Our planet is being bombarded by high-energy particles unleashed by the strongest solar storm since 2005, scientists say.

The charged particles are mostly a concern for satellites - which they can disrupt - and astronauts.

But they can also cause communication problems for aircraft travelling near the poles.

The geomagnetic storm has been caused by a potent flare that erupted from the Sun at 0400 GMT on Monday.

The effects are likely to be felt on Earth throughout Wednesday.

A more benign effect of the outpouring of particles is the ability to see aurorae, or "Northern lights", farther south than is usually possible.

A spokesman for US space agency Nasa said that flight surgeons and solar scientists have modelled the flare's predicted effects.

They decided that the six astronauts on the International Space Station do not have to take any action to protect themselves from the incoming stream of particles.

Solar flares are caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun's atmosphere.

In an event called a coronal mass ejection (CME), bursts of charged particles are released into space.

Solar scientist Dr Lucie Green says the solar storms have meant people further south can see the Northern Lights

Nasa's Goddard Space Weather Center predicted that the coronal mass ejection was moving at almost 2,200 km/s when it was due to reach Earth's magnetosphere - the magnetic envelope that surrounds our planet - on Tuesday at 1400 GMT (plus or minus 7 hours).

This can interfere with technology on Earth, such as electrical power grids, communications systems and satellites - including satellite navigation (or sat-nav) signals.

In 1972, a geomagnetic storm provoked by a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone communication across the US state of Illinois.

And in 1989, another storm plunged six million people into darkness across the Canadian province of Quebec.

But a spokesman for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (Noaa) Space Weather Prediction Center said the effects of this solar eruption seem likely to be moderate.

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NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.

The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week.

It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.

It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.

Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path.

Should we kick it, try to tug it, or even blast it off its trajectory?

"We're going to collate all the scientific information with a view to mitigation," explains project leader Prof Alan Harris at DLR.

"What do you need to know about an asteroid in order to be able to change its course - to deflect it from a catastrophic course with the Earth?"

It's likely that NEOShield will, at the end of its three-and-a-half-year study period, propose to the politicians that they launch a mission to demonstrate the necessary technology.

The NEO threat may seem rather distant, but the geological and observational records tell us it is real.
Artist's impression of the Don Quijote mission The European Space Agency designed - but never launched - the Don Quijote mission

On average, an object about the size of car will enter the Earth's atmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky.

About every 2,000 years or so, an object the size of a football field will impact the Earth, causing significant local damage.

And then, every few million years, a rock turns up that has a girth measured in kilometres. An impact from one of these will produce global effects.

The latest estimates indicate that we've probably found a little over 90% of the true monsters out there and none look like they'll hit us.

It is that second category that merits further investigation.

Data from Nasa's Wise telescope suggests there are likely to be about 19,500 NEOs in the 100-1,000m size range, and the vast majority of these have yet to be identified and tracked.

New telescopes are coming that will significantly improve detection success. In the meantime, the prudent course would be to develop a strategy for the inevitable.

The strongest mitigation candidates currently would appear to be:

Kinetic impactor: This mission might look like Nasa's Deep Impact mission of 2005, or the Don Quijote mission that Europe designed but never launched. It involves perhaps a shepherding spacecraft releasing an impactor to strike the big rock or comet. This gentle nudge, depending when and how it's done, could change the velocity of the rock ever so slightly to make it arrive "at the crossroads" sufficiently early or late to miss Earth.

"The amount of debris, or ejecta, produced in the impact would affect the momentum of the NEO," says Prof Harris.

"Of course, that will depend on what sort of asteroid it is - its physical characteristics. What's its surface like; how porous or dense it is? This is really something you would want to test with a demonstration mission."
Artist's impression of a gravity tractor Can a gravity tractor be relied upon to work for as long as its effort is needed?

"Gravity tractor": This involves positioning a spacecraft close to a target object and using long-lived ion thrusters to maintain the separation between the two. Because of gravitational attraction between the spacecraft and the NEO, it is possible to pull the asteroid or comet off its trajectory. "It's like using gravity as a tow-rope," says Prof Harris. "It's not straightforward of course. Can you be sure those thrusters will keep working for the time they're needed - a decade or more? Do you have confidence that the spacecraft can look after itself autonomously all that time? These are the sorts of technical problems we will look at."

