About 8,000 light-years away, a giant planet circles an aging star, marching once around its sun in a single Earth-year. But that planet, called Kepler 1625b, might not be traveling completely alone. From a report: Scientists now suspect the planet's skies are filled by an orbiting mega-moon, a stunningly large world the size of Neptune that may be the first moon spotted outside our solar system. Early hints of its existence surfaced in July 2017, when scientists tentatively announced that they'd found some evidence of an orbital companion for Kepler 1625b. But it wasn't until the Hubble Space Telescope aimed its eye at the faraway star a year ago that scientists were able to gather enough data to build the case for the so-called exomoon's presence. Now, the two scientists behind the discovery are hoping for independent confirmation of their finding to really shore up the extraordinary claim.

"I'm confident that we've done a thorough job vetting this thing, but I also anticipate there will be things other folks come up with that we might not have considered," says Columbia University's Alex Teachey, who reports the purported alien moon this week in the journal Science Advances. "Whether those other ideas are fatal to the moon hypothesis or not, that remains to be seen." For now, MIT's Sara Seager says she's reserving judgment. "Exomoons are one of the key items remaining on exoplanet researchers' wish list," Seager says. "It's exciting to see the hunt for the first exomoon continue ... and with what would be a shockingly large moon, about the size and mass of Neptune."

Astronomers have discovered a dwarf planet, dubbed "the Goblin," in the outer reaches of the Solar System that never gets any closer to the Sun than 6 billion miles. Some experts say its orbital configuration points to the existence of Planet Nine, a hypothetical planet in our Solar System that is estimated to be about 10 times the mass of Earth. Gizmodo reports: The Goblin, or 2015 TG38 as it's more formally called, is what's known as an extreme trans-Neptunian object, or ETNO. As the moniker implies, these objects, of which there are potentially thousands, are located well beyond the orbit of Neptune. The researchers who discovered the object, a team led by Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chadwick Trujillo from Northern Arizona University, estimate that the Goblin is around 185 miles (300 kilometers) in diameter. At this size, it could very well be sphere-like in shape. Its mean distance from the Sun is about 80 astronomical units (AU), where 1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun. That's 7.45 billion miles, or 12 billion kilometers.

The Goblin's extreme orbital path means it never comes close enough to impose gravitational influence on the Solar System's giant planets, like Neptune or Jupiter. And at the astounding distance of 2,300 AU, it gets slotted into an emerging astronomical category known as Inner Oort Cloud objects (IOCs), of which 2012 VP113 and Sedna are the only other two known members. [...] The discovery of 2015 TG38 is bolstering the case for Planet Nine -- a hypothetical planet, sometimes referred to as Planet X, that's allegedly several times larger than Earth and located hundreds of AU away. As noted in the new study, published today in The Astronomical Journal, the location of Goblin's perihelion is similar to what's observed with Sedna and 2012 VP113, along with other ETNOs. This is a clue to astronomers that something potentially big, i.e. a super-Earth, is pushing these objects into similar types of orbits.

In a wonderful example of truth validating fiction, the star system imagined as the location of Vulcan, Spock's home world in Star Trek, has a planet orbiting it in real life. From a report: A team of scientists spotted the exoplanet, which is about twice the size of Earth, as part of the Dharma Planet Survey (DPS), led by University of Florida astronomer Jian Ge. It orbits HD 26965, more popularly known as 40 Eridani, a triple star system 16 light years away from the Sun. Made up of a Sun-scale orange dwarf (Eridani A), a white dwarf (Eridani B), and a red dwarf (Eridani C), this system was selected to be "Vulcan's Sun" after Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry consulted with astronomers Sallie Baliunas, Robert Donahue, and George Nassiopoulos about the best location for the fictional planet.

"An intelligent civilization could have evolved over the aeons on a planet circling 40 Eridani," Roddenberry and the astronomers suggested in a 1991 letter to the editor published in Sky & Telescope. The three stars "would gleam brilliantly in the Vulcan sky," they added. The real-life exoplanet, known as HD 26965b, is especially tantalizing because it orbits just within the habitable zone of its star, meaning that it is theoretically possible that liquid water -- the key ingredient for life as we know it -- could exist on its surface.

A reader shares a report from Space.com: The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon -- a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) -- as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere. But the bizarre structure actually extends about 180 miles (300 km) above those cloud tops, up into the stratosphere, at least during the northern spring and summer, a new study suggests. The hexagon, which surrounds a smaller circular vortex situated at the north pole, has existed for at least 38 years; NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft spotted the sharp-cornered feature when they flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, respectively. Scientists started to get much more detailed looks at the hexagon in 2004, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft began orbiting the ringed planet. But Cassini's hexagon observations were pretty much confined to the troposphere for a decade after its arrival; springtime didn't come to Saturn's north until 2009, and low temperatures in the stratosphere continued to compromise measurements by the probe's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument for another five years.

