When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet.

In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics in Rome argue that, given the planet’s likely composition and distance from its star, COROT-7b probably loses its surface elements to space in a long, comet-like tail of charged particles.

COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and about five times Earth’s mass, and orbits a sun-like star about 390 light-years away. Because COROT-7b’s density is similar to Earth’s, astronomers hailed it as the first rocky exoplanet discovered and one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life.

But the rocky world also sits almost 100 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, and it orbits its star once every 0.85 Earth days. The temperature on the daylight side of the planet is a scorching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for minerals on the rocky surface to break down and release charged particles into space, where they would be picked up and blown away by the stellar wind.

“We expect that the stellar radiation pressure and the plasma environment will cause the build-up of an elongated comet-like exosphere,” the authors write. Depending on what the planet is made of, and whether it was once the rocky core of a “super-Neptune” as some have suggested, the tail could be composed of elements like sodium, oxygen, magnesium or silicon oxide.

The researchers compare this vision of COROT-7b with Mercury, which has a similarly antagonistic relationship with the sun and also leaks charged particles in a long tail.

“The planet appears to be more like a ’super-Mercury’ under much extremer environmental conditions,” the researchers write.

The team suggests that a tail composed of sodium or calcium could theoretically be detected on COROT-7b from ground-based telescopes. Although detecting such a tail would probably eliminate COROT-7b as a candidate habitable world, “this project would be the very first attempt to learn something of the mineralogy of a rocky planet orbiting another star.”

Image: 1) Artist’s impression of COROT-7b, ESO/L. Calcada. 2) Model of COROT-7b’s proposed sodium tail, assuming the planet is 4000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface. A. Mura et al, Icarus 2010. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.015

See Also:

• Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
• At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
• Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
• Mercury Flyby Maps New Territory
• This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

The extraction of heavy crude oil from oil sands in Canada is releasing as many as 13 kinds of pollutants into the surrounding air and water, according to a study published in PNAS this week. The independent report directly contradicts the results of the government-administered Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP) that claimed neither humans nor the environment were at risk from the oil extraction.

Oil sands are swaths of ground that are laced with heavy crude oil that can be extracted and refined into fuel. Development of oil sands in Canada has been taking place since 1967, but scientists have long been uncertain of the production's impact on the environment.

The RAMP study conducted by the government showed no significant ill effects, but another group of scientists decided to double-check their work. They took samples around an oil sands development facility in Alberta near the Athabasca River from the air and surrounding watersheds, and found some highly contradictory evidence.

Summertime water samples downstream from the development area had concentrations of elements like mercury, arsenic, chromium, and beryllium eight times as high as the background levels. Air samples showed concentrations twice that of the late 1970s, and during the winter, the water concentrations were also twice as high as normal.

The authors speculate that the concentration difference results from the snow capturing many airborne particulates and holding them until summer, when it all melts into the ground and water. The researchers also suspect that many of the airborne contaminants are scattered, lowering their local concentrations but spreading their effects over a wide area.

While this single study doesn't automatically invalidate the RAMP study, this data seriously undermine the government's results and methods, and suggests that the long-term effects of oil sands development bear further scrutiny.

PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1008754107  (About DOIs).

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I got some surprises, after glancing through the feeds and deciding to glance at news from the Phil. Inquirer. There Tom Avril has a story that at first glance looks like a solid but somewhat stolid report on energy innovation in the city’s Navy Yard redevelopment project.

First thing is seeing a quote from a source, “It’s not rocket science,” it says, evoking a yawn. Then comes the second half, “It’s actually a lot more difficult.” Ka-bum!. That’s notable for more than turning a cliche on its head. Here’s a story on adding efficiency to our way of life that does not reassure readers that, if we just had the willpower, reducing our carbon footprints  will be a win-win snap. No, it will demand effort and some initial disruption and sacrifice.