In both scenarios, the effects are small, but if initiated years - even decades - in advance should prove effective enough.

What we've learnt about asteroids, however, is that they are not all the same. Different rocks are likely to need different approaches.

One method often discussed but about which there is great uncertainty is "blast deflection" - the idea that you would detonate a nuclear device close to, or on the surface of (even buried under the surface), an incoming rock.

The Russian members of the NEOShield consortium will take a close look at the option.

At present, I detect a lot of scepticism out there about this approach. Delivering the device to just the right place would prove very difficult, and the outcomes, depending on the composition and construction of the NEO, would be very hard to predict. But some better numbers than we have currently are required and TsNIIMash, the engineering arm of the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), will gather all the available data.

"What we want to do is take a comprehensive view, to try to draw everything we know together, with the right expertise so that this thing has momentum," commented Dr Ralph Cordey, from Astrium UK.

"We will look at the spectrum of techniques, trying to see which ones might be applicable in different cases. And then taking it to a level where we do some detailed design work on a possible mission to demonstrate one or more of these techniques."

And Prof Harris added: "At the end of this, we want to be able to say to the space agencies 'if you're interested in asteroid mitigation, this is what we think. We have six countries represented in our consortium and we're all agreed this is the way to go'.

"The politicians would then have everything on a plate. All they have to do is decide whether or not to execute the mission."

Jonathan Amos Science correspondent

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The largest distant galaxy cluster has been spotted by astronomers using a telescope in Chile.

Galaxy clusters are the largest stable structures in our Universe.

Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed "El Gordo" - "the Fat One" in Spanish.

Astronomers reporting at the 219th American Astronomical Society meeting said El Gordo was currently undergoing a merger and growing even larger.

Alongside other clusters highlighted at the meeting, astronomers hope to better understand how they form, grow and collide with one another.

Galaxy clusters yield many cosmic superlatives; mergers such as the one that El Gordo appears to be undergoing are the most energetic events in the Universe, as vast amounts of matter - and the mysterious dark matter - crash into each other at breakneck speeds.

The growth of clusters and their mergers are driven by gravity; normal matter we see along with the dark matter imaged on a grand scale in Monday's announcement act to draw things together.

Meanwhile, the even more mysterious dark energy works to drive the expansion of the Universe - to draw things apart.

Mapping out the process of cluster growth will be critical to understand the interplay between these dark forces.
Background check

The cluster was discovered by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope high in the mountains of Chile.

Clusters like El Gordo release energetic particles that have an effect on the cosmic microwave background, the extremely faint glow left over from the Big Bang that permeates the Universe.

"El Gordo is at a distance that corresponds to a distance of about seven billion light years - we're looking at it at a time that the Universe was only half as old as it is now, when structure was forming at a different rate," explained Jack Hughes of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US.

"By looking at and understanding the properties of El Gordo, we're able to understand the time evolution of the structure formation of the Universe," Prof Hughes told BBC News.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

    Every great advance in our understanding of the physical universe is a direct result of understanding how things change with time”

William Dawson University of California Davis

Twice as big as its contemporaries at similar distances, El Gordo represents a galaxy cluster in the middle of a lifetime.

Two rather smaller galaxy clusters were also unveiled that will help lay out this timeline.

A team including Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado used the Hubble telescope to pinpoint a handful of bright galaxies making up the most distant known "protocluster".

The light we see from it now was given off nearly 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was only about 650 million years old, and the team estimates the protocluster itself was just 300 million years old.

"This discovery is remarkable because we are witnessing the infancy of a future galaxy cluster," he told the meeting.

At the other end of the cluster evolution spectrum, William Dawson of the University of California Davis and his colleagues used the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes to spot a cluster in the latest stages of colliding that has ever been seen.

The sparse, widely separated galaxies from two clusters have passed through each other and carried on travelling, but much of the loose, thin gas making up the clusters has remained in the middle of the crash scene.

Mr Dawson said that these snapshots in the lifetimes of the Universe's largest structures were a gateway into learning much more.

"Every great advance in our understanding of the physical universe is a direct result of understanding how things change with time," he told the meeting.

That in turn should shed more light on the relative proportions of dark energy and dark matter, as well as help shore up theoretical models of just how big El Gordo will get.

