Astronomers spot a lonely planet, with no star of its own

There's an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighbourhood.

It's a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it's out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. In astronomical terms, that's close.

Astronomers have spied lonely planets before. But this newest object, seen near the southern constellation Dorado, is the closest to Earth yet found.

Unobscured by starlight, the new planet — it has no name, just a catalogue number — provides a perfect opportunity for astronomers to learn about the mysterious class of "substellar objects." Such rogue bodies might number in the billions in our galaxy alone.

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"There could really be a lot of them," said Christian Veillet, former director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, who studied the lonely planet. "But it's a big challenge in terms of observing them."

That's because these drifting bodies are dark. With no home star, they reflect no starlight, nor do they generate any. But, like an iron pulled from a fire, the youngest of these objects still glow with the heat of their creation.

In 2009, astronomers in Hawaii spied such a heat signal with an infrared camera. Another team at the Paranal Observatory in Chile then swung a big telescope around to take a peek.

They detected a planet-like object, estimated to be as big around as Jupiter but perhaps four to seven times as massive. Instruments sensed ammonia, methane and water vapour in the object's atmosphere — typical of Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, the gas-giant planets in our own solar system.

By watching the object's motion, astronomer Jonathan Gagne from the University of Montreal concluded that the planet is probably part of the AB Doradus group, a loose collection of 30 stars that formed from the same cloud of galactic gas. That cloud must have broken off a small puff that coalesced into the lonely planet, Gagne and his colleagues surmise.

Connecting the planet to the star group was key to determining that it is young, just 50 million to 120 million years old, Gagne said. Our solar system, in contrast, is 4.5 billion years old. Its youth, in turn, was crucial for classifying the object as a planet-like body rather than a brown dwarf, an object almost large enough to ignite and become a star. To be a brown dwarf, the object would have to be much older, Veillet said.

Astronomers spied the first orphan planets in the late 1990s, said Philip Lucas from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, who led the first team to spy them. "It was never completely clear from theory if these objects should exist," said Lucas, so he searched for them in a likely locale — a cloud of star-forming gas known as the Orion nebula. His team found more than a dozen likely free-floating planets there.

Last year, a NASA-funded team upped the prospective count dramatically, into the millions. By finding clusters of orphan planets in the dense core of our galaxy, they estimated there might be twice as many such objects in the Milky Way as there are stars. There could be rogue planets everywhere.

Despite growing acceptance of their existence, a debate rages over what to call these objects.

"We call it a 'floating planet'," said Gagne, co-author of an article in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics describing the find. "But if we want to be strictly correct with the International Astronomical Union, we should call it a 'planetary mass object', or 'planemo'."

The International Astronomical Union caused a cosmic kerfuffle in 2006 when it adopted a definition of "planet" that kicked Pluto out of the club, demoting it to a dwarf planet. That same definition says that to qualify as a planet, an object must be circling a star.

The new object, the orphan of Dorado, does no such thing.

But not every lonely planet is sentenced to an eternity of solitude. In 2006, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory announced finding two big planets circling each other, with no star in between, having linked in a cosmic do-si-do. And earlier this year, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics announced that astronomers there were certain that many of these wanderers find a home when they drift near a star, which captures them as adopted members of a star system family.

Whatever its fate, astronomers will be spending more time gazing at the newfound orphan. "We now have this amazing opportunity to study a planet without any starlight polluting it," Veillet said.

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Antarctic sea ice is increasing

The amount of ice in the Arctic may be at a record low but Antarctic sea ice is increasing, according to a new study.

Antarctic sea ice cover has increased under the effects of climate change Photo: British Antarctic Survey

However a study by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and NASA found sea ice in the Arctic has been increasing over the same period.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, shows for the first time how winds in the Antarctic cause the change in sea ice cover.

Dr Paul Holland of BAS explained that there have been huge increases and decreases in sea ice in certain areas over the last 30 years.

Overall there has been a gain, although it is very slight one of about 0.001 per cent, to a record 19 million sq km.

"Overall sea ice cover in Antarctica is increasing but very slowy. It is about a fifth of the overall decrease in the Arctic."

Scientists are now investigating the cause of the changes in sea ice in the South Pole.

Dr Holland pointed out sea ice loss has no effect on the sea rise as there is no change in mass, it is just frozen water melting, like ice in a glass of water.

