Since the dawn of man, the origin of life has always been debated time and time again. Whether its religion, pseudoscience or Darwin’s Theory, the origin and evolution of life still remains largely in question. Although there are many hypotheses, few  have been tested well enough to bear the name of an accepted theory. As humanity develop a better scope of the world we live in and the technology to explore it, we began to search for life outside of mother Earth. We do so in hope that by finding and learning about life outside our world, we will be able to discover more about ourselves. As we reach beyond our Solar System, we looked for other Earth-sized planets, since the only assumption we can make is that a planet as big as Earth within the habitable zone of its host star could maintain life. We ourselves is the very proof of that statement. Planets outside of our solar system are thus called exoplanets, short for extrasolar planets. Searching for other life forms on exoplanets may sound like a walk in the park, but even the study of the study of life is an art to itself. There many ways searching for a planet: direct imaging, transits and eclipses, microlensing, Doppler effect, Pulsar timing and perhaps half a dozen more.

The planet introduced in this paper is WASP-12b. It is roughly 870 light-years away from us in the winter constellation of Auriga. It was discovered in 2008, by the UK’s WASP, Wide Area Search for Planets. The WASP surveyor uses transit methods to search the skies, detecting drops in light signatures as a planet passes in front or behind a star. Each star exerts a consistent and stable amount of energy, demonstrated in its luminosity. When a planet passes in front of the star, between our line of sight, it diminishes the light signatures of the sun.  (http://www.superwasp.org/wasp_planets.htm)  (all data regarding WASP-12 and WASP-12b from superwasp.org)

Basically, if the star is a light bulb and the planet is a pebble, we are trying to detect the “shadow” that the pebble casts when it is placed in front of it. The graph above is the light curve of WASP-12 as WASP-12b transits it. Note the slight drop in the middle of the graph. This is how WASP-12b was discovered. Since WASP-12 is a G-star, a relatively low-mass star, it will slowly grow bigger and more luminous, becoming a giant. When it completely fuses all its hydrogen into helium, it will change into a white dwarf.

WASP- 12b orbits around its star WASP-12. WASP-12 is a G0 star with a luminosity of 1.26 that of our Sun’s. It is 60% large than our Sun is (1.58 Solar Radii) and 30% heavier (1.29 solar masses).[1] Since the Sun is a G2 star, WASP-12 is slightly hotter than our Sun is, with our Sun being 5800 K and WASP-12 being 6350K. The most special phenomenon about the relationship of WASP-12 and WASP-12b is that WASP-12 is slowly absorbing WASP12-b. Since stars grow over time, WASP-12 is slowly growing into WASP12-b’s orbit. Given their minimal distance between the sun and the planet, it gives WASP 12-b incredible temperatures, perhaps even one of the hottest hot Jupiters we have discovered. WASP 12-b is much bigger than Jupiter, with a 1.83 Jupiter radii and 1.39 Jupiter masses. Since it orbits its star at an extremely close distance of 0.0226 AU, it has an incredibly short orbital period of 1.091 Earth days. this means that it takes a little more than one Earth rotation for WASP 12-b to complete a full orbit of its star.

Given the extreme conditions of WASP-12b, it is highly unlikely that WASP-12b would habit any life at all. The following equation is used to find the surface temperature of WASP-12b:

 Solving for SurfaceTemp in the above equation, the surface temperature appears to be 1800 K. Note that this equation does not include the tidal heating caused by WASP-12b’s immediate distance to the WASP-12. Taking the tidal heating into account, WASP-12b would be superheated to 2560 K. This is extremely hot, also the first piece of evidence that suggest that life could not on this planet. One of the most important requirements for life, water, could not exist in its solvent form at this temperature.

To further show that WASP-12b is not habitable, we will now show the habitable zone of WASP-12 and that WASP-12b does not lie within that boundary. The habitable zone equation will be used to find the inner and outer edge of the habitable zone of the star WASP-12.

Since the luminosity of WASP-12 is 1.26 times that of our Sun’s, we get D_inner as 1.07 AU and D_outer as 1.57 AU. The width of the habitable zone is thus 0.50 AU. WASP-12b is only 0.0226 AU away from its star WASP-12, so it clearly does not lie within the habitable zone of its star.

With regards to life on WASP-12b, it is true that it is far too hot for life as we know it to exist. WASP-12b, a hot Jupiter also has no solid surface, especially since the tidal heating from its star causes it to warp into an “egg” shaped planet. The heating also causes WASP-12b’s atmosphere to expand. But one thing about its composition does interest us. Among most hot Jupiter exoplanets that we’ve found have had a 1:2 carbon-oxygen ratio. But on WASP-12b, carbon-oxygen ratio was 2:1, twice the concentration of what it is normally. Moreover, its methane concentration is 100 times that of what astronomists speculated. Carbon and methane concentrations are important to us because life is carbon-based and methane is a by-product of life. Even though life may not exist on WASP-12b, another planet without its system would have similar composition. If such a planet does exist within the habitable zone of WASP-12, it may as well inhabit life.

