New planet discovered: Kepler-22b earth like planet 600 light year away

 
Some 600 light years away, NASA scientists have discovered a planet that seems very similar to planet earth. The scientists are so enthusiastic with the new discovery that they have called it a twin of our own earth as they think the new planet has what it takes to sustain a human life.
NASA scientists have said that the new planet that is much bigger in size than our own earth may be ideally suited for plants to grow and sustaining animal life. The possibility of vegetation and life there has filled scientists with a newfound enthusiasm.
Scientists have named the new planet as Kepler 22 and have suggested that it is complete with a similar solar system that is very close to our own and say that never in history of space exploration, they have stumbled upon such a planet that had so much resemblance to earth and that could sustain life, the way our earth does.
America’s space agency NASA while explaining its very objective Kepler Mission says on its portal, “Considering that we want to find planets in the habitable zone of stars like the Sun, the time between transits is about one year. To reliably detect a sequence one needs four transits. Hence, the mission duration needs to be at least three and one half years. If the Kepler Mission continues for longer, it will be able to detect smaller, and more distant planets as well as a larger number of true Earth analogs”.
NASA scientists have stumbled upon an area on the newly discovered planet that is not too hot and not too cold either ideally suited for vegetation and human life. They say that this area keeps the water on normal temperature and there water neither freezes nor boils.
Regarding the Kepler Mission NASA website further says, “The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope 105 square degrees, which is comparable to the area of your hand held at arm’s length. The fields of view of most telescopes are less than one square degree. Kepler needs the large field of view in order to observe the large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for at least 3.5 years, the initial length of the mission, which can be extended”.

Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit

The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.
If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.
Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.
“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.
According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand).
Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”
Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, called the claim “flabbergasting.”
“If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything,” he said, adding: “It looks too big to be true. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”
The group that is reporting the results is known as Opera, for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus. Antonio Ereditato, the physicist at the University of Bern who leads the group, agreed with Dr. de Rujula and others who expressed shock. He told the BBC that Opera — after much internal discussion — had decided to put its results out there in order to get them scrutinized.
“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing,” Dr. Ereditato told the BBC. “Then I would be relieved.”
Neutrinos are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light, they can sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door. Moreover, they come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect that the Opera experiment was designed to detect by comparing 10-microsecond pulses of protons on one end with pulses of neutrinos at the other. Dr. de Rujula pointed out, however, that it was impossible to identify which protons gave birth to which neutrino, leading to statistical uncertainties.
Dr. Ellis noted that a similar experiment was reported by a collaboration known as Minos in 2007 on neutrinos created at Fermilab in Illinois and beamed through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota. That group found, although with less precision, that the neutrino speeds were consistent with the speed of light.
Measurements of neutrinos emitted from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987, moreover, suggested that their speeds differed from light by less than one part in a billion.
John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the Opera researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”
But it is too soon for such mind-bending speculation. The Opera results will generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirming or repudiating it, according to Dr. Learned. “This is revolutionary and will require convincing replication,” he said.