"El Gordo is going to continue to grow," Prof Hughes said. "We could extrapolate what its mass will be; unfortunately the models are uncertain, but it could become the most massive cluster known about, even when we count the nearby Universe."

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The Pentagon's premiere research agency has chosen a former astronaut to lead a foundation that is designed to take humanity to the stars.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and Nasa are sponsoring the project, known as the 100-Year Starship.

Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, was notified last week that she had won, according to a copy of a Darpa letter obtained by the BBC.

Since leaving Nasa, Jemison has been involved in science education programmes, and is known as a space travel enthusiast and long-time Star Trek fan.

Her organisation, the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, is partnered on the Darpa project with Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to interstellar travel, and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.
Mae Jemison Mae Jemison worked on a Spacelab mission

Since it was first announced last year, the 100-Year Starship project has been met with trepidation by some, and excitement by many.

With Nasa scaling back its manned space programmes, the idea of a manned trip to the stars, which is well beyond any current technology, may sound audacious.

But the goal is not to have the government fund the actual building of spacecraft destined for the stars, but rather to create a foundation that can last 100 years in order to help foster the research needed for interstellar travel.

The money for the winning team, $500,000, is small, but is designed to help jumpstart the effort. According to a copy of the notification letter, Jemison's proposal was titled: "An Inclusive Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth & Beyond".

A spokesman for Darpa declined to comment on the award, which has not been publicly announced.

See "External Link" for pictures and related stories

The number of "eyes" scanning the universe in search of a particle that could shed light on our universe's formation is about to multiply.

High-energy cosmic neutrinos are only able to be detected by a few existing detectors hidden in what may seem bizarre places - inside mountains, underground, underwater and even in solid ice.

Operators use them to unravel the mysteries of cosmos, aiming to provide insights into the nature of dark matter, the evolution of stars and the origin of cosmic rays.

They may also be able to test the results of recent experiments that suggested neutrinos were faster than light which were carried out a Cern, the world's biggest physics laboratory.

Soon two more telescopes will join the network.

The first, a 1 cubic km (0.24 cubic miles) detector, is set to replace an existing small octopus-like device floating more than 1km (0.6 miles) below Russia's Lake Baikal.

The second is destined for the bottom of the Mediterranean and will dwarf its counterpart.

KM3NeT - an acronym of "kilometre-cubed neutrino telescope" - will sit at depths of 3 to 5km and is planned to have a volume of some 5 cu km.

It will consist of a number of vertical strings with spherical modules attached to them. These glass "balls" contain sensors which search for the neutrinos.

Each string will be almost 1km long - so once the entire structure "stands" at the bottom of the Mediterranean, it will be taller than the highest building in the world, the 830-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The thousands of pressure-resistant optical sensors will register rare and faint flashes of the so-called Cherenkov light - electromagnetic radiation emitted by charged particles originating from collisions of high-energy neutrinos and the Earth.
Continue reading the main story

Neutrinos

Neutrinos are among the most basic building blocks of the Universe - tiny "elementary" particles.

They are produced in certain types of radioactive decay and in nuclear reactions - including those that occur within stars.

The particles are also generated when cosmic rays interact with the other matter in our Universe.

They have no electric charge and negligible mass (a neutrino has less than a billionth the mass of a single hydrogen atom).

The particles come in several different versions, and can flip between these different neutrino "flavours".

Neutrinos interact weakly with other types of matter, which has led to their nickname: "ghost particles".

In fact, a neutrino can pass through about six trillion miles of lead without hitting a single atom.

Researchers in Italy say the particles seem to travel faster than the speed of light.

But this result is still unexplained and may be due to an error.

Like all the other neutrino telescopes, KM3NeT needs to be in as deep and dark a place as possible, to screen out the other particles which bombard our planet from above.

This European effort involves 40 institutes or university groups from 10 countries.

At the moment, there are several neutrino detectors, but only three are searching for the high-energy elusive particle. They are NT-200 in Baikal; Antares, located 2.5km under the Mediterranean; and IceCube in the ice at the South Pole.

To embrace the entire Earth, neutrino telescopes must be located in both northern and southern hemispheres, peering in opposite directions.
'Ghost particles'

Our universe hosts many violent processes including supernovae stellar explosions, star collisions and huge cosmic blasts known as gamma-ray bursts.

These phenomena accelerate charged particles to extremely high energies, far exceeding those reached in laboratory experiments on Earth, creating what is known as high-energy cosmic rays.

