Category: Science &Technology

Microsoft has revealed plans to deliver the complete, intelligent Microsoft Cloud for the first time from datacentres located in Africa. This new investment is a major milestone in the company’s mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more, and a recognition of the enormous opportunity for digital transformation in Africa.

Expanding on existing investments, Microsoft will deliver cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, from datacentres located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa with initial availability anticipated in 2018.

The new cloud regions will offer enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with data residency to help enable the tremendous opportunity for economic growth, and increase access to cloud and internet services for organisations and people across the African continent.

“We’re excited by the growing demand for cloud services in Africa and their ability to be a catalyst for new economic opportunities,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft Corp. “With cloud services ranging from intelligent collaboration to predictive analytics, the Microsoft Cloud delivered from Africa will enable developers to build new and innovative apps, customers to transform their businesses, and governments to better serve the needs of their citizens.”

Expanding Access & Opportunity:Currently many companies in Africa rely on cloud services delivered from outside of the continent. Microsoft’s new investment will provide highly available, scalable, and secure cloud services across Africa with the option of data residency in South Africa. With the introduction of these new cloud regions, Microsoft has now announced 40 regions around the world – more than any major cloud provider. The combination of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will connect businesses with opportunity across the globe, help accelerate new investments, and improve access to cloud and internet services for people and organisations from Cairo to Cape Town.

“We greatly value Microsoft’s commitment to invest in cloud services delivered from Africa. Standard Bank already relies on cloud technology to provide our customers with a seamless experience,” says Brenda Niehaus, group CIO at Standard Bank. “To achieve success as a business, we need to keep pace with market developments as well as customer needs, and Office 365 empowers us to make a culture shift towards becoming a more dynamic organisation, whilst Azure enables us to deliver our apps and services to our customers in Africa. We’re looking forward to achieving even more with the cloud services available here on the continent.”

Investing in African Innovation:This announcement expands on ongoing investments in Africa, where organizations are using currently available cloud and mobile services as a platform for innovation in health care, agriculture, education, and entrepreneurship. Microsoft has been working to support local start-ups and NGOs, unleashing innovation that has the potential to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity, such as the scarcity of water and food, and economic and environmental sustainability. One start-up, M-KOPA Solar, provides affordable pay-as-you-go solar energy to over 500,000 homes using mobile and cloud technology. AGIN has built an app connecting 140,000 smallholder farmers to key services, enabling them to share data and facilitating $1.3 million per month in finance, insurance and other services.

Across Africa, Microsoft has brought 728,000 small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) online to help them transform and modernise their businesses, and over 500,000 are now utilising Microsoft cloud services, with 17,000 using the 4Afrika hub to promote and grow their businesses. The Microsoft Cloud is also helping Africans build job skills, with 775,000 trained on subjects ranging from digital literacy to software development. We anticipate the Microsoft Cloud from Africa will fuel extensive new opportunities for our 17,000 regional partners and customers alike.

“This development broadens the options available to us in our modernisation journey of Government ICT infrastructure and services. It allows us to take advantage of new opportunities to develop innovative government solutions at manageable costs, as well as drive overall improvements in operations management, while improving transparency and accountability,” says Dr. Setumo Mohapi, CEO at SITA.

The Microsoft Trusted Cloud: Microsoft has deep expertise protecting data, championing privacy, and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements. With Microsoft’s Trusted Cloud principles of security, privacy, compliance, transparency, and the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure supports over a billion customers and 20 million businesses around the globe.

“By establishing hyperscale cloud datacentre capacity in South Africa, Microsoft is directly addressing customers’ concerns, and demonstrating commitment to the delivery of cloud services within the country and the region as a whole,” says Jon Tullett, senior research manager, IDC MEA. “The presence of local facilities will be greatly encouraging to South African customers, particularly those in regulated industries such as financial services and the public sector where data sovereignty concerns are paramount. This is a strongly positive development for the cloud industry in Africa, and particularly Microsoft’s ecosystem of partners, ISVs and customers.”

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

A paper-thin, flexible device created at Michigan State University not only can generate energy from human motion, it can act as a loudspeaker and microphone as well, nanotechnology researchers report in the May 16 edition of Nature Communications.

The audio breakthrough could eventually lead to such consumer products as a foldable loudspeaker, a voice-activated security patch for computers and even a talking newspaper.

“Every technology starts with a breakthrough and this is a breakthrough for this particular technology,” said Nelson Sepulveda, MSU associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and primary investigator of the federally funded project.

