Were people created and put here on the Earth by an intelligent and Almighty Creator for a definite purpose? If so, just what is that purpose, and why is humanity so totally unaware of it? For ages people have wanted to know the reason for our very existence. We have asked: “What am I?” and “Why am I?” These are the ultimate questions of all time. Have you ever asked yourself these questions? If What is Man’s Ultimate Destiny
The ‘new stars’ are red dwarfs – small bundles of glowing gases cooler and dimmer than the sun.
Astronomers have discovered that dim red dwarf stars in nearby elliptical galaxies (right) are much more numerous than in our own Milky Way (left). This suggests that the total number of stars in the universe could be up to three times higher than previously thought
Astronomer Pieter van Dokkum said: ‘There are possible trillions of Earths orbiting these stars.’
They were already known to be the most abundant type of star. But our inability to ‘see’ much past our own galaxy meant no one realised just how common they were,
Professor Van Dokkum, of the prestigious Yale University in the US, used one of the world’s largest telescopes to ‘peer’ far past our own Milky Way into eight egg-shaped elliptical galaxies.
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The giant telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii picked out the particular pattern of light emitted by red dwarfs – and the ‘signature’ was much stronger than expected.
The elliptical galaxies were found to be home to 20 times more red dwarfs than the Milky Way. Across the universe as a whole, this could treble the number of stars, the journal Nature reports.
Professor Van Dokkum said: ‘No one knew how many of these stars there were.
‘Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities , so this answers a long-standing question about just how abundant these stars are.’
Charlie Conroy, the study’s co-author said: ‘We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies.’
More stars also mean more planets – raising the odds that we are not alone in the universe.
A cluster of diverse galaxies taken bu the Hubble space telescope. The new study led by a Yale University astronomer looks at elliptical galaxies, such as the bright one in the top middle of this photo taken in 2006
And the great age of the red dwarfs found in the elliptical galaxies raises the odds of another form of life having evolved even more, say the researchers.
Boosting the number of red dwarfs also raised the number of planets orbiting the stars - and the odds in favour of extraterrestrial life.
The red dwarfs discovered were typically more than 10 billion years old, which provides enough time for complex life to evolve.
One recently detected exoplanet astronomers believe could potentially harbour life orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581.
'There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,' said Dr van Dokkum.
The discovery also has implications for theories about dark matter, the mysterious invisible 'stuff' that appears to exert a gravitational influence on galaxies but cannot be detected directly.
More abundant red dwarfs might mean that galaxies contain less dark matter than earlier measurements indicated.
Edinburgh University researchers recently calculated that almost 40,000 worlds in our galaxy are hospitable enough to be home to creatures at least as intelligent as ourselves.
Astrophysicist Duncan Forgan created a computer programme that collated all the data on several hundred planets known to man and worked out what proportion would have conditions suitable for life.
The estimate, which took into account factors such as temperature and availability of water and minerals, was then extrapolated across the Milky Way.
What is more, these lifeforms would not be mere amoeba wriggling on the end of a microscope but fully-fledged aliens, because the scientists' definition of intelligent life is a species at least as advanced as humans.
And, as outlandish as the theory sounds, many Britons believe in little green men.
When more than 2,000 men and women were polled for the Royal Society, 44 per cent said they believe in extra-terrestrial life.
Just 28 per cent were non-believers, with the remaining 28 per cent saying they simply couldn’t be sure.
The Universe is teeming with planets capable of supporting alien life, according to a new study.
After studying stars similar to the Sun, astronomers found that almost one in four could have small, rocky planets just like the Earth.
Many of these worlds may occupy the 'Goldilocks' zone - the region where conditions are neither too hot, nor too cold, for liquid water and possibly life.
The findings mean that there could be tens of billions of planets like the Earth in our own galaxy alone - and trillions upon trillions of planet able to support life throughout the Universe.
An artist's impression of Gliese 581 g which scientists believe is orbiting a planet around 20 light years away
Scientists came to the conclusion after spending five years studying 166 Sun-like stars within 80 light years - or 470 trillion miles - from the Earth.
Planets outside our own solar system are too far away and too small to see directly with telescopes.
Instead, astronomers study distant stars for tell-tale 'wobbles' - caused when stars are pulled by a planet's gravity.
In the last decade, nearly 500 planets have been discovered outside the solar system this way.
The new study - published in the journal Science - found that Earth like planets were relatively common.
Dr Andrew Howard, from the University of California at Berkeley, said: 'Of about 100 typical Sun-like stars, one or two have planets the size of Jupiter, roughly six have a planet the size of Neptune, and about 12 have super-Earths between three and 10 Earth masses.
'If we extrapolate down to Earth-size planets - between one-half and two times the mass of Earth - we predict that you'd find about 23 for every 100 stars.'
The technique used by astronomers can only detect planets orbiting close to their stars. That means the true number of planets could be much higher.
