A recent study has confirmed that there are hundreds of other planets which carry conditions similar to Earth in the outskirts of the Solar System and even across the Milky Way Galaxy.

The scientists hope to know more about this in the continued search for life and possible future colonies. Know more after the jump!

Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing a pair of bright stars. When sunrise comes, you see not one, but two suns rising on the horizon. That's what the residents of the planet of star system HD 98800 would see if it ever forms and bears life.

Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists observed the star system 150 light years away. What they know about the system is that it is made of two pairs of stars. Two stars circling each other make one pair, and then that pair is circling around another pair. The two pairs of twins are only a bit farther than how the Earth is as far from Pluto.

They also know that circling one of the pairs of stars are two pairs of dust rings. The first ring is made up of dust grains and sits away from the twin suns as much as the Earth is from the Sun. The second ring is about four times farther than that, and is made up of larger material like asteroids or comets.

Scientists now believe that the empty space between the rings may be the path of a newly forming planet. Elise Furlan of NASA describes it this way: "Planets are like cosmic vacuums. They clear up all the dirt that is in their path around the central stars." It won't be easy to see a planet as a massive cosmic dust bunny, but that's essentially what it is. She also relates how life may be able to exist on planet dust bunny as long as the star system has a stable orbit.

 

If you like star gazing and mythology (like this writer), then you're going to enjoy this one. The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, have been captured in infrared by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Take out your telescopes and binoculars.

If you're not so into the heavenly bodies geekiness, a bit of a primer. In mythology, the Pleiades are the seven daughters of Pleione and Atlas, the titan: Alcyone, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, Celaeno and Asterope. Now, when Atlas was asked to carry the sky on his shoulders, the hunter Orion started pursuing the Pleiades. King of the gods Zeus stepped in and turned them into doves - when that didn't work, he turned them into a cluster of stars.

That cluster of stars is on the constellation Taurus and they're going to be very visible in the night sky, both for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. A couple of days back, they shone just above Venus (it's like they're having a photoshoot). On April 19, the crescent moon will join them and cut in between the Pleiades and Venus. The heavenly show will also be visible to the naked eye on clear nights.

The picture on the left is the one taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The yellow, green and red in the background of the stars is made up of dust. The star cluster travels through cloud that may explain the dust. The parent star Atlas is also visible in the picture along with other stars in blue.

The Spitzer also gathered some data on "brown dwarfs" or failed stars plus some planetary debris. The telescope gives astronomers a better view of cooler, smaller stars and lets them study the faint stars better. (Of course if the star has lower mass and cooler, it is less visible.) According to John Stauffer of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope mission, the Pleiades are perfect for the study of the evolution of stars.

Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, three teams of NASA scientists have gotten their first close look at two distant planets and they were shocked at what they didn't find more than what they did find.

The look at planets Planet HD 209458b and HD 189733b in the constellations Pegasus and Vulpecula respectively, have debunked the popular claims of theorists that water should be present in their atmospheres in the form of vapor. Instead, all they saw were dust clouds floating in the hydrogen and oxygen atmosphere. 

For years, the popular belief in NASA was if the elements hydrogen and oxygen were present, water can be formed, and when water is present, life has a chance of existing. In these two hot gas giants, the mantra doesn't hold true.

"The main finding is that we don't see evidence for water in the two planets," NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center team leader Jeremy Richardson said.

Scientists still haven't given up on the possibility that water may yet be present underneath the dust clouds, but at this point, there's no way of finding out.

The two "hot Jupiters" were viewed via infrared spectrum technology. Scientists used infrared light to detect the planets and split the wavelengths of the radiation in a manner similar to how a prism chops light into a rainbow. The resulting data can be used to find out the composition of the planet and its motion along its orbit.

What's it like to live in a planet where one side is burnt toast while the other is as frigid as your freezer? Three hundred eighty trillion kilometers from the Earth, there exists a planet called Upsilon Andromedae B, which revolves around its star called Upsilon Andromedae, whose temperatures were detected by NASA's Spitzer infrared telescope. Cool, huh?

NASA's telescope has given us an insight that the weather systems in these "exoplanets" (planets outside the solar system) are extremely unusual. Scientists had supposed that very strong winds redistribute heat around the planet, but Spitzer's measurements revealed it's more possible that atmospheric gases were instead absorbing and re-radiating sunlight rapidly. Don't ask why, Upsilon Andromedae B revolves around its sun in just 4.6-days, as compared to our 365-day year. Discovered in 1996, it was thus dubbed as the "hot-Jupiter" planet.

Considering that it was a NASA space telescope that was able to accomplish this groundbreaking feat (first ever exoplanet weather forecast), is there something left for us to imagine on whatever else floats outside of our very own solar system? (George Lucas, where are you?).