Then he introduces some tidy examples of very clever thinking that the greening project entails. They include phase-change cooling systems, and how toad skin may inspire more efficient air conditioning. Now, I already knew that when I run my car’s windshield defroster at the same time that I turn up the temperature, I force it to run the air conditioner and heater at the same time. That’s an energy hog that probably cuts mpg measurably. But I hadn’t thought about the same, bass ackwards way that buildings stay warm and keep humidity in bounds. That’s where toads come in.

This is a pro’s job on what could have been a tedious boostery story on local businesses and agencies painting themselves green. It’s not as though it is a hard-hitting investigative piece. But it does help one learn a few things.

- Charlie Petit

The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.

“A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is one step toward proving there’s liquid water at the surface of an extrasolar planet.”

The proposed technique for finding wet worlds takes advantage of the same effect that makes sunsets on the Pacific coast so spectacular. The idea was suggested by Carl Sagan in 1993, and has been used to confirm the presence of liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.

“The oceans do a really good job of reflecting light like a mirror,” Robinson said. “Especially when you have the sun really low on the horizon, most of the sunlight comes reflected off of the water towards you. The same thing happens on the scale of a planet.”

Robinson and his colleagues showed that when a planet appears crescent-shaped to an Earthly observer, starlight reflecting off oceans can make the planet appear up to twice as bright as a planet with no oceans. They also showed that the sparkle of starlight off oceans looks different from light scattered through clouds.

Most other proposed techniques for finding water on an extrasolar planet rely on taking its spectrum, or detailed measurements of the planet’s atmosphere, and looking for the chemical fingerprint of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But this strategy would show only that the planet hosts water vapor, not liquid oceans, and the technology is still a long way off.

“To get a good spectrum would require a big telescope that is still 10 or 20 years away from being designed or launched,” said exoplanet expert Darren Williams of Penn State University, who has also studied ways to search for exo-oceans but was not involved in the new work. “That’s really becoming a long-range, futuristic sort of thing.”

Robinson and his colleagues proved that the glint effect could be observable with the telescope touted as the successor to Hubble: the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2014. If the telescope is accompanied by a shield to block starlight, as suggested in the New Worlds Observer mission concept, it will be sensitive to the light glinting off extrasolar oceans.

To test whether the glint would be visible to the new space telescope, Robinson imagined he was an alien observer looking back at Earth. He used data from weather satellites and NASA’s EPOXI mission to build a computer model of what Earth would look like to a distant observer, including weather patterns, seasonal changes and wind speeds over the oceans that would influence the height of waves.

The model “does explain what we can observe on our own planet from other spacecraft in the solar system, so you can trust the model that they’re using to do these calculations,” Williams said.

Unfortunately, even the James Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to take sharp enough images of exoplanets to tell whether the planet is in a crescent phase, much less directly see a glint. The telescope will just see a dot of light getting brighter and dimmer as it circles its star.

“We have to look for evidence of this glint when we just have this pale, tiny speck of light on our camera,” Robinson said.

So Robinson and colleagues added up all the light reflected by the model Earth to see if the glint would light up the whole planet enough to be seen from space. They found that Earth in the crescent phase would be twice as bright with a glint as without it. “That’s significant,” Robinson said. “A factor of two is a really big deal.”

The researchers also found that the glint effect is strongest in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what the human eye can see. These wavelengths of light are not as badly scattered as they pass through a planet’s atmosphere. Conveniently, they are also the wavelengths that the new space telescope will be most attuned to.

“The James Webb Space Telescope is really well suited to do this,” Robinson said.

Looking for the glint would not be the first line of investigation, however. Rather, Robinson imagines the technique could confirm that a good exo-Earth candidate, a plant that is about Earth’s size planet and lies the right distance from its star to support liquid water, actually does have oceans at its surface.

“We would first worry about whether the planet is even remotely Earthlike before looking for the glint,” he said.

“What’s nice about this result here is that we have a chance of doing interesting things with Earthlike planets with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically sitting on the hangar waiting to be launched into space,” commented Williams. “We can do that in our research lifetimes. That’s the most exciting thing about this.”