“This is the first transducer that is ultrathin, flexible, scalable and bidirectional, meaning it can convert mechanical energy to electrical energy and electrical energy to mechanical energy.”

In late 2016, Sepulveda and his team successfully demonstrated their sheet-like device — known as a ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG — by using it to power a keyboard, LED lights and an LCD touch-screen. That process worked with a finger swipe or a light pressing motion to activate the devices — converting mechanical energy to electrical energy.

The current breakthrough extends the FENG’s usability. The researchers discovered the high-tech material can act as a microphone (by capturing the vibrations from sound, or mechanical energy, and converting it to electrical energy) as well as a loudspeaker (by operating the opposite way: converting electrical energy to mechanical energy).

To demonstrate the microphone effect, the researchers developed a FENG security patch that uses voice recognition to access a computer. The patch was successful in protecting an individual’s computer from outside users. “The device is so sensitive to the vibrations that it catches the frequency components of your voice,” Sepulveda said.

To demonstrate the loudspeaker effect, the FENG fabric was embedded into an MSU Spartan flag. Music was piped from an iPad through an amplifier and into the flag, which then reproduced the sound flawlessly. “The flag itself became the loudspeaker,” Sepulveda said. “So we could use it in the future by taking traditional speakers, which are big, bulky and use a lot of power, and replacing them with this very flexible, thin, small device.”

Imagine a day when someone could pull a lightweight loudspeaker out of their pocket, slap it against the wall and transmit their speech to a roomful of people, Sepulveda said.

“Or imagine a newspaper,” he added, “where the sheets are microphones and loudspeakers. You could essentially have a voice-activated newspaper that talks back to you.”

Wei Li, an MSU engineering researcher and lead author of the paper in Nature Communications, said other potential applications of the FENG include noise-cancelling sheeting and a health-monitoring wristband that is voice-protected.

“Many people are focusing on the sight and touch aspects of flexible electronics,” Li said, “but we’re also focusing on the speaking and listening aspects of the technology.”

The innovative process of creating the FENG starts with a silicone wafer, which is then fabricated with several layers, or thin sheets, of environmentally friendly substances including silver, polyimide and polypropylene ferroelectret. Ions are added so that each layer in the device contains charged particles. Electrical energy is created when the device is compressed by human motion, or mechanical energy.

Story Source:Elcrema

Anyone who ever used a typewriter will recall the difficulty of fixing a misspelled or poorly chosen word — remember whiteout and correction tape?

Now, technology developed by Princeton University computer scientists may do for audio recordings of the human voice what word processing software did for the written word.

The software, named VoCo, provides an easy means to add or replace a word in an audio recording of a human voice by editing a transcript of the recording. New words are automatically synthesized in the speaker’s voice even if they don’t appear anywhere else in the recording.

The system, which uses a sophisticated algorithm to learn and recreate the sound of a particular voice, could one day make editing podcasts and narration in videos much easier. More broadly, the technology could provide a launching point for creating personalized robotic voices that sound natural.

“VoCo provides a peek at a very practical technology for editing audio tracks, but it is also a harbinger for future technologies that will allow the human voice to be synthesized and automated in remarkable ways,” said Adam Finkelstein, a professor of computer science at Princeton.

Zeyu Jin, a Princeton graduate student advised by Finkelstein, will present the work at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGGRAPH conference in July. The work at Princeton was funded by the Project X Fund, which provides seed funding to engineers for pursuing speculative projects. The Princeton researchers collaborated with scientists Gautham Mysore, Stephen DiVerdi, and Jingwan Lu at Adobe Research.

The team described the development of VoCo in a paper to be published in the July issue of the journal Transactions on Graphics. The research team has posted preprint of the paper as well as a video demonstrating the project and examples of synthesized voices at their web pages.

On a computer screen, VoCo’s user interface looks similar to other audio editing software such as the popular podcast editing program Audacity or Apple’s music editing program GarageBand. It offers visualization of the waveform of the audio track and a set of cut, copy and paste tools for editing. Unlike other programs, however, VoCo also augments the waveform with a text transcript of the track and allows the user to replace or insert new words that don’t already exist in the track simply by typing in the transcript. When the user types the new word, VoCo updates the audio track, automatically synthesizing the new word by stitching together snippets of audio from elsewhere in the narration.

“Currently, audio editors can cut out pieces of a track of narration and move a clip from one place to another. However, if you want to add a word that doesn’t exist in the recording, it’s possible only through a painstaking trial and error process of searching for small audio snippets that might fit together well enough to plausibly form the word,” said Finkelstein. “VoCo automates the search and stitching process, and produces results that typically sound even better than those created manually by audio experts.”

