Citizen Cartwright

The answer may be near for one big question

At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, held this week in Washington, D.C., top scientists have been talking about being at "an incredible special place in history," possibly just a few years away from discovering the first planet similar to Earth where life has developed, or could.

"The fundamental question is: Are we alone? For the first time, there's an optimism that sometime in our lifetimes we're going to get to the bottom of that," says Simon "Pete" Worden, head of NASA's Ames Research Center. "I would certainly expect in the next four or five years we'd have an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone."

Closing in on the Big Bang

The most distant object ever seen — a star collapsing into a black hole more than 13 billion light years away — has been detected by a NASA satellite and is the subject of two papers in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The discovery "brings us close to that magical point of first light," says astrophysicist Volker Bromm of the University of Texas at Austin. "We don't have to get much farther to catch the earliest stars."

ScienceNow Daily News

Report: NASA can't get there from here

The blue-ribbon panel charged with reviewing NASA’s spaceflight program released its final report Thursday, saying the program "is at a tipping point where either additional funds must be provided or the exploration program first instituted by President Kennedy must be abandoned at least for the time being."

About $3 billion a year more is needed, the report says.

The Washington Post

Who's there?

European astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, bringing the total of discovered exoplanets to more than 400.

"I'm pretty confident that there are Earth-like planets everywhere," says astronomer Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva. "Nature doesn't like a vacuum. If there is space to put a planet there, there will be a planet there."

The Associated Press