If the life does exist on WASP-12b, they would mostly live in the higher atmosphere where water vapor could exist. They would have to be large, buoyant bodies that can regulate its altitude at will in case of the solar winds. They may be large creatures resembling jelly fish, but could inflate themselves to the size of a blimp. Since the planet is 870 light-years away, it would take far too long for us to get there with our current technology, we may never have a real image of WASP-12b being eaten away by its star. Overall, WASP-12b is a fascinating discovery and confirms a phenomenon that scientists have long suspected, but had not been able to confirm with legitimate data.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.superwasp.org/wasp_planets.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/planet-eater.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2035754,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12b

After viewing a report on smartphone ownership, I decided to create a chart with the data in the report. I documented The percentage of people who own smartphones with respect to age, Income and Education Level. Both Income and Education Level are in descending order while Age is in ascending order. These are not the only elements that the report recorded. But those seem irrelevant to the general trend. Those quantities include gender (50/50) and Race (50% for Whites, Hispanics and Blacks). One criteria that I did not include but did contribute to the trend was geographic location. But as one would expect, people in urban (48%) and suburban (49%) areas own more smartphones than those who live in rural areas (29%).

To explain the graph in its most basic form, the younger (though not younger than 18) , richer, more educated a person is, the more likely they will possess a smartphone. This should make perfect sense because smartphones is a very 21st century trend. The general population born in the ’90s experienced the development of the smartphone just as they are at their peak of learning capacity. As a result, 2/3 of the people between ages 18-29 own smartphones.

Another component to this is wealth. Let’s be honest, smartphones are quite expensive in comparison to the basic tool of communication it used to be. It has evolved a long way and can achieve a number of goals with just a few swipes and clicks. The amount of effort put in to develop this mini-computer has been phenomenal in the past 2 decades. But because of that very effort, not everybody can afford this luxury. The more wealthy a family, the more likely their child will have a smartphone. Intuitively, the level of education is also connected to wealth, more so than the smartphones even. This works both ways though. On one hand, the more wealthy a family is, the better the education their kids will receive, and they will mostly likely reward their child with a smartphone for a birthday or some other occasion, perhaps graduating middle school. On the other hand, the better of an education a person receives, the better the job he/she will get. And a better job means a better salary and income, which will ultimately lead to a more adept communications tool: the smartphone.

Even though these element show a very consistent and uniform trend, this does not mean the inverse of this trend is true. To elaborate, owning a smartphone does not make a person wealthier (they may appear wealthier), it does not make them more educated (one could argue that a smartphone is a good learning tool), and it certainly does not take any wrinkles of one’s face. So do not be mistaken. At the end of the day, education is still the ladder to the top, and the smartphone is just a small stepping stone along the way.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-Sept-2012.aspx

During its search for brown dwarfs, the PS1 telescope stumbled across a special planet, one that is not orbiting around a star. To be precise, it’s not moving at all, completely stationary. This planet, named PSO J318.5-22 after its discovering telescope is also one of the lightest, if not the lightest, free-floating object we have ever discovered. And it is the first free-floating planet we’ve discovered. Chemically, this planet contains elements one would normally find in a gas-giant orbiting a young star. Although PSO J318.5-22 is only 12 million years old, basically fresh out of the womb in terms of planetary ages, it is certainly don’t orbiting around anything at all. It is 80 light-years away from Earth. When you mass it with Jupiter, it would weigh roughly 6 times more than it.

A particularly special thing about this lonely planet is its color. When we first named colors of stars: white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, it’s because at a distance, white dwarfs look white, and in fact, they are extremely white, and brown dwarfs look brown to us but they are in fact very red in color. The extraordinary thing about PSO J318.5-22 is that even through a telescope, it looked redder than a brown dwarf did. And since it is not orbiting or close to a star, it is much easier for us to observe it. This is certainly a breakthrough in science because we have not previously discovered a lone planet. There will certainly be more similar and more astound discoveries in the future, especially since we have only recently in the past decade began to rapidly discover exoplanets. As Dr. Eugene Magnier of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa describe this discovery, “searching for a needle in a haystack”. Apparently, this particular discovery of the PSO J318.5-22 was like finding a needle in ” the biggest haystack that exists in astronomy”. As small as the probability is, time will be the cornerstone of astronomical discovery in years to come.