At the heart of VoCo is an optimization algorithm that searches the voice recording and chooses the best possible combinations of partial word sounds, called “phonemes,” to build new words in the user’s voice. To do this, it not only needs to find the individual phonemes, but also find sequences of them that stitch together without abrupt transitions, as well as fit them into the existing sentence so that the new word blends in seamlessly. Words are pronounced with different emphasis and intonation depending on where they fall in a sentence, so context is important.

For clues about this context, VoCo looks to an audio track of the sentence that is automatically synthesized in artificial voice from the text transcript — one that sounds robotic to human ears. This recording is used as a point of reference in building the new word. VoCo then matches the pieces of sound from the real human voice recording to match the word in the synthesized track — a technique known as “voice conversion,” which inspired the project name VoCo.

In case the synthesized word isn’t quite right, VoCo offers users several versions of the word to choose from. The system also provides an advanced editor to modify pitch and duration, allowing expert users to further polish the track.

To test how effective their system was a producing authentic sounding edits, the researchers asked people to listen to a set of audio tracks, some of which had been edited with VoCo and other that were completely natural. The fully automated versions were mistaken for real recordings more than 60 percent of the time.

Jin, whose research interests straddle audio and machine learning, said voice conversion technologies hold promise for a range of applications beyond editing audio tracks. For instance, people who have lost their voices due to injury or disease might be able to recreate their voices through a robotic system.

“We were approached by a man who has a neurodegenerative disease and can only speak through a text to speech system controlled by his eyelids,” said Jin. “The voice sounds robotic, like the system used by Steven Hawking, but he wants his young daughter to hear his real voice. It might one day be possible to analyze past recordings of him speaking and created an assistive device that speaks in his own voice.”

On the lighter side, Jin said voice conversion might be used to bring back the long lost voices of iconic cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny or Popeye. Such voices — and those of famous actors or historic figures — could then be used to create narration for new movies, or even integrated into automated intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.

The Princeton researchers are currently refining the VoCo algorithm to improve the system’s ability to integrated synthesized words more smoothly into audio tracks. They are also working to expand the system’s capabilities to create longer phrases or even entire sentences synthesized from a narrator’s voice.

Finkelstein said that editing software like VoCo raises important questions about how to treat digital content when we know it may have been altered to change its meaning. “This question came to the forefront for photography decades ago with the arrival of digital image editing software like Adobe Photoshop,” he said.

He said the emergence of fast and easy photo editing led to long discussions of the reliability of photos in news stories. Even before digital editing became available, expert photographers had many tricks for modifying their prints, but new programs made it faster and easier, and did not require the same degree of expertise.

“Today we take it for granted that photos can be edited, and we judge photos with a little more skepticism,” he said. “We understand there is a journalistic responsibility attached to photos.”

He said the same discussion is now happening with digital audio. Editors have long been able to modify audio files to clean up an audio track, and they could choose to change its meaning, for example simply by removing the word “not.” But he said that programs like VoCo, by making that process easier, will likely raise concerns.

“This tool will almost certainly fuel the conversation about audio that was preceded by a conversation about photos,” Finkelstein said. “Soon enough, it will be followed by a conversation about video.”

Source:Science Daily

Researchers from the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium, have succeeded in developing a process that purifies air and, at the same time, generates power. The device must only be exposed to light in order to function.

“We use a small device with two rooms separated by a membrane,” explains professor Sammy Verbruggen (UAntwerp/KU Leuven). “Air is purified on one side, while on the other side hydrogen gas is produced from a part of the degradation products. This hydrogen gas can be stored and used later as fuel, as is already being done in some hydrogen buses, for example. ”

In this way, the researchers respond to two major social needs: clean air and alternative energy production. The heart of the solution lies at the membrane level, where the researchers use specific nanomaterials. “These catalysts are capable of producing hydrogen gas and breaking down air pollution,” explains professor Verbruggen. “In the past, these cells were mostly used to extract hydrogen from water. We have now discovered that this is also possible, and even more efficient, with polluted air.”

It seems to be a complex process, but it is not: the device must only be exposed to light. The researchers’ goal is to be able to use sunlight, as the processes underlying the technology are similar to those found in solar panels. The difference here is that electricity is not generated directly, but rather that air is purified while the generated power is stored as hydrogen gas.