The rays propagate through the universe, and rain down on the Earth's atmosphere.

Although astronomers have registered cosmic rays for years, they have been unable to pinpoint their sources.

High-energy neutrinos, think scientists, may be able to help.
Graphic showing KM3Net telescope The KM3NeT telescope is set to be made up of hundreds of slender strings, each supporting dozens of sensors

These subatomic particles are born from cosmic rays' reaction with matter in the universe, so they are believed to originate at the heart of the same violent processes as the rays.

But unlike cosmic rays, neutrinos have no electric charge and almost zero mass.

They have such little interaction with normal matter that they travel unhindered through space, covering great distances. That includes passing through every one of us and our planet, in a straight line.

Being able to speed through the universe without deviation or absorption means they should be able to point back to their origin, making them unique cosmic messengers.

"Registering a high-energy neutrino could be our opportunity to see its source - and it would also guarantee that high energy cosmic rays come from there too, helping us learn more about them and the universe," says Dr Oleg Kalekin, one of the researchers working on the project at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

But detecting a high-energy neutrino is very tricky.

They are so difficult to spot that scientists have nicknamed them "ghost particles".

Lower-energy cosmic neutrinos originating in our Sun, in the Earth's atmosphere, and even in a supernova from a nearby dwarf galaxy have been registered.

However, we have yet to "catch" a high-energy astrophysical neutrino from far away, and there has only been indirect proof of its existence.
From big to bigger

Stumped by continuous failures to spot a real distant traveller, researchers now believe they need to act big.
Continue reading the main story

Hidden telescopes

The telescopes searching for high-energy astrophysical neutrinos are nothing like normal telescopes that astronomers point at the sky.

Not only do these devices look very different, they also have to be either deep underwater, underground or in solid ice. This is done to filter out low-energy atmospheric neutrinos that are created when cosmic rays pass through the atmosphere.

These low-energy particles constantly rain at us from above, and make it extremely difficult to register the neutrinos that come from faraway space.

But once deep underwater, in the darkness, the telescopes manage to screen out most of this "background noise" - in the hope of spotting the particles that originated from distant parts of the universe.

"The neutrino observational window at low energies has been opened," says Dr Christian Spiering of DESY, a German research centre for particle physics, who has been involved in the KM3NeT project.

"We want to open it at high energies and see how this terra incognita looks.

"To do that, we need bigger detectors."

Bigger, he explains, is at least 1cu km. This is why the IceCube detector was built. It started working at full capacity in 2010 and may get even larger in future.

Hence the plans for the lake telescope - Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) - and the colossal KM3NeT.

Although no one has been able to register a high-energy neutrino, the race is on to get there first, says astrophysicist Bair Shaibonov, from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna - one of the researchers participating in the Baikal project.

This is why, he says, the detector in Russia is being upgraded.

Organisers plan to submerge the first 350m-long vertical string with attached spherical modules during next year's annual expedition out on Baikal's thick ice in March and April.

Conditions at Baikal, the world's deepest lake, are ideal for a neutrino telescope, he adds.

"We have a metre-thick ice, a natural platform for upgrades and repairs. There are no storms, and the water is fresh, so the equipment doesn't rust as quickly.

"And building a huge telescope here would be only a fraction of the cost of KM3NeT or IceCube."

For now, the ambitious project is backed by only a few Russian institutes.
The original Baikal project sensors being installed Sinking the sensors into icy Lake Baikal helps filter out the "noise" of other neutrino particles

Whether the effort will make it beyond the first string, to the full 1 cu km, will depend on funding. The project relies both on private grants and the support of the Russian government.

The scientist overseeing Baikal-GVD, professor Grigorii Domogatskii of the Institute for Nuclear Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, is certain the venture will take off, calling it one of the most ambitious projects in the area of astroparticle physics in Russia.

In any case, building Baikal-GVD should not be a waste of resources: together with KM3NeT, these two big, powerful detectors in the northern hemisphere will complement IceCube - increasing the chances of homing on an elusive high-energy astrophysical neutrino.

And when that happens, a door may open to a new era of uncovering deep space enigmas.

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Twin satellites are due to go into orbit around the Moon this weekend with the intention of mapping its gravity.

Nasa's Grail spacecraft are expected to give scientists remarkable new insights into the internal structure of the lunar body.

