time frame of their 30-day lifespan, she said. "Either the larvae are using some other transport or they are living longer than we thought," said Mullineaux.

She speculates that large eddies, or whirlpools of water, several hundred kilometers in diameter, may be propelling the migrating larvae even faster -- delivering them to their new home while they are still alive. Or perhaps, she says, the larvae are able to somehow reduce their metabolism and extend their life.

In any case, the findings present an array of fascinating scientific scenarios, Mullineaux says, that warrant further exploration.

They also may open up new ways of looking at the impacts of human activities on the seafloor, such as seafloor mineral mining, which could alter a vent site in a similar way to an eruption. Depending on the site, such activity could conceivably foster a greater diversity of species at a vent that has just been mined, or it could cause extinction, she said. But such scenarios are still highly speculative, she emphasizes

Cat Brain: A Step Toward the Electronic Equivalent

A cat can recognize a face faster and more efficiently than a supercomputer. That's one reason a feline brain is the model for a biologically-inspired computer project involving the University of Michigan.

U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can.

Lu previously built a "memristor," a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now, he has demonstrated that this memristor can connect conventional circuits and support a process that is the basis for memory and learning in biological systems.

A paper on the research is published online in Nano Letters and is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming April edition of the journal.

Astronomical News - II

Planet Or Failed Star? One Of Smallest Stellar Companions Seen By Hubble

The Hubble observation of the diminutive companion to the low-mass red dwarf star CHRX 73 is a dramatic reminder that astronomers do not have a consensus in deciding which objects orbiting other stars are truly planets - even though they have recently provided the definition of 'planet' for objects inside our Solar System.

Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, USA, leader of the international team that found the object (called CHRX 73 'B') is casting his vote for a brown dwarf. "New, more sensitive telescopes are finding smaller and smaller objects of planetary-mass size," said Luhman. "These discoveries have prompted astronomers to ask the question, are planetary-mass companions always planets?"

Some astronomers suggest that an extra-solar object's mass determines whether it is a planet. Luhman and others advocate that an object is only a planet if it formed from the disk of gas and dust that commonly encircles a newborn star. Our Solar System planets formed 4.6 thousand million years ago out of a dust disk around our Sun.

Brown dwarfs, by contrast, form just like stars: from the gravitational collapse of large, diffuse clouds of hydrogen gas. Unlike stars, brown dwarfs do not have quite enough mass to ignite hydrogen fusion reactions in their cores, which power stars such as our Sun.

CHXR 73 B is 31.2 thousand million kilometres from its red dwarf sun. This is roughly 200 times farther than Earth is from our Sun. Being about two million years old, the star is very young when compared with our middle-aged 4.6-thousand-million-year-old Sun.

"The object is so far away from its star that it is unlikely to have formed in a circumstellar disk," Luhman explained. Disks around low-mass stars are about 8 to 16 thousand million kilometres in diameter. There isn't enough material at that distance from the red dwarf to create a planet. Theoretical models show that giant planets like Jupiter form no more than about 5 thousand million kilometres from their stars.

Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys discovered the object while conducting a survey of free-floating brown dwarfs. Astronomers have found hundreds of brown dwarfs in our galaxy since the first brown dwarfs were spied about a decade ago. Most of them are floating through space and not orbiting stars.

"The study of sub-stellar objects in orbit around a star allows us to determine the age, and over time also the mass of the companion. Such studies help us to improve our understanding of the formation and inner structure of brown dwarfs and planets," says Wolfgang Brandner of the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

One way to further settle the uncertainty would be if a disk of dust could be observed around CHRX 73's companion. Like stars, brown dwarfs have circumstellar disks, too. They would be no more than about 4 thousand million kilometres in diameter.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected disks around several free-floating brown dwarfs. But CHRX 73 B is too close to its star for Spitzer to detect the disk. So astronomers will have to wait for the launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in 2013 to determine if this companion has a disk. The Webb telescope will combine Hubble's sharpness, which is needed for detecting close companions, and Spitzer's infrared sensitivity, which is necessary for seeing cool, dusty disks.

There is also a roughly 0.1 percent probability that CHRX 73 B is a background object that by chance happens to align with CHRX 73.

The team's results will appear in the 20 September 2006 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Members of the research team are K. L. Luhman, Penn State University, USA; J. C. Wilson, M. F. Skrutskie, M. J. Nelson, and D. E. Peterson, University of Virginia, USA; W. Brandner, Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany; and J. D. Smith, M. C. Cushing, and E. Young, University of Arizona, USA.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Astronomers Confirm The First Image Of A Planet Outside Of Our Solar System

In February and March of this year, the astronomers took new images of the young brown dwarf and its giant planet companion with the state-of-the-science NACO instrument on the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. The planet is near the southern constellation of Hydra and approximately 200 light years from Earth.

"Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system," said Gael Chauvin, astronomer at the ESO and leader of the team of astronomers who conducted the study.

"The two objects — the giant planet and the young brown dwarf — are moving together; we have observed them for a year, and the new images essentially confirm our 2004 finding," said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and a member of the team. "I'm more than 99 percent confident. This is also the first time that a planet outside of our solar system has been detected far from a star or brown dwarf — nearly twice as far as the distance between Neptune and the sun."

Anne-Marie Lagrange, another member of the team from the Grenoble Observatory in France, said, "Our discovery represents a first step towards one of the most important goals of modern astrophysics: to characterize the physical structure and chemical composition of giant and, eventually, terrestrial-like planets."

Last September, the same team of astronomers reported a faint reddish speck of light in the close vicinity of a young brown dwarf. The feeble object, now called 2M1207b, is more than 100 times fainter than the brown dwarf, 2M1207A. The spectrum of 2M1207b presents a strong signature of water molecules, thereby confirming that it must be cold. Based on the infrared colors and the spectral data, evolutionary model calculations led to the conclusion that 2M1207b is a five-Jupiter-mass planet. Its mass can be estimated also by use of a different method of analysis, which focuses on the strength of its gravitational field; this technique suggests that the mass might be even less than that of five Jupiters.

At the time of its discovery in April 2004, it was impossible to prove that the faint source is not a background object (such as an unusual galaxy or a peculiar cool star with abnormal infrared colors), even though this appeared very unlikely. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, obtained in August 2004, corroborated the VLT/NACO observations, but were taken too soon after the NACO ones to demonstrate conclusively that the faint source is a planet.

The new observations show with high confidence that the two objects are moving together and hence are gravitationally bound.

The paper describing this research has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a premier journal in astronomy.

"Given the rather unusual properties of the 2M1207 system, the giant planet most probably did not form like the planets in our solar system," Chauvin said. "Instead it must have formed the same way our sun formed, by a one-step gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust."

The same European/American team has had another paper just accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. This paper reports the imaging discovery with the same VLT/NACO instrumentation of a lightweight companion to AB Pictoris, a young star located about 150 light years from Earth. The estimated mass of the companion is between 13 and 14 times the mass of Jupiter, which places the companion right on the borderline between massive planets and the lowest mass brown dwarfs.

"Remarkably, this companion is located very far from its host star — about nine times farther from AB Pictoris than Neptune is from the sun," Zuckerman said. Nothing so far from its star has ever been seen in a planetary system before, he added.

Brown dwarfs, the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small, low‑mass stars, are failed stars about the size of Jupiter, with a much larger mass — but not quite large enough to become stars. Like the sun and Jupiter, they are composed mainly of hydrogen gas, perhaps with swirling cloud belts. Unlike the sun, they cannot fuse protons to helium nuclei as their primary internal energy source, and they emit almost no visible light.

Web sites for reference:

ESO: http://www.eso.org/

UCLA Astronomy and Astrophysics: http://www.astro.ucla.edu

Scientists Find Possible Birth Of Tiniest Known Solar System

A team led by Kevin Luhman, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, will discuss this finding in the Dec. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The discovered object, called a brown dwarf, is described as a "failed star" because it is not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion like our sun. The object is only eight times more massive than Jupiter. The fact that a brown dwarf this small could be in the midst of creating a solar system challenges the very definition of star, planet, moon and solar system.

"Our goal is to determine the smallest 'sun' with evidence for planet formation," said Luhman. "Here we have a sun that is so small it is the size of a planet. The question then becomes, what do we call any little bodies that might be born from this disk: planets or moons?" If this protoplanetary disk does form into planets, the whole system would be a miniaturized version of our solar system -- with the central "sun", the planets and their orbits all roughly 100 times smaller.

Luhman's team detected the brown dwarf, called Cha 110913-773444, with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and two telescopes in the Chilean Andes, the Blanco telescope of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and the Gemini South telescope, both international collaborations funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Luhman led a similar observation last year that uncovered a 15-Jupiter-mass brown dwarf with a protoplanetary disk.

Brown dwarfs are born like stars, condensing out of thick clouds of gas and dust. But unlike stars, brown dwarfs do not have enough mass -- and therefore do not have enough pressure and temperature in their cores -- to sustain nuclear fusion. They remain relatively cool objects visible in lower-energy wavelengths such as infrared. A protoplanetary disk is a flat disk made up of dust and gas that is thought to clump together to form planets. Our solar system was formed from such a disk about 5 billion years ago. NASA's Spitzer telescope has found dozens of disk-sporting brown dwarfs so far, several of which show the initial stages of the planet-building process. The material in these disks is beginning to stick together into what may be the "seeds" of planets.

