FT Chronicle

A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only possible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs-a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years’ worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a “hellish environment” around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.

Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

“We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis,” said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

Philippines’ top leaders from different sectors will have a leadership conference with former US Vice-President Al Gore as keynote speaker and other global leaders.

The lecture will have Gore present an Asian version of An Inconvenient Truth, a multimedia presentation on the threat of climate change and solutions to global warming and the subject of the movie of the same title that has won critical and box-office acclaim.

A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gore has just published his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which proposes measures to help solve the climate crisis.

It is made possible by SM Prime Holdings and is to be held at the SMX Convention Center at the SM Mall of Asia Complex on April 30.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA says the handful of defects on space shuttle Endeavour are too small to pose any threat.

Mission managers agreed Friday that there’s nothing that would prevent Endeavour and its six astronauts from returning safely to Earth.

Managers came to that unanimous conclusion after reviewing pictures from Monday’s launch and data collected from orbit. Management team leader LeRoy Cain says a cracked thermal tile and protruding ceramic spacer on the cockpit are so small that even if they managed to break off during re-entry and strike Endeavour, no serious damage would result.

Endeavour will remain at the International Space Station until the end of next week. Astronauts need to finish installing a new room and lookout. - AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) – NASA launched a first-of-its-kind solar observatory into space Thursday in hopes of expanding scientists’ understanding of the sun and its complicated workings.

A two-stage Atlas rocket roared off its launch pad from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 10:23 am (1523 GMT), carrying NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) into space.

NASA missed its first launch opportunity on Wednesday because of high winds, but the weather cooperated Thursday despite partially cloudy skies.

The 3.2-tonne satellite was to be lofted into orbit some 22,295 miles (35,880 kilometers) from Earth, circling the planet once every 24 hours during its five-year mission.

“This is going to be sensational,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“SDO is going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun and its effects on life and society.”

Space physicists have called SDO the cornerstone of future NASA missions to study the sun, which is considered the next frontier for US space research.

NASA said the probe will be especially helpful in revealing how changes in the sun alter the levels of radiation and energy within our solar system, and will provide new information concerning the sun and solar system that directly affect Earth, its inhabitants and technology.

Scientists said space weather caused by the sun can affect communications and satellite signals, electrical power lines and other objects and energy transmissions in our atmosphere and beyond.

Telescopes and other gear onboard the probe will scrutinize sunspots and solar flares using more pixels and colors than any other observatory in the history of solar physics.

NASA said the spacecraft will send about 1.5 terabytes of data back to Earth each day — the equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies.

US physicists said that if they can get a better understanding of the sun’s magnetic field, they can predict how it affects the solar system and near-Earth space to create space weather.

Among the questions researchers hope to answer is how the sun’s magnetic field is generated and how stored magnetic energy changes into kinetic energy, in the form of solar wind and energy particles.

In obligation of peace and order, Nigeria army has taken over responsibility for security in the central city of Jos in debt of religious rioting that killed at least 65 Christians and 200 Muslims in recent days.

Nigeria’s Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan said that the situation in Jos under control and those responsible would be brought to justice.

The vice-president made the annoucement in his first national broadcast since a court ruling last week court ruling empowering him to perform executive duties while President Umaru Yar’Adua is out of the country for health reasons.

He said some of the 17,000 displaced people were returning home, but others had decided to flee the city itself.

The 24-hour curfew has been eased to allow city residents to leave their homes between 1000 and 1700 local time.

A lot of people have died but it is very difficult to determine the number because this thing happened in various locations,” Abdul Umar, the Red Cross’s disaster manager coordinator.

Via BBC.com

WASHINGTON – In their search to find Earth-like planets, NASA has discovered five new planets beyond the solar system by the use of its Kepler space telescope

The five exoplanets breakthrough “contributes to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,” William Borucki, NASA chief science researcher for the Kepler mission, said in a statement.

But all five exoplanets are “too hot for life as we know it,” NASA said.

The newly discovered planets are branded as “hot Jupiters” since their bulky masses are compared to Jupiter and but they possess extreme temperatures, which range from 2,200 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,204 – 1649 degrees Celsius).

Their orbits last between three and five days, meaning they follow paths close to their stars, which are hotter and larger than the Earth’s sun, NASA said.

The smallest of the newly discovered planets is roughly the size of Neptune, the fourth largest planet in Earth’s solar system, and the biggest is around the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.

Kepler is NASA’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours.

It is searching for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.

MANILA, Philippines – Astronomy aficionados will enjoy the annual Quandrantid meteor shower which is active this year from January 1 to 7 and a longest solar eclipse on January 15.

According to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), stargazers should keep their eyes south of the Big Dipper where the meteors are expected to spread out.

The agency said the meteors can be seen at the rate of at least 40 meteors per hour.

It said the Quadrantid meteor shower hits the Earth’s atmosphere at the rate of about 40 kilometers per second.

The incinerated dust are said to be particles apparently derived from the debris ejected by the near-Earth asteroid 2003 EH, it added.

Also, PAGASA said on Tuesday that the Philippines will see a partial solar eclipse on January 15 with the moon covering around half of the sun in some areas of the country.

PAGASA said Metro Manila residents will see 39.1 percent of the sun’s diameter blotted out by the moon. The eclipse will start at 3:49 pm in Metro Manila with the maximum eclipse coming at 4:53 pm and ending at 5:51 pm.

Around the world, the eclipse will be viewed as an annular eclipse, meaning the moon would not be able to cover the whole of the sun, as in the case of a total eclipse. Instead, the sun will appear as a bright ring around the moon.

This eclipse will be visible from a track that goes across central Africa, the Indian Ocean and eastern Asia. The maximum eclipse occurs in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The January 15 eclipse will be the longest solar eclipse in terms of duration since 1992 and the next eclipse to have that duration will be till 3043.

Remember Hollywood catastrophic films “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon.“

Well, Russia’s got a plan to knock a large asteroid off course and to reduce its chances to collide with Earth using a spacecraft to be dispatched, even though U.S. scientists say such a scenario is slim.

Russia’s space agency Chief Anatoly Perminov told Golos Rossii radio they would call a meeting to weigh up a mission to Apophis saying his agency might eventually invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project.

When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated its chances of smashing into Earth in its first flyby, in 2029, at 1-in-37.

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, said better calculations of Apophis’ path in several years “will almost certainly remove any possibility of an Earth collision” in 2036.

Without mentioning NASA’s conclusions, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said.

“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Perminov said.

Perminov wouldn’t disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn’t require any nuclear explosions.

Astronomers have discovered a new planet which resembles much of our own Earth according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

The planet, called GJ 1214b, has a radius nearly 2.7 times larger than that of our planet and is about 42 light years away in another solar system according to the study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

However, the “newfound world” is too hot to sustain life as we know it having temperature estimated to be between 280 and 120 degrees Celsius (536 and 248 degrees Fahrenheit) with its host star about one-fifth the size of the Sun.

Its density suggests however it “is composed of about three-fourths water and other ices and one fourth-rock” and some of the water would likely be in crystalline form that exists at pressures greater than 20,000 times Earth’s sea-level atmosphere.

The planet orbits every 38 hours around a small, faint star that was first spotted by eight ground-based telescopes no larger than those used by amateur astronomers, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre said.

Its relative closeness makes its possible to study it to determine its atmosphere.

The discovery of the planet represents a “major step forward” in the search for worlds similar to the Earth, added the University of California’s Geoffrey Marcy in a commentary also in Nature.