The formation of a stratospheric hexagon appears to be tied to the warming brought on by the change of seasons, the research team wrote in the new study. Indeed, Cassini spied a vortex high above the south pole during its early years at Saturn, when that hemisphere was enjoying summer. (Saturn takes 30 Earth years to orbit the sun, so seasons on the ringed planet last about 7.5 years apiece.) But the southern stratospheric vortex wasn't hexagonal. And neither, for that matter, is the vortex that spins around the south pole lower down, in the tropospheric clouds, the researchers said. "This could mean that there's a fundamental asymmetry between Saturn's poles that we're yet to understand, or it could mean that the north polar vortex was still developing in our last observations and kept doing so after Cassini's demise," study lead author Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement.

According to a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists have found the first direct evidence of frozen water on the Moon's poles. "The discovery is based on data gathered by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a NASA instrument that flew to the Moon back in 2008," reports Quartz. From the report: Reanalyzing this data today, the researchers found tiny patches of ice mixed with rock on the surface of certain craters at the northernmost and southernmost points on the Moon. Shuai Li, a geologist at the University of Hawaii who worked on the study, says the data can't tell us where the ice originally came from. However, Li adds, it's likely that it came from comets that smashed into the Moon years ago. Collisions with other space objects, like meteorites and comets, gave the Moon its pockmarked surface, and could have easily brought a foreign substance like ice along with them. Ice on the lunar surface could also be a result of gases coming out of the rock below. It could also be due to solar winds -- energetically charged ions emanating from the sun -- bombarding the Moon's surface to cause the chemical reactions needed to make frozen water. However, to truly understand the ice's origins, Li hopes to get a rover onto the Moon to take actual samples of the frigid lunar ground and its ice.

NASA's Sun-chasing Parker Solar Probe successfully launched this morning at 3:31AM. A couple hours later, NASA confirmed that the vessel was healthy.

The probe still has a ways to go before it's conducting scientific studies. "It'll spend its first week in space deploying its high-gain antenna, the first part of its electric field antennas and its magnetometer," reports Engadget. "In early September, the probe will start a roughly four-week instrument shakedown to be sure it's ready for science gathering." From the report: The trip to the Sun will take a while. NASA's probe will pass by Venus a total of seven times (starting in early October) as it uses the planet's gravity to whip itself ever closer to the star. The spacecraft will make its first close approach in early November, when it will travel 15 million miles from the Sun -- inside the Sun's corona (aka the solar atmosphere). Its closest approach will put it at just 3.8 million miles from the Sun, at which point it should be the fastest-ever human-made object with a speed of 430,000MPH. The first science data should return sometime in December. The New York Times has a neat video explaining how the Parker Solar Probe will touch the Sun. Meanwhile, Fox News has a dialogue-free clip of the actual launch.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch the Parker Solar Probe for a seven-year mission to study the sun and its atmosphere. The spacecraft will take off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, traveling up to 430,000 miles per hour towards the star -- that will make it the fastest spacecraft ever. Assuming you're reading this story around the time it's published, you still have time to watch the launch via NASA's livestream. The launch window for the Parker Solar Probe opens at 3:33 a.m. ET Saturday, but the exact launch time is unknown.

The New York Times has published a story about Eugene N. Parker, the professor that the spacecraft was named after. It is the first time that NASA has named a mission for a living person. Here's an excerpt from the report: In a foundational paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Parker described how charged particles streamed continuously from the sun, like the flow of water spreading outward from a circular fountain. Almost no one believed him. [...] Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft en route to Venus, measured energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space -- exactly what Dr. Parker had predicted. Scientists now call that stream of particles the solar wind. UPDATE: After several delays, the Sun-chasing probe successfully launched on August 12th at 3:31AM.

swm writes: The Baltimore police department is still using an antiquated (1996) case-management system based on Lotus notes. A recent technology assessment found "millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs," reports Baltimore Sun. The report found that the "siloed nature of the Lotus Notes databases made it difficult for officers to match, verify or search for information. [...] Various systems may also contain 'conflicting information' about the same case, or may not reflect the most complete information."

"At the same time, detectives continue compiling and using paper case folders," the report stated. "Depending on the unit and the detective, the appropriate Lotus Notes database and/or hard copy case folder system may or may not be up-to-date, and the systems may or may not match." The consultant who is paid to maintain the system says that it is "working wonderfully for the police." Despite these concerns that the assessment addressed, Baltimore's spending panel agreed to pay $176,800 to the consultant to help maintain the outdated system. The police department's chief spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the agency will be moving away from Lotus Notes in the future. "However, until such time, we must manage and maintain the product that we currently use which is Lotus Notes," he said.