This new data should clarify ideas about the Moon's formation and resolve many mysteries, such as why its near and far sides look so different.

Lead scientist Dr Maria Zuber is expecting some dramatic discoveries.

"Grail will improve our knowledge of the Moon's nearside gravity by more than 100 times over what was previously known, and by more than 1,000 times over what was known on the far-side," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher said.

"In science, when we can improve measurements by a factor of two, we usually learn an awful lot; but when we improve measurements by orders of magnitude, the kind of science that we do is actually transformative."

The duo were launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, last September, and have taken a long spiral out to their destination.

This weekend's approach to the Moon will bring them in over the south pole. Each satellite will execute a roughly 40-minute engine burn to slow itself and take up an elliptical orbit around the 3,500km-wide sphere.

The Grail-A spacecraft will initiate the manoeuvre at 2121 GMT on Saturday, 31 December; Grail-B will do a very similar burn a day later, starting 2205 GMT. Nasa should have confirmation near midnight on New Year's Day that both satellites are in the positions they should be.
 

"Following the lunar orbit insertion, the spacecraft will perform a series on intricate burns that take about two months, and these are required to get both spacecraft down to a [55km; 34-mile] altitude; and once that's done, that's when the science for Grail can begin," explained David Lehman, the mission's project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

Grail will map the small variations in gravity across the Moon.

These differences are the result of an uneven distribution of mass. Obvious examples at the Moon's surface include big mountain ranges or deep impact basins, but even inside the lunar body the rock will be arranged in an irregular fashion, with some regions being denser than others.

All this will have a subtle influence on the pull of gravity sensed by over-flying spacecraft.

The Grail twins will make their measurements by carrying out a carefully calibrated pursuit of each other.
 

    It takes the Moon about the same amount of time to rotate on its axis as it does to complete an orbit of the Earth
    This is known as "synchronous rotation" and explains why the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to Earth (top left)
    The nearside is covered in smooth, dark lunar maria (Latin for "seas") created by magma flooding into crater depressions
    The far-side is more rugged, with a thicker crust pock-marked by impact craters; the highest elevations are on the far-side (top right; bottom)
    In 1959, the USSR's unmanned spacecraft Luna 3 became the first to image the far-side; many of its features have old Soviet names

As the lead spacecraft flies through the uneven gravity field, it will experience small accelerations or decelerations. The second spacecraft, following some 100-200km behind, will detect these disturbances as very slight changes in the separation between the pair - deviations that are not much more than the width of a human red blood cell.

When the gravity map is combined with comparable-resolution topographical information showing the surface highs and lows, scientists should be able to deduce the Moon's probable internal structure and composition. This is fundamental knowledge that will play into theories of how the lunar body formed and how it has evolved over time.

"We believe the Moon formed from the impact of a Mars-sized object into Earth, but we understand little really of how this happened and how the [lunar body] cooled off after the violent event," said Dr Zuber. And she described as "shocking", the continued inability of science to explain why the rugged far-side of the Moon looks so different from that of the nearside with its great swathe of dark volcanic plains, or maria.

"Given that we've sent so many missions that have studied the outside of the Moon, it seems that the answer is not on the surface. The answer is locked in the interior," she said.

Grail's mapping phase will last for 82 days until early June. The Moon then goes into shadow, into eclipse, behind the Earth.

If the satellites can survive the hours of darkness on their batteries, it is likely they will be tasked with a second mapping cycle in the second half of 2012.

This would be at a much reduced altitude, perhaps as low as 25km from the surface. Getting lower would improve the resolution of the gravity maps yet again, and enable scientists to study even the structure of relatively small, shallow craters.

Grail is an acronym for Gravity Recovery and Internal Laboratory. The satellites will be given more engaging names than just "A" and "B" once the weekend's orbit insertion is confirmed. The names are being chosen via a public competition.

To see full story and pictures click on "external link"

Five days after a failed launch, the Russian Soyuz rocket system has been pressed back into service.

The vehicle successfully put six spacecraft in orbit for US satellite phone and data company, Globalstar.

The Soyuz lifted away from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1709 GMT, ejecting the last of the six Globalstar platforms an hour and 40 minutes later.

Last Friday, a Soyuz malfunctioned soon after launching from the Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia.