Over the next decade, new methods of planet detection and more powerful telescopes could soon be uncovering true Earth-like worlds orbiting distant stars, the scientists said.
Gliese 581g mapped onto our own solar system to show how its orbit compares to that of Earth and Venus. Scientists now believe there are many Earth-like planets around distant stars
'These results will transform astronomers' views of how planets form,' said Prof Geoffrey Marcy, another member of the Berkeley team and one of the world's leading planet-hunters.
The astronomers used the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii to carry out their research on yellow G-type stars like the Sun, or slightly smaller orange-red stars known as K-type dwarfs.
Over the five years, 33 planets circling 22 stars were detected.
Prof Marcy is a member of the US space agency Nasa's Kepler mission to survey 156,000 faint stars using a newer 'transiting' method of planet-spotting.
This involves measuring the minute dimming of starlight as a planet passes in front of its star.
The astronomers estimate that the Kepler space telescope will detect 120 to 260 'plausibly terrestrial worlds' around some 10,000 nearby G and K dwarf stars.
Dr Howard said: 'One of astronomy's goals is to find 'eta-Earth', the fraction of Sun-like stars that have an Earth. This is a first estimate, and the real number could be one in eight instead of one in four. But it's not one in 100, which is glorious news.'
Last month astronomers announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet ever found - a rocky world three times the size of our own world, orbiting a star 20 light years away.
The planet appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could have flowing water on its surface.
The discovery came three years after astronomers found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra.
The planet, named Gliese g, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away - so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.
Nasa is set to launch a £428million space mission to hunt for Earth-like worlds that may harbour alien life.
Scientists believe that the three-and-a-half year voyage of the Kepler telescope, considered one of the agency's most exciting unmanned spacecraft, will help answer the centuries-old question: 'Are we alone?'
An artist's impression of the Kepler Telescope. It will be Nasa's first mission capable of finding Earth's size planets
Due to blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday, it will look for evidence of planets in the 'Goldilocks zone' around 100,000 stars, so named by scientists because conditions there are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for liquid water - and therefore life - to exist.
They say the search could yield 50 or more potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system.
'If we find that many, it will certainly mean life may well be common throughout our galaxy,' said Bill Borucki, the project's principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California.
'On the other hand, if we don't find any, that is still a profound discovery. It will mean that Earth must be very rare - we may be the only life in our universe. It'll mean there will be no Star Trek.'
The Kepler will be able to search a region of space 3,000 light years across
The spacecraft will carry a highly sensitive light meter, or photometer, that will stare constantly at an area of the Milky Way to measure the brightness of each star in Nasa's target group every 30 minutes for over three years.
When a planet passes in front of the star, the brightness will dim, like a blink. By measuring precisely how much the light fluctuates, and for how long, Kepler can calculate the size and temperature of the planet - information that will tell scientists whether or not that planet is habitable.
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'An Earth-like planet moving in front of a star is going to cause that star to dim by one part per 10,000. That's like looking at a car headlight from a great distance and trying to sense the brightness change when a flea crawls across the surface - but the Kepler instrument is designed to detect such small changes,' explained project scientist Patricia Boyd.
She added: 'We have an innate curiosity about our origins. Is life in our galaxy common, does it exist, are we alone, how unique is life here on Earth? And the Kepler mission is one step in answering that question.'
Preparing for launch: The fairing is moved into place around Nasa's Kepler spacecraft atop the United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket at Launch Pad 17-B, Cape Canaveral
The craft is named after Johanes Kepler, a 17th-century German scientist noted for his pioneering studies on planetary motion. It will look at a region of the sky located between two constellations - Cygnus the Swan, and Lyra - where a total of 3.5 million stars lie. Nasa has selected 100,000 of those stars for the study.
Over the past decade, man has discovered more than 250 giant planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, most of them huge balls of gas. Kepler will be hunting for smaller, terrestrial planets - rocky globes like Earth.
Its telescope is the largest of its kind ever built, allowing it to gaze at an area of the galaxy equivalent to the width of 20 Moons.
Mr Borucki said: 'With this cutting-edge capability, Kepler may help us answer one of the most enduring questions humans have asked throughout history: are there others like us in the universe?'
The hunt, he stressed, will establish whether there are other habitable planets, and not whether those planets are actually inhabited. That will be down to a follow-up expedition already being considered by Nasa.
First evidence of other universes that exist alongside our own after scientists spot 'cosmic bruises'
Scientists say that they have found evidence that our universe was 'jostled' by other parallel universes in the distant past.
The incredible claim emerged after they studied patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) – the after-effects of the Big Bang.
They say they may have found evidence that four circular patterns found in the CMB are 'cosmic bruises' where our universe has crashed into other universes at least four times.