“We are currently working on a scale of only a few square centimetres. At a later stage, we would like to scale up our technology to make the process industrially applicable. We are also working on improving our materials so we can use sunlight more efficiently to trigger the reactions. ”

Source:Science Daily

A team of scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India, have found new ways to detect a bare or naked singularity, the most extreme object in the universe.

When the fuel of a very massive star is spent, it collapses due to its own gravitational pull and eventually becomes a very small region of arbitrarily high matter density, that is a`Singularity’, where the usual laws of physics may breakdown. If this singularity is hidden within an event horizon, which is an invisible closed surface from which nothing, not even light, can escape, then we call this object a black hole. In such a case, we cannot see the singularity and we do not need to bother about its effects. But what if the event horizon does not form? In fact, Einstein’s theory of general relativity does predict such a possibility when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. In this case, we are left with the tantalizing option of observing a naked singularity.

An important question then is, how to observationally distinguish a naked singularity from a black hole. Einstein’s theory predicts an interesting effect: the fabric of spacetime in the vicinity of any rotating object gets `twisted’ due to this rotation. This effect causes a gyroscope spin and makes orbits of particles around these astrophysical objects precess. The TIFR team has recently argued that the rate at which a gyroscope precesses (the precession frequency), when placed around a rotating black hole or a naked singularity, could be used to identify this rotating object. Here is a simple way to describe their results. If an astronaut records a gyroscope’s precession frequency at two fixed points close to the rotating object, then two possibilities can be seen: (1) the precession frequency of the gyroscope changes by an arbitrarily large amount, that is, there is a wild change in the behaviour of the gyroscope; and (2) the precession frequency changes by a small amount, in a regular well-behaved manner. For the case (1), the rotating object is a black hole, while for the case (2), it is a naked singularity.

The TIFR team, namely, Dr. Chandrachur Chakraborty, Mr. Prashant Kocherlakota, Prof. Sudip Bhattacharyya and Prof. Pankaj Joshi, in collaboration with a Polish team comprising Dr. Mandar Patil and Prof. Andrzej Krolak, has infact shown that the precession frequency of a gyroscope orbiting a black hole or a naked singularity is sensitive to the presence of an event horizon. A gyroscope circling and approaching the event horizon of a black hole from any direction behaves increasingly ‘wildly,’ that is, it precesses increasingly faster, without a bound. But, in the case of a naked singularity, the precession frequency becomes arbitrarily large only in the equatorial plane, but being regular in all other planes.

The TIFR team has also found that the precession of orbits of matter falling into a rotating black hole or a naked singularity can be used to distinguish these exotic objects. This is because the orbital plane precession frequency increases as the matter approaches a rotating black hole, but this frequency can decrease and even become zero for a rotating naked singularity. This finding could be used to distinguish a naked singularity from a black hole in reality, because the precession frequencies could be measured in X-ray wavelengths, as the infalling matter radiates X-rays.

Source:Science Daily

Researchers are turning glass bottles into high performance lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and personal electronics

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering have used waste glass bottles and a low-cost chemical process to create nanosilicon anodes for high-performance lithium-ion batteries. The batteries will extend the range of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and provide more power with fewer charges to personal electronics like cell phones and laptops.

Titled “Silicon Derived from Glass Bottles as Anode Materials for Lithium Ion Full Cell Batteries,” an article describing the research was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Cengiz Ozkan, professor of mechanical engineering, and Mihri Ozkan, professor of electrical engineering, led the project.

Even with today’s recycling programs, billions of glass bottles end up in landfills every year, prompting the researchers to ask whether silicon dioxide in waste beverage bottles could provide high purity silicon nanoparticles for lithium-ion batteries.

Silicon anodes can store up to 10 times more energy than conventional graphite anodes, but expansion and shrinkage during charge and discharge make them unstable. Downsizing silicon to the nanoscale has been shown to reduce this problem, and by combining an abundant and relatively pure form of silicon dioxide and a low-cost chemical reaction, the researchers created lithium-ion half-cell batteries that store almost four times more energy than conventional graphite anodes.

To create the anodes, the team used a three-step process that involved crushing and grinding the glass bottles into a fine white power, a magnesiothermic reduction to transform the silicon dioxide into nanostructured silicon, and coating the silicon nanoparticles with carbon to improve their stability and energy storage properties.

As expected, coin cell batteries made using the glass bottle-based silicon anodes greatly outperformed traditional batteries in laboratory tests. Carbon-coated glass derived-silicon (gSi@C) electrodes demonstrated excellent electrochemical performance with a capacity of  1420 mAh/g at C/2 rate after 400 cycles.