Parts were reported to have crashed back down into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia.

Last week's Soyuz was a type 2.1b, compared with the 2.1a version used for the Globalstar mission.

The two variants share many design features but use different engines in their third segment, or stage - the part of the Soyuz said to have been responsible for the failure five days ago.
Pressing concern

Wednesday's successful outing will come as a huge relief for Globalstar.

The company is the first of the major sat-phone concerns to start upgrading its systems. The six latest satellites follow 12 others launched in July this year and October last year.

The upgrade is a pressing concern for the company because its existing constellation is failing.

Rolled out in the late 1990s, many of these original satellites have suffered suspected radiation damage to their S-band transmitter equipment, which has limited their ability to handle two-way communications.

Globalstar is pinning its future on its second-generation constellation. It plans to put in orbit at least another six satellites to boost service reach and quality.

Following Wednesday's flight, Tony Navarra, Globalstar's president of global operations, was quick to thank the Soyuz team and Arianespace, the French company that markets commercial Soyuz launches through its Starsem subsidiary.

"These satellites were flawlessly placed exactly where we needed them so that our ground stations could find them on the very first pass," he said. "It's amazing that we can find six satellites within 30 minutes of them being placed into space."

Investigations continue into the cause of last Friday's launch malfunction, which resulted in the loss of a Russian Meridian telecommunications satellite.

It was the latest in a recent run of flight failures for the national rocket industry.

In August, a Soyuz failure on an unmanned mission to resupply the space station led to a six-week suspension of flights.

On 18 August, the week before the loss of the space station mission, a Proton rocket failed to put a communications satellite in its proper orbit.

Back on 1 February, a Rokot launcher also underperformed with a similar outcome.

And on 5 December last year, a Proton carrying three navigation spacecraft fell into the Pacific Ocean. This particular failure is widely believed to have contributed to the decision of the Russian government to replace the then space agency chief, Anatoly Perminov.

Vladimir Popovkin took over as the head of Roscosmos in April.

The rocket failures come on top of the loss of Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades. It became stuck in Earth orbit after its launch in November and will probably fall back to Earth next month.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

LHC reports discovery of its first new particle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009.

It is called Chi_b (3P) and will help scientists understand better the forces that hold matter together.

The as-yet unpublished discovery is reported on the Arxiv pre-print server.

The LHC is exploring some of the fundamental questions in "big physics" by colliding proton particles together in a huge underground facility.

Detail in the sub-atomic wreckage from these impacts is expected to yield new information about the way the Universe is constructed.

The Chi_b (3P) is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments, explained Prof Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC.

"The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together," he told BBC News.

"People have thought this more excited state should exist for years but nobody has managed to see it until now.

"It's also interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together - the strong nuclear force. And that's the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons."

The LHC is designed to fill in gaps in the Standard Model - the current framework devised to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles - and also to look for any new physics beyond it.

In particular, it is using the collisions to try to pin down the famous Higgs particle, which physicists hypothesize can explain why matter has mass.

Discoveries such as Chi_b (3P) are an important part of this quest because they add to the wider background knowledge, says Prof Jones, from Lancaster University, UK.

"The better we understand the strong force, the more we understand a large part of the data that we see, which is quite often the background to the more exciting things we are looking for, like the Higgs.

"So, it's helping put together that basic understanding that we have and need to do the new physics."

Prof Paul Newman, from the University of Birmingham, added: "This is the first time such a new particle has been found at the LHC. Its discovery is a testament to the very successful running of the collider in 2011 and to the superb understanding of our detector which has been achieved by the Atlas collaboration already."

And Andy Chisholm, a PhD student from Birmingham who worked on the analysis, said: "Analysing the billions of particle collisions at the LHC is fascinating. There are potentially all kinds of interesting things buried in the data, and we were lucky to look in the right place at the right time."

By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News Website, Geneva

Anticipation is building in the run-up to presentations of the best-yet evidence for - or against - the existence of the Higgs boson.

The famed particle is a missing link in current theories of physics, used to explain how everything gains its mass.

Rumours have been swirling about the findings for weeks, ahead of the announcement on Tuesday afternoon.

It is likely to yield only tantalising hints, as the teams do not have enough data to claim a formal discovery.

However, most physicists concede that not finding the Higgs boson is as exciting a prospect as finding it in the place where existing theory predicts it should be.

