Renegade Planets: Weird Alien Worlds Challenge Theories

Over the past 200 years, a standard model has emerged to explain how solar systems form. Using our own solar system as a guide, the model explains the existence of a central star (our Sun), an inner system of rocky, "terrestrial" planets, and an outer system of "gas giant" planets, all orbiting in nearly the same plane of rotation as the central star.

Recent discoveries of planetary systems around other stars have challenged this model. These exoplanet discoveries have included gas giant planets in close orbit around their stars, some of which are in radically different planes of rotation from their primary stars.

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Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.

If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.

The Kepler space observatory monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate the presence of alien planets passing in front of them as seen from Earth. Astronomers will use the newly-released data from Kepler to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/hundredsofpossiblealienplanetsdiscoveredbynasaspacecraft

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Strange Discovery on Titan Leads to Speculation of Alien Life

New findings have roused a great deal of hoopla over the possibility of life on Saturn's moon Titan, which some news reports have further hyped up as hints of extraterrestrials. However, scientists also caution that aliens might have nothing to do with these findings.

All this excitement is rooted in analyses of chemical data returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. One study suggested that hydrogen was flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Astrobiologist Chris McKay at NASA Ames Research Center speculated this could be a tantalizing hint that hydrogen is getting consumed by life.

"It's the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth," McKay said.

Another study investigating hydrocarbons on Titan's surface found a lack of acetylene, a compound that could be consumed as food by life that relies on liquid methane instead of liquid water to live.

"If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth," McKay said.

However, NASA scientists caution that aliens might not be involved at all.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100607/sc_space/strangediscoveryontitanleadstospeculationofalienlife

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