With Spitzer, the science team spotted Cha 110913-773444 about 500 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon. This brown dwarf is young, only about 2 million years old. The team studied properties of the brown dwarf with infrared instruments on the other observatories. The cool, dim protoplanetary disk was detectable only with Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera, which was developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In the past decade, advances in astronomy have led to the detection of small brown dwarfs and massive extra-solar planets, which has brought about a quandary in taxonomy. "There are two camps when it comes to defining planets versus brown dwarfs," said team member Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Some go by size, and others go by how the object formed. For instance, this new object would be called a planet based on its size, but a brown dwarf based on how it formed." If one were to call the object a planet, Fazio said, then Spitzer may have discovered its first "moon-forming" disk. No matter what the final label may be, one thing is clear: The universe produces some strange solar systems very different from our own. Other members of the discovery team are Lucia Adame and Paola D'Alessio of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Nuria Calvet and Lee Hartmann of the University of Michigan.

The 4-meter Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile is part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The nearby 8-meter Gemini South telescope also is managed by AURA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer mission for NASA. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Is It A Planet? Exotic Object Orbiting Star Stirs Exoplanet Classification Rethink

The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is about the size of Jupiter, but packs more than 20 times the mass. It takes only 4 days and 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the Sun.

COROT-exo-3b was found as the satellite observed the drop in the brightness of the star each time the object (COROT-exo-3b) passed in front. "We were taken by surprise when we found this massive object orbiting so close to its parent star", said Dr Magali Deleuil from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), leader of the team that made the discovery. She added, "COROT-exo-3b is really unique - we’re still debating its nature."

The search for planets with orbital periods less than 10 days orbiting close to the parent star has lasted almost 15 years. During this time, scientists have encountered planets with masses 12 times that of Jupiter, and stars 70 times as massive as Jupiter, but none in between. This is why the 20-Jupiter-mass COROT-exo-3b was such a surprise.

This odd find does not fall into either conventional category of planets or brown dwarfs. A brown dwarf is a ‘failed star’, a sub-stellar object that is not undergoing nuclear fusion at its core, but displays some stellar characteristics.

"COROT-exo-3b might turn out to be a rare object found by sheer luck", said Dr Francois Bouchy, from Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP), member of the team that made the discovery. “But it might just be a member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than our Sun. We’re now beginning to think that the more massive the star, the more massive the planet," he said.

Team member Dr Hans Deeg, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), explains why this new object is such an important find for planet hunters, "It has puzzled us; we’re not sure where to draw the boundary between planets and brown dwarfs.”

As a planet, COROT-exo-3b would be the most massive and the densest found to date - more than twice as dense as lead. Studying it will help them better understand how to categorise such objects. The team also wants to understand how such a massive object formed so close to its parent.

This discovery of COROT-exo-3b was supported by a number of ground-based observations that made use of a network of observatories operated by different institutes worldwide. The telescope of Observatoire de Haute Provence (France) studied the object’s mass, orbit and stellar properties; the European Southern Observatory telescopes at Paranal and La Silla (Chile), looked into the properties of its parent star; the Thuringia State Observatory in Tautenburg (Germany) was used to help determining the object’s mass and orbit; the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea looked for signals from faint stars in the vicinity; the Swiss Euler Telescope at La Silla (Chile) helped determine its mass and orbit; the Wise Observatory (Israel), the ESA telescope on Mt. Teide, Tenerife, and the telescope of the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands were used to exclude signal contributions from other stars.

The results are due to appear in ‘Transiting exoplanets from the COROT space mission, VI. COROT-exo-3b: The first secure inhabitant of the Brown-dwarf desert’ by M. Deleuil et al, in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

COROT is a mission led by the French Space Agency (CNES), with contributions from ESA, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Brazil. It was launched in December 2006. It carries a 27-cm aperture telescope designed to detect tiny changes in brightness from nearby stars. The mission’s main objectives are to search for exoplanets and to study stellar interiors.

Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down: Nine New Exoplanets Found, Some With Retrograde Orbits

"This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets," says Amaury Triaud, a PhD student at the Geneva Observatory who, with Andrew Cameron and Didier Queloz, leads a major part of the observational campaign.

Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star. This proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, and up to now it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star's rotation. This is the case for the planets in the Solar System.

After the initial detection of the nine new exoplanets [1] with the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP, [2]), the team of astronomers used the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile, along with data from the Swiss Euler telescope, also at La Silla, and data from other telescopes to confirm the discoveries and characterise the transiting exoplanets [3] found in both the new and older surveys.