Changling Li, a graduate student in materials science and engineering and lead author on the paper, said one glass bottle provides enough nanosilicon for hundreds of coin cell batteries or three-five pouch cell batteries.

“We started with a waste product that was headed for the landfill and created batteries that stored more energy, charged faster, and were more stable than commercial coin cell batteries. Hence, we have very promising candidates for next-generation lithium-ion batteries,” Li said.

This research is the latest in a series of projects led by Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan to create lithium-ion battery anodes from environmentally friendly materials. Previous research has focused on developing and testing anodes from portabella mushrooms, sand, and diatomaceous (fossil-rich) earth.

Source:Science Daily

Similarities in partial fingerprints may be sufficient to trick biometric security systems on smartphones

No two people are believed to have identical fingerprints, but researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Michigan State University College of Engineering have found that partial similarities between prints are common enough that the fingerprint-based security systems used in mobile phones and other electronic devices can be more vulnerable than previously thought.

The vulnerability lies in the fact that fingerprint-based authentication systems feature small sensors that do not capture a user’s full fingerprint. Instead, they scan and store partial fingerprints, and many phones allow users to enroll several different fingers in their authentication system. Identity is confirmed when a user’s fingerprint matches any one of the saved partial prints. The researchers hypothesized that there could be enough similarities among different people’s partial prints that one could create a “MasterPrint.”

Nasir Memon, a professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon and the research team leader, explained that the MasterPrint concept bears some similarity to a hacker who attempts to crack a PIN-based system using a commonly adopted password such as 1234. “About 4 percent of the time, the password 1234 will be correct, which is a relatively high probability when you’re just guessing,” said Memon. The research team set out to see if they could find a MasterPrint that could reveal a similar level of vulnerability. Indeed, they found that certain attributes in human fingerprint patterns were common enough to raise security concerns.

Memon and his colleagues, NYU Tandon Postdoctoral Fellow Aditi Roy and Michigan State University Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Arun Ross, undertook their analysis using 8,200 partial fingerprints. Using commercial fingerprint verification software, they found an average of 92 potential MasterPrints for every randomly sampled batch of 800 partial prints. (They defined a MasterPrint as one that matches at least 4 percent of the other prints in the randomly sampled batch.)

They found, however, just one full-fingerprint MasterPrint in a sample of 800 full prints. “Not surprisingly, there’s a much greater chance of falsely matching a partial print than a full one, and most devices rely only on partials for identification,” said Memon.

The team analyzed the attributes of MasterPrints culled from real fingerprint images, and then built an algorithm for creating synthetic partial MasterPrints. Experiments showed that synthetic partial prints have an even wider matching potential, making them more likely to fool biometric security systems than real partial fingerprints. With their digitally simulated MasterPrints, the team reported successfully matching between 26 and 65 percent of users, depending on how many partial fingerprint impressions were stored for each user and assuming a maximum number of five attempts per authentication. The more partial fingerprints a given smartphone stores for each user, the more vulnerable it is.

Roy emphasized that their work was done in a simulated environment. She noted, however, that improvements in creating synthetic prints and techniques for transferring digital MasterPrints to physical artifacts in order to spoof a device pose significant security concerns. The high matching capability of MasterPrints points to the challenges of designing trustworthy fingerprint-based authentication systems and reinforces the need for multi-factor authentication schemes. She said this work may inform future designs.

“As fingerprint sensors become smaller in size, it is imperative for the resolution of the sensors to be significantly improved in order for them to capture additional fingerprint features,” Ross said. “If resolution is not improved, the distinctiveness of a user’s fingerprint will be inevitably compromised. The empirical analysis conducted in this research clearly substantiates this.”

Memon noted that the results of the team’s research are based on minutiae-based matching, which any particular vendor may or may not use. Nevertheless, as long as partial fingerprints are used for unlocking devices and multiple partial impressions per finger are stored, the probability of finding MasterPrints increases significantly, he said.

“NSF’s investments in cybersecurity research build the foundational knowledge base needed to protect us in cyberspace,” said Nina Amla, program director in the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations at the National Science Foundation. “Much as other NSF-funded research has helped identify vulnerabilities in everyday technologies, such as cars or medical devices, investigating the vulnerabilities of fingerprint-based authentication systems informs continuous advancements in security, ensuring more reliable protection for users.”

Source:Science Daily

As a driver and car owner, you want your vehicle to use as little petrol as possible because you obviously know that the less it consumes, the less money you spend on petrol.