A solar-powered aircraft from the European aerospace giant Airbus has completed a maiden flight lasting 25 days, 23 hours, and 57 minutes. In doing so, the production model unmanned solar-powered aircraft set the record for the longest flight ever made by any aircraft. From a report: Originally built by British defence company Qinetiq and now owned by Airbus, the Zephyr aircraft is designed to soar through the stratosphere for months at a time by drawing on the power of the sun. It is similar to Facebook's now defunct Aquila aircraft in this sense, and is hoped to one day provide satellite-like services with the flexibility of an unmanned drone. The latest version of the Zephyr weighs just 75 kg (165 lb), but is able to carry up to five times its own weight. Flying above weather and other air traffic at 70,000 ft (21,300 m), the aircraft can be controlled from the ground and has the potential to carry all kinds of payloads, be they to collect high-resolution imagery, provide voice communications or, as was the idea with Aquila, beam internet service to underserved areas. [...] It took off from Arizona on the 11th of July and has only now come down to Earth, a total of 25 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes later. This was the first outing for the production model Zephyr S, and the team is already setting its sights on its next voyage.

In T-minus three days, NASA will launch a car-sized spacecraft to investigate our Sun's scorching hot atmosphere. "The vehicle is the Parker Solar Probe, and it's set to launch at 3:33AM ET on Saturday, August 11th, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. "It'll be riding on a Delta IV Heavy rocket made by the United Launch Alliance, which will send the probe zooming toward the inner Solar System," reports The Verge. "Just six weeks after launch, Parker will do a flyby of Venus to alter its route slightly, and then six weeks later, the vehicle will be in the corona. Over the course of seven years, Parker will do 24 orbits around the star, as well as six more Venus flybys so that it can get even closer to the Sun's surface over time." From the report: NASA has long wanted to send a vehicle to the Sun's atmosphere, but such a mission has been considered impossible until the last few decades. This region of space, known as the corona, is filled with tiny, energetic particles that can reach above 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. Any vehicle that ventures near this region must have sophisticated protection to keep from melting. But thanks to advancements in carbon manufacturing and other key areas of engineering, NASA has been able to create a vehicle with a state-of-the-art heat shield and other crucial cooling systems. The result: the spacecraft will stay at room temperature in some of the hottest places in the Solar System.

The Sun's corona is actually 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun, and no one understands why. The region gets so hot that chunks of the corona actually accelerate and break away from the immense pull of the Sun at supersonic speeds. These so-called solar winds shoot highly energized particles out in all directions, which then slam into surrounding planets. Parker is tasked with investigating the mechanics of the breakaway effect and why the atmosphere is so much hotter than its source.

Kepler, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,800 known exoplanets to date, woke up from a four-week hibernation yesterday and has begun beaming data home, just as planned, NASA officials announced today. From a report: Kepler had been sleeping in an attempt to save thruster fuel, which is running very low. Mission team members wanted to make sure the spacecraft had enough propellant left to orient its antenna toward Earth for yesterday's data dump. Far-flung NASA spacecraft send information back to mission controllers via the agency's Deep Space Network (DSN), a system of radio dishes around the globe. The sun-orbiting Kepler's latest allotted DSN window opened yesterday, agency officials have said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world's first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field. World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world's dependence on coal.

More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Facebook is being used by oil and gas companies to clamp-down on protest. Three companies are currently seeking injunctions against protesters: British chemical giant INEOS, which has the largest number of shale gas drilling licenses in the UK; and small UK outfits UK Oil and Gas (UKOG), and Europa Oil and Gas. Among the thousands of pages of documents submitted to British courts by these companies are hundreds of Facebook and Twitter posts from anti-fracking protesters and campaign groups, uncovered by Motherboard in partnership with investigative journalists at DeSmog UK. They show how fracking companies are using social media surveillance carried out by a private firm to strengthen their cases in court by discrediting activists using personal information to justify banning their protests.

Included in the evidence supplied by the oil and gas companies to the courts are many personal or seemingly irrelevant campaigner posts. Some are from conversations on Facebook groups dedicated to particular protests or camps, while others have been captured from individuals' own profile pages. For instance, a picture of a mother with her baby at a protest was submitted as part of the Europa Oil and Gas case. Another screenshot of a post in the Europa bundle shows a hand-written note from one of the protesters' mothers accompanying a care package with hand-knitted socks that was sent to an anti-fracking camp. One post included in the UKOG hearing bundle shows two protesters sharing a pint in the sun -- not at a protest camp, nor shared on any of the campaign pages' Facebook groups. A screenshot from INEOS's hearing bundle shows posts from a protester to his own Facebook wall regarding completely unrelated issues such as prescription drugs, and a generic moan about his manager.