"If we wouldn't find it it would be even - in a way - more exciting, but you know, both ways, it's a win-win situation," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a particle physicist from the University of Manchester.

"[If] we find it, we know this theory's complete, but there's still more things to look for. If we don't find it, we know there must be something else which we haven't understood yet."

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Skywatchers have begun enjoying the last total lunar eclipse until 2014.

The spectacle, which occurs when the earth casts its shadow over the moon, will be visible from Australia, Asia and North America.

But indirect sunlight can still illuminate the Moon, turning it a dramatic shade of red.

The shadow started to fall at 11:33 GMT; the spectacle ends after 17:30 GMT. The total eclipse will last 51 minutes eight seconds.

The action began unfolding on Saturday night (local time) in Australia and Asia, where views are set to be the best.

Viewers in the western half of the US will have the best views on Saturday well before dawn (Pacific and Mountain Standard Time).

The further west they are, the better.

This is the second total lunar eclipse this year; the first occurred in June.

Stargazers will have to settle for partial eclipses of the Moon until 2014, say astronomers.

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Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own.

The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C.

It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0".

However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid.

During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets.

The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star, dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount.

Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth.
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Kepler Space Telescope
Infographic (BBC)

 Kepler 22-b was one of 54 candidates reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes.

More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries has brought that number down to 48.

Kepler 22-b lies at a distance from its sun about 15% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, its sun puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water.

The Kepler team had to wait for three passes of the planet before upping its status from "candidate" to "confirmed".

"Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research Center.

"The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season."

The results were announced at the Kepler telescope's first science conference, alongside the staggering number of new candidate planets. The total number of candidates spotted by the telescope is now 2,326 - of which 207 are approximately Earth-sized.

In total, the results suggest that planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth's size - so-called "super-Earths" - may be more common than previously thought.

It is looking increasingly grim for Russia's Mars mission Phobos-Grunt, which has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November.

Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft.

The European Space Agency announced on Friday that it was now ceasing any further attempts to get a signal.

Russian engineers though are expected to keep trying to the last.

"We will stay available for our Russian colleagues in case there is any sign or glimpse of hope from their side," said Dr Manfred Warhaut from Esa's European Space Operations Centre (Esoc) in Darmstadt, Germany.

It was Esa's 15m antenna in Perth, Australia, that first managed to get a response from Phobos-Grunt on 22 and 23 November (GMT). That success was quickly followed by Russian ground controllers using a 0.5m dish in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
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Phobos-Grunt - Mishap sequence

    8 Nov (GMT): The probe launched successfully on its Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
    It was dropped off 11 minutes later in an elliptical orbit some 345km above the Earth
    Two firings from the probe's hydrazine-fuelled cruise stage were planned over South America
    The first, lasting 11.5 minutes, should have raised the orbit of Phobos-Grunt to 4,000km
    A second burn, four hours into the mission, was to have sent the probe on a path to Mars
    But Russian engineers later confirmed that neither burn took place
    Two weeks on, Esa made brief contact through its Perth antenna; the Russians also
    The commands sent so far have not been able to re-establish control

    What would Mars probe failure mean for Russian space?

But since then, the probe has not reacted to any commands.

Phobos-Grunt is currently moving in an orbit with an altitude that varies between 200km (perigee) and 340km (apogee).

This orbit is slowly decaying. If engineers cannot re-establish contact and control, the 13-tonne spacecraft will eventually fall back to Earth.

The game-plan of late has been to try to stabilise the orbit by getting commands into the probe that would activate its thrusters and raise it higher in the sky. Getting Phobos-Grunt into a safe "parking orbit" would buy engineers more time to consider their options.

The opportunity to go to Mars, however, has been lost. The changing alignment of the planets now makes the distance to Mars too big to cross.

Phobos-Grunt was built to land on the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, and scoop up rock to bring back to Earth.

Such a venture should yield fascinating new insights into the origin of the 27km-wide object and the planet it circles.

The mission is also notable because China's first Mars satellite, Yinghuo-1, has been launched piggy-back on the main Russian spacecraft.

While Esa was always going to provide ground support to the Phobos-Grunt mission, the agency said it now felt it had done everything it could do to help.

"We have exhausted all the technical options at this point," said Wolfgang Hell, Esa's Phobos-Grunt service manager.