Image: 1) Astrophysical Journal Letters/Tyler Robinson. Left: NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. Right: Earth and Moon Viewer. 2) NASA

See Also:

• The New Exoplanetology: ‘I Learned It by Watching You, Earth
• Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
• Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
• Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
• The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

At AP one finds Seth Borenstein providing an explainer for big, if now weakening, Hurricane Earl whirling north just a little seaward of the US east coast. One thing to wonder, before reading it, is whether he brings up global warming and, if so, how it’s handled.

Answers: Yes, and just fine.

His story, as far as I can tell with no meteorology expertise, provides a clear explanation of the weather peculiarities in play. They include  a low pressure trough that formed just right to prevent Earl from the usual hard-right turn of such storms that reach Bermuda’s neighborhood. We learn about “fish storms” and why this may not be one and instead is on a fairly rare course.

He does not venture to call this a global warming storm. And he doesn’t quite embrace another trope – saying it is consistent with global warming or a sign of what will come, turning a storm story into another global warming story. I mean, most of us have already bought GW as a dreadful challenge to mankind. But he does tie together two separate factors that are in play. First, those peculiarities that are keeping the storm track close and, if things had been slightly different, could have sent it ashore in states that don’t get many hurricanes. Second, that the mid-Atlantic is getting warmer. So while the east coast may not worry about being hit more often by hurricanes or their fading remnants, warmer waters easily foreseen in virtually all global circulation models under greenhouse forces ought to keep them more dangerous to more northern latitudes than has been the norm.

It flows along naturally from that, he writes, that some day other factors combined with this (he doesn’t say it, but one recalls wind shear over warmer seas) may make dangerous hurricanes less frequent in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

One thing that hit me on seeing the map that AP ran. It shows the projected path headed straight at the Maritimes in Canada, shooting right up the Bay of Fundy. Holy cow, a hurricane there!? Isn’t that something? Not unprecedented, but still…

Borenstein doesn’t pay that attention. It does get coverage in Canadian media. At the Canadian Press, Melanie Patten reports yep its aimed at Nova Scotia and yep right up Fundy’s gut. But by then it ought to be, we read here, a Category 1 and fading fast. A serious storm so close the shutters and take the boat out of the water but no monster. Maybe the water is not warm enough. Yet.

- Charlie Petit

Normally, black holes evaporate over time, a process that probably releases information about their contents – but there may be a way to create black holes that stand the test of time

A scientist who had stored a metal canister in his luggage was detained at Miami airport during a security scare that shut down America's biggest international gateway.

Isn’t that a pretty picture? The circle of beads has been dubbed the string of pearls. At its center is the expanding debris of Supernova 1987A, the most intensely studied supernova, and quite possibly the most intensely studied single anything in the sky other than the Sun, in the history of astronomy. Roughly160,000 years after it blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and 23 years after the signal of the closest supernova in recorded history reached Earth’s telescopes and neutrino observatories, it’s still making news.

The string of pearls is not news – they are knots of stuff that the progenitor star spat out long before it blew up, and for several years now have been lit up as shock waves from the explosion reach them. Farther out are additional rings showing the intersection of the blast with other material, also not newly found. But the image is arresting and helps dress up news in Science from an international team led by a U. Colorado-Boulder man. The team says the newly spiffed up Hubble Space Telescope has yielded fresh info on how the giant original star disassembled itself and sent violently expanding shards and layers of itself racing and rebounding into the rarefied interstellar medium – including into its pre-blast burps.

The report is not itself a major revision or advance in supernova theory. But it does underscore the astounding details that this event has given astronomers who previously had little but theory to tell them what happens when a giant star burns its last shred of fusable element – silicon – and undergoes the greatest irony in astrophysics by collapsing and exploding at the same time.

Oh yeah – this is the journalism tracker, so I’d get to journalism. Some reporters, and it’s hard to be surprised, seem unsure what is the news here.