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5739/a-strange-lonely-planet-that-has-no-star

After going to a talk about National Parks and Animal Preservations, I have to say that a lot of us have an idea that human footprints are doing a lot of damage to many species, but the scale of the aftermath is mostly mistaken. We largely see it under a much more underwhelming light than the naked truth. The thing is, even the smallest things can affect a whole colony of birds or deer from migrating or moving to other parts of a forest. One thing that the speaker said that stuck with me was that a simple road could affect how bears survive in a forest. When you think of the number of highways Going North-South and East-West, all across the country, You release what humanity has done to Nature. The speaker then lead on to say that we need large spaces, bigger national parks and preservations for these species. Even Yellowstone Nation Park, one of America’s cornerstone landmarks and tourist attractions is too small. By tracking 10 bears in the National Park, they realized that a lot of the bears left the boundaries of the National Park, meaning that it needs to be expanded. They are still caged. Just because it’s a big cage does not make the bear free to roam and survive under its natural means.

A quote from The Newsroom summarizes our order of actions fairly well, “The first rule of solving a problem is recognizing that there is one.” And the speaker himself used a Wayne Gretzky quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” To solve this animal crisis, we have to recognize, anticipate and adapt. We have to alert our congressmen and the big corps to join in together to protect these ever trimming numbers of animals. We have to give back to Nature what we took from it. Even when we’re not trying, we’ve already begun the process. In the past decade, a lot of people from rural areas have to moving into the city, and animals have actually began to inhabit these areas. In a way, Nature has actually been de-urbanizing these past human populated areas. If we can artificially stimulate these processes, we could truly protect the endangered species out there.

We have been studying the yeast S.pombe microbe for a while now, using it as a model for living organisms for sixty years. You would think that we would have already found everything that there is to know about this beer cell. But turns out, this cell still has a lot to offer. Most cells reproduce by replicating itself. When a cell ages, it starts to develop defects and as a means of self preservation, it duplicates itself and separates a young, healthy cell, the daughter cell, while the original, old cell, the mother cell, with slowly die out. This is how most cells replicate themselves, asymmetrically. But the yeast cell is different.

It has been known for decades that the yeast cell replicates symmetrically, and it is not alone with that feature. But usually, the cells still leave a healthy cell and an aging cell. On the other hand, the yeast cell divides the damage between the two cells of the next generation. The researchers tested so by following a protein aggregation and the replication speed of the yeast cells. First, protein aggregation is a very common aging-related damaging condition. By following the traces of damage in each generation, the researching actually recorded that each pair of cells in a generation holds half the damage of the previous one. The second way they tested it was by recording the replication speed of the yeast cells. Usually, an aging cell takes longer and longer to replicate itself each generation. For example, if it takes a few seconds to replicate the first generation, it may take 20 seconds to divide the 75th generation. But the results of the speed of each generation’s replication were astounding – the number of generations did not affect the cell’s dividing speed, implying that these cells do not age.

Even though these cells do not age, it does not mean that they are immortal. Under ideal conditions, true, they can divide the damage evenly and spread it thin across the board. But under stressed conditions, the cells do leave a mother cell and a daughter, leading the mother cell to die off.

Perhaps the most important lesson about the discovery of this phenomenon is that there is always more than what meets the eye. Even though we’ve been learning about the yeast cell for decades, we still learnt about its non-aging feature these recent few years. This shows that we do not know everything there is to know about life. And that we should always keep a humble mind in the field of science, or in life for that matter.

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5722/a-microbes-fountain-of-youth

NASA has recently captured a near-Earth asteroid, part of a mission to learn more about near-Earth bodies and nebular residue. Since asteroids in our solar system is practically “waste” from the creation of our local system, we may find things of interest within them about the beginning of mother Earth. Some scientists hypothesize that water or even life itself could’ve came from asteroids. Even our Moon, given that the most popular hypothesis is now the Giant Impact, is basically a huge asteroid (well, it’s more of a planet but it wasn’t in orbit of the sun).

We have also been observing things outside our Solar System, especially since NASA recently upgraded one of their telescopes so now we can observe exoplanets with infrared light much easier and more accurately. All this uneventful data-mining and the countless manpower and time that has been put in to space exploration may seem unnecessary at times, or not worthy of an investment. But it is also to answer one of the main questions and motivation of this work: alien life and the origin of life.  If you ask the average rocket scientist whether there’s alien life, you will most likely get a uniform answer that it is not a question of “if”, but “when” and “where”. Since we exist, and we know Earth is not as special a planet as our hubris would like us to think, there is most likely some other planet out there very similar to Earth. But the question is when we will find that new-Earth, and where it is.