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has tripped upon one of the most massive natal stars yet seen in our galaxy. Clothed behind a shroud of dust in the constellation Cygnus, DR21 is a stellar nursery, which is an exceptionally bright source of radio emission.

The constellation Cygnus, The Swan, is one of the more obvious asterisms in the summer skies, and is more commonly known as the Northern Cross because of its shape. The constellation itself has several superb visual binaries as well as one of the more intriguing Mira-type variables. It was deemed surprising that while Cygnus lies in the heart of Milky Way, it has no truly outstanding clusters, nebulae, or galaxies.

At it turns out, something even more far outstanding was hidden behind Cygnus. The never-before-seen star discovered is found to be 100,000 times as bright as the Sun. Also revealed for the first time is a powerful outflow of hot gas emanating from this star and bursting through a giant molecular cloud. Now ain't that a pleasant surprise?

Have you ever tried baby-sitting for your hyper-active three-year old nephew? He would run all over the house like crazy, climb on top of cabinets and appliances and won't follow any of your orders. It seems as if he just won't slow down.

Well, it is interesting to note that young stars are pretty much the same too. If the sun takes 28 days to make a complete revolution, it  takes less than a day for young stars to complete one (revolution).  And guess what, these stars would spin much faster if nothing slows them down. On a sugar-high? You bet!

So if they keep spinning so fast, why don't they crash into each other? Scientists claim that disks of gas and dust that form planets hold these stars down. According to researchers, as stars contract, they spin faster. Due to this, leftover gas and dust flattens into a disk, which in turn, tugs at a star's magnetic field, similar to what a spoon moving through molasses does.

Study leader Luisa Rebull of NASA's Spitzer Science Center says, "We can now say that disks play some kind of role in slowing down stars in at least one region, but there could be a host of other factors operating in tandem". Other factors include the different behaviors of stars in different environments, stellar winds and possibly full-grown planets.

Quasar (Quasistellar Radio Source) is an astronomical source of magnetic energy, including light that dwarfs the energy output of the brightest stars. The most famous quasar is 3C273. It is located in the constellation Virgo and is optically the most luminous quasar in our sky and also with the closest redshift. Up until now the consensus was that quasars were powered by supermassive blackholes.

Now new theories dare to challenge this long known belief like the Synchroton Radiation theory. It is is electromagnetic radiation, similar to cyclotron radiation, but generated by the acceleration of ultrarelativistic electrons through magnetic fields. Pictures using infrared that were taken by a team of astronomers led by researchers at Yale shows a map of the 3C273 jet in infrared, visible light and X-rays.

“The Yale team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe 3C273 because it is located in space and is more sensitive to faint infrared jet emission than any previous telescope,” said Yasunobu Uchiyama, a team leader and former postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Center for Astronomy.

The Synchroton Radiation theory was also supported by Sebastian Jester, now at the University of Southampton, led a complementary study that used the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years and the brightest part of the jet indicates that is about 100,000 light years. Since there would be insufficient time for the particles to shoot out from the black hole at close to the speed of light and then release their energy as radiation as far out as they are seen, the particles have to be accelerated locally, where they produce their emission.

These new insights favoring the synchrotron model only deepens the mystery of how jets produce the ultra-energetic particles that radiate at X-ray wavelengths.

“Our results call for a radical rethink of the physics of relativistic jets that black holes drive,” said Uchiyama. “But, we now have a crucial new clue to solving one of the major mysteries in high-energy astrophysics.”

The galaxy known as Andromeda is situated some 2.5 million light-years from our location, riding like a majestic counterweight to the Milky Way (which it is believed to resemble) on the other end of the Local Group.

This spectacular infra-red photo was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, a composite of over 3,000 individual frames. In this image, interstellar gas appears red, while older stars show up in blue. Young stars located in the galaxy's spiral arms are clear in the visible light spectrum, but when the infra-red filter is added, trails of dust lead back toward the core.

The purpose behind this image was to  explore Andromeda's infra-red brightness and determine the nature of its stellar population. Although as a "spiral"-type galaxy, Andromeda - with around one trillion stars - is well over twice the size of the Milky Way.

Once thought as a distinctive feature to black holes, narrow jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream near the speed of light were also found by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, around a dense stellar corpse known as a neutron star.

Normal X-binary systems are made up of a normal star and a neutron star or black hole, with the normal star, orbiting the collapsed star. As this happens, the neutron star, with 14 times more mass than the normal star, collects the material leaving the orbiting star and creating a disk of matter around itself known as the accretion disk.

"For years, scientists suspected that something unique to black holes must be fueling the continuous compact jets because we only saw them coming from black hole systems,” said Simone Migliari, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. “Now that Spitzer has revealed a steady jet coming from a neutron star in an X-ray binary system, we know that the jets must be fueled by something that both systems share.”