We don't yet know if there's life on other worlds, however likely that is, but NASA's Kepler Mission satellite has helped pinpoint the abundance of planets orbiting other stars starting in May 2009. So far, it has provided data that scientists have used to confirm the existence of 2,650 exoplanets in a field of over 150,000 stars that it's examining. But that long service is about to end, as NASA said this week the craft is running out of fuel. From a report: The space agency has put the satellite into a form of hibernation until August 2, when there's time booked on the Deep Space Network -- a global array of receivers for space missions -- to download data from its 18th observational mission. Following that download, NASA will use the remaining fuel to start a 19th session. Fortunately, its successor is already in place and operational. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018, and produced a test image in May. TESS is a massive upgrade, observing almost 400 times the region of space as Kepler, or about 85% of what's observable from its orbit relative to Earth. Kepler is already a survivor, continuing to operate after part of the gyroscope mechanism failed that let it target star fields. Four wheels rotate in the gyroscope to provide a reaction that allows the necessarily precision in tracking, and two of the four failed by May 2013. NASA mission scientists figured out a clever workaround, in which they used pressure from the Sun to provide additional positioning assistance. The mission resumed under the moniker K2 in May 2014.

When Jeff Bezos arrives as expected at the Sun Valley conference -- the year's most exclusive meeting of media industry leaders -- he'll know much more about his fellow media moguls than they know about him. And that has them worried, especially as Amazon's advertising business picks up. From a report: Amazon's growing advertising business is poised to challenge the stranglehold Google and Facebook have on the internet's ad dollars, thanks to its growing dominance in e-commerce and growing presence in the media world. Google knows what consumers are interested in, and Facebook knows who you are. But Amazon has what many in the advertising industry regard as the most important piece of the puzzle: what people buy. And the e-commerce giant is starting to capitalize on that data in a big way. "It is definitely growing as a media company, but it is surging in terms of ad revenue," said Advertising Age editor Brian Braiker. "The scary part for marketers is that [data] is all walled off, and if you want the special sauce you have to play by Amazon's rules." Amazon still makes the bulk of its money through the sales of goods and its widely used cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, but its advertising business is growing. In the first three months of 2018, Amazon reported revenue for its "other" segment, which is largely advertising, rose 139 percent, to $2 billion.

Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Never again, he thought. "I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy," he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. "These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil." Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. From a report: In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and Andre Borschberg flew around the world a few years back, Erussard and teammate Jerome Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they'll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.

The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production. Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it's the way that's stored that's clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas.

In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.

A new study by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute determined that it's quite likely humans are alone in the observable universe. Fortune reports: The study looked at the Fermi paradox -- the apparent discrepancy between the seeming likelihood of alien life, given the billions of stars similar to our sun, and the scant evidence that such life actually exists. The paradox was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked his colleagues at Los Alamos, N.M.. "Where Is Everyone?"

The study authors then examined various hypotheses and equations used to resolve the Fermi paradox. The results weren't pretty: "Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe. Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cited the study's conclusions as an "added impetus" for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization capable of extending life beyond Earth. He tweeted: "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."

BitTorrent, an early mover (and currently the largest player) in decentralised computing architecture to distribute and store data, is being sold for $140 million in cash to Justin Sun and his blockchain media startup Tron, TechCrunch has learned. From a report: Variety yesterday reported that a sale of the company to Sun closed last week, without naming a price, following rumors that circulated for at least a month that the two were in negotiations. Shareholders have now been sent the paperwork to sign off on the deal, and that has detailed the $140 million price. Some are, we understand, still disputing the terms, as more than one person claims to have made the introduction between Sun and BitTorrent. A source says it's unlikely that the disputes will actually kill the acquisition, given how long BitTorrent has been looking for a buyer. BitTorrent most recently said it has about 170 million users of its products.

An anonymous reader writes: If you drop your phone today and it falls to the ground, you can be fairly certain that if it slips from your grip again tomorrow (butterfingers!), it won't suddenly soar into the sky. That's thanks to one of the basic ideas in Einstein's theory of general relativity, which posits that the laws of physics don't change over space and time. But to actually know that for a fact, you'd have to perform the same task over and over again, in as many locations as possible, and watch closely for any change in outcome. That's why, as Sophia Chen reports, a group of physicists has spent the past 14 years -- or 450 million seconds -- watching clocks tick.

Their results would have made Einstein heave a sigh of relief. The physicists were observing the 12 atomic clocks to see whether their subatomic particles' behavior changed over those 14 years -- but it was completely consistent, even as the clocks moved with the Earth around the sun. Now, these findings don't necessarily mean that the laws of physics are absolutely not changing across time and space. They only definitively show that the laws of physics stayed constant over the 14 years of the experiment. "Still, they can now say this with five times more certainty than they could a decade ago," Chen writes. "And if it holds true for Earth's location in the universe, it's not too much of a leap to imagine it's true elsewhere."