Stories:

• NatureNews – Rhiannon Smith: ‘Lost years’ end for backyard supernova ; A savvy piece, telling a story of research process and progress without regarding the specifics as particularly more astounding than what 1987A already showed to astronomers.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Supernova blast wave could shape galaxy evolution ;  Ms. Chow recounts what supernovas are, very briefly, and that they throw heavy elements into space where they get incorporated into new stars, planets, etc. She writes little on what SN 1987a has added. Odd usage too – she reports the supernova was “first discovered” in 1987. An editor ought to have lined out the “first” as redundant. She also writes that it has been “studied for more than ten years,” a peculiarly constricted time span. It’s heaviest scrutiny came immediately after that discovery.
• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Hubble Revisits Supernova 1987a ; A focus on one new discovery – that reverse shock waves, sort of like those waves that race back out to see from a steep beach – are making their way back toward the original explosion site.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: ‘Rock star’ spewed guts after emitting vast pearl necklace ; Once again varnishing his underlying enthusiasm for making  science a public amusement with lots of tweaky references to boffins (he even calls Science a “hefty boffinry mag,’ Page zips through this news quick. He may better have gone more slowly in describing the synthesis of heavy elements in supernovae. It’s true the strew them, but they don’t themselves, as he writes, make all of them. Manufacture of those beyond iron is in fact largely a job for Type II supernovae, as was this one, but lots of other  elements  beyond H and He,  up to iron, are constructed by the normal fusion burning sequence in heavy stars.
• Wired News UK – Duncan Geere: ‘Star guts’ pour out of decaying supernova ; A small niggle here. The team is not “at” CU Boulder; it’s members are all over including in Europe. In a short space Geere neatly connects this supernova with the process that provided our solar system, and out hemoglobin, with iron, oxygen, carbon…).
• Boulder Daily Camera – Brittany Anas: Hubble gives astronomers a glimpse of ’star guts’ ; She tells readers that the string of pearls will, a home town astronomer expects, ‘grow and glom together” with time, a spritely phrase.

Grist for the Mill:

Paper Observing Supernova 1987A wih the Refurbished Hubble Space Telescope ; CU Boulder Press Release (source of the ’star guts’ term in several accounts) ; HubbleSite Press Release ;

Other recent 1987A, gen’l supernova stories:

• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Supernova Explosions Offer Potential Spin on Life’s Origins ; about the chirality of biological proteins.
• Cosmos (Australia) Kate Heness: 3D map of supernova reveals wonky innards ;

Ancient Grist for the Mill:

This news dredges up many memories for me. In 1989 I rented a house near Santa Cruz and spent two weeks at a workshop at UCSC that noted supernova guru Stan Woosley hosted. I went there for the late, lamented magazine Mosaic that the NSF once published. As noted at this site before, thanks to friends of its now-retired editor,  Warren Kornberg, the articles are on line. If you have time and want to know how much was already known about 1987A shortly after it went off, here’s how I saw it. Warren sure let his reporters write long.

- Charlie Petit

Hurricane Earl is waning as it moves northward up the east coast of the United States. Some of the first researchers to notice the weakening had front row seats, watching the eye of the hurricane via drone flights.

In addition to the usual cadre of satellites, NASA is using a small fleet of unmanned aircraft into, over and around the hurricane as it tracks north from the Caribbean. While flying into a hurricane is nothing new, Earl is the first hurricane that NASA has observed using their unmanned Global Hawk observation aircraft (pictured above).

The aircraft are giving researchers a 3-D view of the temperature, waver vapor and cloud liquid water in the hurricane. Using a High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer, or HAMSR in official NASA acronymese, the Global Hawk is able to look down into the eye of the storm to the sea surface and compare different layers in relatively high resolution and in real time.

The unmanned aircraft left the Dryden Flight Research Center in California earlier in the week and spent all day Thursday flying over Earl at an altitude of about 63,000 feet. Along with HAMSR, the Global Hawk also carries an HD camera, giving hurricane scientists new capabilities to watch the storm strengthen or degrade in real time.