Some of us own vehicles that use so much petrol and we do not get why this is so. Well, I know a few possible reasons why.

* First of all, the type of engine oil you use matters. Using the right type of engine oil keeps your vehicle running without stress. Using the wrong one on the other hand, can cause it to suffer to move and when that happens, the fuel consumption rate automatically increases.

* The way you drive your vehicle also determines how much petrol it uses. Revving, speeding and sudden application of brakes are examples of things that can make your vehicle use more petrol.

* Slightly deflated tyres consume petrol. When tyres are under-inflated, the surface area of the tyre in contact with the road tends to increase. This will in turn cause rolling resistance to increase; more fuel will burn. But that’s not all; over-inflation can cause loss of traction which makes your car do more work to stay on the road.

Research has shown that a decrease in tyre pressure by 10 psi can lead to up2.5% increase in fuel consumption.

* Your vehicle must have really good air filters always. If you have a thing for driving in dusty conditions, it is advisable to change the air filter as often as possible.

* It is not only unsafe to drive your car when the suspension systems and the chassis are bad; it also affects your gas mileage.

Regularly inspect your vehicle for misalignment. Broken springs, worn suspension, bent wheel and bent axle can cause the drive-train drag to increase.

And that’s all I have to share with you on petrol preservation for now, I do hope you’ve learned something from it. Don’t forget to share with friends who will value this info.

Source:Elcrema

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around the super-Earth planet GJ 1132b. This marks the first detection of an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet other than Earth itself, and thus is a significant step on the path towards the detection of life outside our Solar System. The team that made the discovery, led by Keele University’s Dr John Southworth, used the 2.2 m ESO/MPG telescope in Chile to take images of the planet’s host star GJ 1132. They were able to measure the slight decrease in brightness as the planet and its atmosphere absorbed some of the starlight while transiting (passing in front of) the host star.

Dr John Southworth explains, “While this is not the detection of life on another planet, it’s an important step in the right direction: the detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth GJ 1132b marks the first time that an atmosphere has been detected around an Earth-like planet other than Earth itself.”

Is there life out there?

Astronomers’ current strategy for finding life on another planet is to detect the chemical composition of that planet’s atmosphere, on the look-out for chemical imbalances which could be caused by living organisms. In the case of our own Earth, the presence of large amounts of oxygen is a tell-tale sign of life.

Until these findings by Dr Southworth’s team, the only previous detections of exoplanet atmospheres all involved gas giants reminiscent of a high-temperature Jupiter.

Dr Southworth says that whilst we’re still a long way from detecting life on exoplanets, this discovery is the first step:

“With this research, we have taken the first tentative step into studying the atmospheres of smaller, Earth-like, planets. We simulated a range of possible atmospheres for this planet, finding that those rich in water and/or methane would explain the observations of GJ 1132b. The planet is significantly hotter and a bit larger than Earth, so one possibility is that it is a “water world” with an atmosphere of hot steam.”

Studying atmospheres

The planet in question, GJ 1132b, orbits the very low-mass star GJ 1132 in the Southern constellation Vela, at a distance of 39 light-years from Earth. The system was studied by a team led by John Southworth (Keele University, UK) and Luigi Mancini (currently at the University of Rome Tor Vergata), and including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA, Germany) and the University of Cambridge.

The team used the GROND imager at the 2.2 m ESO/MPG telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to observe the planet simultaneously at seven different wavelength bands spanning the optical and near-infrared. As GJ 1132b is a transiting planet, it passes directly between Earth and its host star every 1.6 days, blocking a small fraction of the star’s light. From the amount of light lost, astronomers can deduce the planet’s size — in this case only 1.4 times that of Earth.

Crucially, the new observations showed the planet to be larger in one of the seven wavelength bands. This suggests the presence of an atmosphere that is opaque to this specific light (making the planet appear larger), but transparent to all the others.

The discovery of this atmosphere is encouraging. Very low-mass stars are extremely common (much more so that Sun-like stars), and are known to host lots of small planets. But they also show a lot of magnetic activity, causing high levels of X-rays and ultraviolet light to be produced which might completely evaporate the planets’ atmospheres. However, the properties of GJ 1132b show that an atmosphere can endure this for billion of years without being destroyed. Given the huge number of very low-mass stars and planets, this could mean that the conditions suitable for life are common in the Universe.

This discovery makes GJ 1132b one of the highest-priority targets for further study by the current top facilities, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope, as well as the James Webb Space Telescope which is slated for launch in 2018.

Source:Science Daily