However glacial ice, that is on land and will cause sea level rise, is decreasing in the Antarctic.

"It is important to distinguish between the Antarctic Ice Sheet – glacial ice – which is losing volume, and Antarctic sea ice – frozen seawater – which is expanding, " said Dr Holland.

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Coffee threatened by climate change

Coffee is under threat from climate change, according to a study which found that popular Arabica beans could face extinction within decades.

Rising global temperatures and subtle changes in seasonal conditions could make 99.7 per cent of Arabica-growing areas unsuitable for the plant by 2080, according to a new study by researchers from Kew Gardens.

Although commercial growers could still grow their own crops by watering and artificially cooling them, the wild type has much greater genetic diversity which is essential to help plantations overcome threats like pests and disease.

Identifying new sites where arabica could be grown away from its natural home in the mountains of Ethiopia and South Sudan could be the only way of preventing the demise of the species, researchers said.

Justin Moat, one of the report's authors, said: "The worst case scenario, as drawn from our analyses, is that wild Arabica could be extinct by 2080. This should alert decision makers to the fragility of the species."

Arabica is one of only two species of bean used to make coffee and is by far the most popular, accounting for 70 per cent of the global market including almost all fresh coffee sold in high street chains and supermarkets in the US and most of Europe.

A different bean known as Robusta is used in freeze-dried coffee and is commonly drunk in Greece and Turkey, but its high caffeine content makes it much less pleasant to most palates.

The new study, published in the Public Library of Science ONE journal, used computer modelling to predict the survival prospects of Arabica coffee for the first time, based on three different climate change scenarios.

At the very least 65 per cent of locations where arabica is currently grown will become unsuitable by 2080, the study found, while the most extreme model predicted almost 100 per cent.

In some areas, such as the Boma Plateau in South Sudan, the demise could come as early as 2020, based on the low flowering rate and poor health of current crops.

Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, said: "Arabica can only exist in a very specific pace with a very specific number of other variables. It is mainly temperature but also the relationship between temperature and seasonality – the average temperature during the wet season for example."

Climate change is happening so fast that caffeine farms would have to move their plantations 50m every decade to survive, he added.

The researchers said their estimates were "conservative" because they did not take into account the widespread deforestation taking place in the highland forests where the beans are grown, or other factors such as a drop in the number of birds which spread seeds.

Even if the beans do not disappear completely from the wild, climate change is highly likely to impact on yields and the taste of coffee beans in future decades, they added.

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Water world

In this Nov. 1, 2012 photo provided by the Wildlife Conservation Society a black drum fish at Coney Island's New York Aquarium swims in the water of the "Sea Cliffs" exhibit, in front of flood waters that inundated the aquarium during superstorm Sandy. Unless power is restored soon, the aquarium says it may have to relocate 12,000 creatures, including walruses, sharks, sea turtles, penguins and a giant octopus. Photo: Wildlife Conservation Society, Julie Larsen Maher 
As these images illustrate, flood waters from superstorm Sandy left the New York Aquarium’s 14-acre facility in Coney Island virtually underwater. Recent arrival Mitik the walrus made it through safely, but aquarium staff members are still working to protect the rest of the animals and fish, whose habitats require complex filtration systems and temperature control.

Power was restored to all of the exhibits by Friday evening, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the aquarium and the Bronx and Central Park zoos, said in an update. They said salt water from the surge caused extensive damage to the equipment, which made the restoration effort even more challenging. Earlier, the society had announced that two of the aquarium’s main exhibit buildings — Glover’s Reef and Conservation Hall — had electricity.  

While there had been some losses to the aquarium's fish collection, most in one exhibit tank, the rest of the exhibits and the fish in them are doing well. There are no immediate plans to relocate any of the aquarium's marine animals, the society said, assuming the aquarium is able to maintain generator power. 

     

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New tree dwelling tarantulas described

Nine new species of tree-dwelling tarantulas have been identified in central and eastern Brazil, researchers say, bringing the total in the area to 16 species.
Arboreal tarantulas -- known from a few tropical places in Asia, Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean -- generally have a lighter build, thinner bodies and longer legs than their ground-living cousins, which better suits them for their forest tree habitats, they said.
The new species have been reported in the journal Zookeys by Rogerio Bertani, a tarantula specialist in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
"Instead of the seven species formerly known in the region, we now have sixteen," Bertani said.
These species are in highly concentrated habitats in regions where they are suffering high pressure from human activities, researchers said.
In addition all the new species are colorful, the researchers said, which could constitute another, because it might make them attractive for the pet trade,


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Climate change on political back burner

When Americans elect a president in 2112, they might look back across the previous century and view this year’s election with regret, marking it as a time when the nation failed to take climate change seriously enough.