Surprisingly, when the team combined the new data with older observations they found that more than half of all the hot Jupiters [4] studied have orbits that are misaligned with the rotation axis of their parent stars. They even found that six exoplanets in this extended study (of which two are new discoveries) have retrograde motion: they orbit their star in the "wrong" direction.

"The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin," says Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow this week.

In the 15 years since the first hot Jupiters were discovered, their origin has been a puzzle. These are planets with masses similar to or greater than that of Jupiter, but that orbit very close to their suns. The cores of giant planets are thought to form from a mix of rock and ice particles found only in the cold outer reaches of planetary systems. Hot Jupiters must therefore form far from their star and subsequently migrate inwards to orbits much closer to the parent star. Many astronomers believed this was due to gravitational interactions with the disc of dust from which they formed. This scenario takes place over a few million years and results in an orbit aligned with the rotation axis of the parent star. It would also allow Earth-like rocky planets to form subsequently, but unfortunately it cannot account for the new observations.

To account for the new retrograde exoplanets an alternative migration theory suggests that the proximity of hot Jupiters to their stars is not due to interactions with the dust disc at all, but to a slower evolution process involving a gravitational tug-of-war with more distant planetary or stellar companions over hundreds of millions of years. After these disturbances have bounced a giant exoplanet into a tilted and elongated orbit it would suffer tidal friction, losing energy every time it swung close to the star. It would eventually become parked in a near circular, but randomly tilted, orbit close to the star. "A dramatic side-effect of this process is that it would wipe out any other smaller Earth-like planet in these systems," says Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory.

Two of the newly discovered retrograde planets have already been found to have more distant, massive companions that could potentially be the cause of the upset. These new results will trigger an intensive search for additional bodies in other planetary systems.

This research was presented at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) that is taking place this week in Glasgow, Scotland. Nine publications submitted to international journals will be released on this occasion, four of them using data from ESO facilities. On the same occasion, the WASP consortium was awarded the 2010 Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award.

Baby Stars in the Rosette Cloud

The image is a new release of 'OSHI', ESA's Online Showcase of Herschel Images.

The Rosette Nebula resides some 5,000 light years from Earth and is associated with a larger cloud that contains enough dust and gas to make the equivalent of 10,000 Sun-like stars. The Herschel image shows half of the nebula and most of the Rosette cloud. The massive stars powering the nebula lie to the right of the image but are invisible at these wavelengths. Each colour represents a different temperature of dust, from -263ºC (only 10ºC above absolute zero) in the red emission to -233ºC in the blue.

The bright smudges are dusty cocoons hiding massive protostars. These will eventually become stars containing around ten times the mass of the Sun. The small spots near the centre and in the redder regions of the image are lower mass protostars, similar in mass to the Sun.

ESA's Herschel space observatory collects the infrared light given out by dust. This image is a combination of three infrared wavelengths, colour-coded blue, green and red in the image, though in reality the wavelengths are invisible to our eyes. It was created using observations from Herschel's Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) and the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE).

Herschel is showing astronomers such young, massive protostars for the first time, as part of the 'Herschel imaging survey of OB Young Stellar objects'. Known as HOBYS, the survey targets young OB class stars, which will become the hottest and brightest stars.

"High-mass star-forming regions are rare and further away than low-mass ones," says Frédérique Motte, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, France. So astronomers have had to wait for a space telescope like Herschel to reveal them.

It is important to understand the formation of high-mass stars in our Galaxy because they feed so much light and other forms of energy into their parent cloud they can often trigger the formation of the next generation of stars.

When astronomers look at distant galaxies, the star-forming regions they see are the bright, massive ones. Thus, if they want to compare our Galaxy to distant ones they must first understand high-mass star-formation here.

"Herschel will look at many other high-mass star-forming regions, some of them building stars up to a hundred times the mass of the Sun," says Dr Motte, who plans to present the first scientific results from HOBYS at ESA's annual ESLAB symposium to be held in the Netherlands, 4-7 May.

Biggest Comet Measured to Date: Comet McNaught

British scientists have identified a new candidate for the biggest comet measured to date. Dr Geraint Jones of UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory presented the results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow on April 13. Instead of using the length of the tail to measure the scale of the comet, the group used data from the ESA/NASA Ulysses spacecraft to gauge the size of the region of space disturbed by the comet's presence.

Analysis of magnetometer data shows evidence of a shockwave surrounding the comet created when ionized gas emitted from the comet's nucleus interacts with fast-flowing particles in the solar wind, causing the wind to slow down abruptly.

In January and February 2007, Comet C/2006 P1 McNaught became the brightest comet visible from Earth for 40 years. Serendipitously, Ulysses made an unexpected crossing of Comet McNaught's tail during this time, one of three unplanned encounters with comet tails during the 19-year mission. The other encounters included Comet Hyakutake in 1996, the current record-holder for the comet with the longest tail.