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5641/new-images-reveal-nasas-asteroid-capture-mission

NASA has been discussing a possible 2030s manned mission on Mars, since Mars is much further than the moon, food is more of a concern. Of course, the astronauts could always load enough food for the trip, but one particularly interesting suggestion was to GROW food on Mars. This suggestion raised a lot of questions. Can plants and crops survive on Mars? Would be we need a green house? The Sun is a lot weaker on Mars than the Earth, how would that affect the growth of the plants? The Mars doesn’t have an atmosphere like Earth does, would the atmospheric pressure affect the crops in a negative way?

Apparently, plants could in fact survive on Mars. It would take a big green house, since the thinner the atmosphere, the bigger the green house we need. The weaker Sun would slow down the growth of plants, but agricultural scientists have long been researching on artificial light to grow crops. Not only that, they have actually been able to focus the specific frequency of light wave that plants needs to increase the efficiency of their growth.

A quote that stood out in particular in the article follows, “Every great migration in history happened because we took our agriculture with us”. This quote speaks very well the most if not all the greatest explorations on Earth. Even in this very country, it all started with explorers coming to the New World, bringing along their crops and seeds as a means to survive. If we can sustain ourselves in a place, we can live and multiply there as well.

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5483/farming-on-mars-nasa-ponders-food-for-mid-2030s-manned-mission

After reading an article from the Astrobiology Magazine website, I find it fascinating that panspermia, a hypothesis that life came from space, could actually be true. Of course, this has always been a well considered hypothesis. Though, scientists have always questioned: if life (ex: bacteria) were to exist on an asteroid, could it survive the extreme temperatures and the radiation from the sun? What about the  Earth’s atmosphere and the force caused by the impact? Even though Dina Pasini, a researcher with the European Planetary Science Congress at UCL, could not answer all these questions, her research did prove to be useful.

Using frozen algae organisms, Pasini tested whether such simple life forms could survive impacts at extreme speeds. Using a light gas gun, she fired bullets of organisms at 6.93 km/s into water. Even at that speed, some organisms still survive. A typical meteorite impacting Earth would likely have similar speeds, showing that life could survive the initial impact. With regards to freezing and radiation, if organisms were embedded deep in ice or rock, it could protect it from the temperature and radiation. Moreover, passing through Earth’s atmosphere would only create heat on a thin surface layer of the asteroid, again protection any life forms within the asteroid.

Even though this test does not accurately recreate an actual meteor impact,  it shows that panspermia is possible after all. This also implies and raises many questions. First of all, we could all potentially be aliens. But more importantly, if we find extraterrestrial life, they could be related to us. And if life came from some other planet, we must stem from some other species. Are humans considered a primitive species in the eyes of others? Do some other species stem from us?

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5687/could-life-have-survived-a-fall-to-earth

In my hometown, the beautiful city of Hong Kong, lies a very special rock formation:  The Lion’s Rock. But to my young self, growing up around Walt Disney’s Lion King, it was the Pride Rock. The rock formation dates back to the Upper Jurassic Period, roughly 140 million years ago. Like most of the rocks in Hong Kong, the Lion’s Rock is mostly made of Volcanic granite. It is made of This is a major attraction in Hong Kong and has great significance in Hong Kong’s history. Before the Lion Rock Tunnel was built (a tunnel through the mountain, to get to the other side of the town), people would hike the lion’s trail to deliver messages and food every day.

Sitting at the entrance of the Lion ‘s Rock tunnel is a smaller, natural rock statue, called the Amah Rock. “Amah”, in Cantonese, means mother. The rock loosely resembles a woman with a child on her back, facing the sea. The legend says that a woman would bring her son to this hilltop, watching over shore, awaiting the arrival of her husband, a fisherman at sea. Little did she know that her husband had already drowned. Days go by and months, and yet the woman does not give up, till the day she passes. As a reward for her loyalty, the Goddess of the Sea made her body into a statue so her spirit can reunite with her husband up in the heavens. The Amah Rock is often a place where people (single and couples) make wishes. It is also a symbol of loyalty and faith.

Both the Lion’s Rock and Amah Rock have benefitted Hong Kong people significantly, though one practically and the other spiritually. The natural rock formations mostly likely formed over time due to erosion. But the structure of these formations and the resemblance they possess are stunning noticeable. Whether civilization emerged around these rocks as a result is certainly an interesting question. If not, it surely is a spectacular coincidence.

Reference:

http://www.afcd.gov.hk/english/country/cou_vis/cou_vis_cou/cou_vis_cou_lr/cou_vis_cou_lr.html
http://travel.cnn.com/hong-kong/life/top-10-parks-and-nature-reserves-hong-kong-615373

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Rock