Neither President Barack Obama, Republican nominee Mitt Romney nor their running mates have mentioned climate change or global warming in any of the four debates held this month. They weren’t asked about it, either, but that didn’t stop them from bringing up topics they wanted to discuss.
Jonathan Gilligan, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, said it’s a noticeable change from 2008, when both Obama and U.S. Sen. John McCain promised action on climate change.
“It’s really missing an important issue,” he said. “But a lot of other things get people’s attention a lot more readily.
“This is real. It’s happening. The amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean, up around the North Pole, by a very large measure it set a record for the smallest amount this summer.”

Gilligan said that could present a national security issue as Russia and China seek to take control of those waters when they become navigable.

“When I’ve talked to people in the Navy, they’re very aware that the Arctic Ocean is going to become very important strategically. So even people who don’t care about hugging trees but just want to keep the country strong had better be thinking and planning.”

Gilligan said recent research also has shown an increase in the number of places experiencing record heat. Nashville residents knew what he was talking about last summer. At 109 degrees, June 29 was the hottest day in the city’s history — part of a 10-day stretch in which the city recorded eight daily record high temperatures.

John McFadden, executive director of the Tennessee Environmental Council, said the day-to-day impact of climate change sometimes gets ignored.

For example, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga are three of the five most challenging places in the nation to live with asthma, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America said earlier this year. Nashville ranked 26th.

“The thing that gets lost in the whole climate change debate is that there are real costs to human health and the economy related to the burning of fossil fuels,” McFadden said.

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Why do dung beetles dance on balls of poop? To keep cool

Dung beetles can use balls of poo much like air-conditioning units to cool themselves, researchers say.

Dung beetles roll up nutritious balls of excrement up to 50 times heavier than their own bodies to feed their young. They roll the balls walking backward, with their heads near the ground. The ancient Egyptians envisioned that the sun was rolled around the sky in much the same way, making the dung (or scarab) beetle an important symbol in ancient Egyptian religion.

Past research showed these insects routinelydance in circles on top of their feasts of dungto help navigate away from rival beetles as quickly as possible. As scientists looked for this dancing, they noticed the beetles climbed onto the excrement balls most often during the midday heat.

Now researchers find that dung beetles might also use excrement to keep themselves cool.

"Dung beetles are the first example of an insect using a mobile, thermal refuge to move across hot soil," researcher Jochen Smolka, a neuroethologist at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. "Insects, once thought to be at the mercy of environmental temperatures, use sophisticated behavioral strategies to regulate their body temperature[s]."

Scientists used thermal vision cameras to watch the Scarabaeus (Kheper) lamarcki dung beetle in its natural habitat in the South African savanna, where ground temperatures at noon can exceed a searing 140 degrees F (60 degrees C). The scientists prepared two sandy, circular arenas 10 feet wide. They kept one shaded in the morning so that it only reached a relatively cool 124.3 degrees F (51.3 degrees C), and left the other exposed to full sunlight so it heated up to about 135 degrees F (57.2 degrees C).

"Like an air-conditioning unit, the moist ball is cooled by evaporative cooling," Smolka said.

The researchers discovered that beetles on hot soil climbed onto their excrement balls seven times more often than when on cooler ground. When the researchers painted rubbery boots made of silicone onto the legs of the insects to protect them from the heat, "beetles with boots on climbed their balls less often," Smolka said. The scientists think the insects get on top of dung when it gets hot to give themselves a respite from scorching sands and help protect their brains from overheating. The researchers found the front legs of the beetles cooled by about 12 degrees F (7 degrees C) on average within 10 seconds of climbing on their excrement balls. 

Once on top of the balls, the insects were often seen "wiping their faces," preening gestures the investigators think spread regurgitated liquid onto their legs and heads, behavior never seen at other times of day.

"We'd really like to continue looking at the preening behavior," Smolka said. "Do the beetles actually regurgitate liquid in order to cool their heads?"

The scientists detailed their findings in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Current Biology.

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