Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet ever found outside our solar system, and the first that is rocky like the Earth.
Nasa's Kepler mission has confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, according to Nasa.
The discovery of this "exoplanet" is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.
"All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our Sun," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team lead at Nasa's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
"The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off."
Elsewhre, the Hubble Space Telescope has got its first peek at a mysterious giant green blob in outer space that is a birthplace for stars.
The bizarre glowing blob is giving birth to new stars, some only a couple million years old, in remote areas of the universe where stars do not normally form.
The blob of gas was discovered first by a Dutch school teacher in 2007 and is named Hanny’s Voorwerp. The Dutch for object is Voorwerp.
Nasa released the new Hubble photo at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington.
Parts of the green blob are collapsing and the resulting pressure from that is creating the stars. The stellar nurseries are outside of a normal galaxy, which is usually where stars live.
That makes these “very lonely newborn stars” that are “in the middle of nowhere”, said Bill Keel, the University of Alabama astronomer who examined the blob.
The blob is the size of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes the Earth, and it is 650 million light years away. Each light year is about six trillion miles.
The blob is mostly hydrogen gas swirling from a close encounter of two galaxies; it glows because it is illuminated by a quasar in one of the galaxies. A quasar is a bright object full of energy powered by a black hole.
The blob was discovered by elementary school teacher Hanny van Arkel, who was 24 at the time, as part of a worldwide Galaxy Zoo project where everyday people can look at archived star photographs to catalogue new objects.
Ms van Arkel said when she first saw the odd object in 2007 it appeared blue and smaller. The Hubble photo provides a clear picture and better explanation for what is happening around the blob.
“It actually looked like a blue smudge,” Ms van Arkel said. “Now it looks like dancing frog in the sky because it’s green.” She says she can even see what passes for arms and eyes.
Since Ms van Arkel’s discovery, astronomers have looked for similar gas blobs and found 18 of them. But all are about half the size of Hanny’s Voorwerp, Mr Keel said.
AP