In addition to the Global Hawk which flew over the top of the hurricane, a NASA DC-8 is flying researchers through the eye of the hurricane and the high flying WB-57 is also participating in the research flights. NASA used images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station as their orbit took them over the storm as well.

Temperatures across the eye of hurricane Earl using HAMSR aboard the unmanned Global Hawk (pink crosses mark lightning)

The observations and measurements are part of the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Process experiment NASA is conducting during the 2010 hurricane season. New instruments such as HAMSR, as well as a weather radar aboard the DC-8 capable of creating 3-D images of precipitation from inside the hurricane are helping researchers gain a better understanding of the rapidly changing nature of hurricanes.

Hurricane Earl from the International Space Station taken the morning of Sept. 3

High resolution maps and images isn’t the only information available to the public. Hurricane researchers inside the DC-8 were also sending out tweets as they flew into and out of the hurricane. One of the tweets sent out Thursday mentioned the degradation of the eye wall at the center of Earl, an early sign of a weakening hurricane.

NASA plans to continue using the aircraft through the end of the month as more hurricanes line up in the Atlantic.

Images: NASA

The Smithsonian National Zoo has just launched a live webcam of the zoo’s four new baby African lion cubs and their mother. The cubs were born during the late night and early morning of Aug. 30 and 31 and will remain indoors until late fall.

The litter is the first for 5-year-old mother lion Shera, and the first surviving litter for 4-year-old male Luke. The new batch of cubs is part of an effort to develop a lion pride at the zoo, which has involved many years of planning.

Luke, Shera and her 6-year-old sister Nababiep started spending almost all their time in the yard together as a group six months ago. Shera and Luke bred in the second week of May. Over the past few weeks, the keepers started separating Shera to give her privacy and emulate the natural process.

In the wild, lions may wait up to six weeks before introducing their cubs to the rest of the pride.

Nababiep gave birth to a single cub in May, but it died when a straw seed got lodged in the lung, causing pneumonia.

“Since the unfortunate death of Naba’s cub, we’ve investigated various alternative bedding options,” lion-and-tiger-keeper Rebecca Stites said in a press release Sept. 3. “The use of bedding is imperative as it protects the cubs from trauma during the first fragile weeks of their lives. We’ve provided Shera and her cubs with shavings and soft hay with as few seed as possible.”

Keepers suspect that Nababiep is pregnant again.

The formation of prides makes lions unique among the great cats, many of which are solitary animals. In the wild, African lions are threatened by hunting, disease and habitat loss.

Image: Smithsonian National Zoo

See Also:

• Gallery: Robotic Sub Installs Deep-Sea Webcam
• Space Station Webcam Goes Live
• California Sea Otters Mysteriously Declining Despite Protection
• Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail
• DNA Testing Finds Endangered Whale Meat in Restaurants
• Oil Disaster Shows Need for Endangered Species Act Overhaul

Molecular cages for storing hydrogen fuel have been made from cheap, natural ingredients – and they taste like crackers

The stalled weather pattern behind floods in Pakistan and a heatwave in Russia may have delayed the start of the Atlantic hurricane season

The sizes of asteroids near Jupiter spell trouble for the leading theory of how our solar system evolved

Young drivers who played car-based computer games in their mid-teens are more likely to say they drive fast and dangerously in the real world

A 20-fold jump in the number of humans with a smallpox-related virus in Congo has provoked a call to assess its global threat

Laziness runs in the family, a new study suggests.

What happens in your brain when you view illusions in which two separate images can be seen?

Cotton impregnated with silver nanowires and carbon nanotubes could provide a cheap and effective method of purifying water in remote locations

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study that analyzes a decade of achievement data from New York City public schools reveals that the trajectories of math and English performance among students at standalone middle schools are significantly lower than students attending kindergarten-to-eighth grade (K-8) schools. The study, authored by researchers at Columbia University, was published in the journal Education Next and is also forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics.

The fallout from the current mass extinction of life on Earth will be far from simple to predict