The different signatures of a bubble collision. A collision (top left) induces a temperature change in the CMB temperature map (top right). The 'blob' associated with the collision is identified by a large needlet response (bottom left), and the presence of an edge is determined by a large response from the edge detection algorithm (bottom right)
The findings are based on the complex theory of eternal inflation for our universe. This theory holds that out universe if only one bubble in a larger cosmos and that other universes,which will have different physics to our own, all exist at the same time.
This is also know as the the multiverse theory.
Where these universe bubbles crash against each other they leave signature traces in the background radiation, some scientists believe.
The findings, by Stephen Feeney from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, are likely to be controversial.
A number of cosmologists have already written in response to the paper that it is too easy to jump to conclusions about what can be seen in the CMB.
The team behind the paper accept that 'it is rather easy to find all sorts of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB'.
But they add: 'If a bubble collision is verified by future data, then we will gain an insight not only into our own universe but a multiverse beyond.'
The paper, published online yesterday, comes just a month after a similar study of the background radiation claimed to have discovered evidence that the universe existed before the Big Bang.
Most scientists believe the universe was created in the Big Bang around 13.7 billion years ago. Stars and galaxies started to form around 300 million years later. Our Sun was born around five billion years ago, while life first appeared on the Earth around 3.7 billion years ago.
The CMB dates back to 300,000 years after the Big Bang and has now cooled to around -270 degrees Celsius.
A map of the cosmic background radiation (CMB) in the universe with circles which may signify events that took place before the Big Bang
A paper posted online on the website arXiv.org by respected scientists Professor Roger Penrose from Oxford University and Professor Vahe Gurzadyan from Yerevan State University, Armenia, suggested the universe could be much older han previously thought.
Penrose and Gurzadyan argue that evidence unearthed by Nasa’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotophy Probe in the CMB shows imprints in the radiation that are older than the Big Bang.
They say they have discovered 12 examples of concentric circles, some of which have five rings, meaning the same object has had five massive events in its history.
The rings appear around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background radiation appears to be strangely low.
The research appears to cast aside the widely-held 'inflationary' theory of the origins of the universe, that it began with the Big Bang, and will continue to expand until a point in the future, when it will end.
They believe the circles are imprints of extremely violent gravitational radiation waves generated by supermassive black hole collisions in a previous aeon before the last big bang.
Faster than a speeding bullet: Research finds young stars blast water into space at 120,000mph
Research has uncovered that young stars blast huge jets of water into space at a speed 80 times faster than a bullet.
The discovery was uncovered by scientists at the Leiden University in The Netherlands who focused on a protostar located in the constellation Perseus, which is around 750 light years from earth.
The star is aged at no more than 100,000 years and still remains surrounded by a large gas-cloud and dust from which the star was born.
Research has uncovered that young stars blast huge jets of water from their north and south poles (pictured in blue) into space at a speed 80 times faster than a bullet
During the research the scientists used an infrared instrument at the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory to look through the cloud.
In doing so they detected both hydrogen and oxygen atoms moving on and around the star.
They then traced the path of these atoms and concluded that water forms on the star at a few thousand degrees Celsius.
As they are blasted out of the star’s north and south poles they face temperatures of 100,000 degrees Celsius which turned the water back into gaseous form.
Once these gases hit the surrounding material they cool quickly and condense, reforming as liquid water.
Lars Kristensen, who led the study told National Geographic: 'If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second.
'We are talking about velocities reaching 200,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun.'
Kristensen and his team are particularly excited by the discovery as it could shed new light on the early stages of the sun's life.
'We are only now beginning to understand that sunlike stars probably all undergo a very energetic phase when they are young,' Kristensen said.
'It's at this point in their lives when they spew out a lot of high-velocity material—part of which we now know is water.'
The phenomenon seen in Perseus is 'probably a short-lived phase all protostars go through,' Kristensen said.
'But if we have enough of these sprinklers going off throughout the galaxy—this starts to become interesting on many levels.'
Scientists have witnessed a massive black hole swallowing up and ripping apart a star.
A powerful beam of energy that had crossed 3.8billion light years of space was the last gasp of the ill-fated star.
The bright flash of gamma rays was detected by the Swift satellite within the constellation of Draco.
An artist's impression of a star about to be consumed by a giant black hole. Scientists have detected a massive black hole consuming and ripping apart a star within the constellation of Draco
At first, astronomers thought it was a typical 'gamma ray burst' from a collapsing star, but closer inspection of the data revealed something far more interesting.
The high-energy jet was produced by a star about the size of the sun being swallowed up by a black hole a million times more massive.
The event - known as Sw 1644+57 - appeared to come from the centre of a galaxy nearly four billion light years away.
Cosmic collision: The incredible galactic pile-up that has lasted 350million years
A cosmic 'pile-up' between four galaxy clusters that has taken place over 350million years has been pieced together by scientists.
The investigation into how Abell 2744 - nicknamed Pandora's Cluster - came to be formed is likely to provide researchers with significant insights into the nature of dark matter.
They pieced together the cluster's complex and violent history using telescopes in space and on the ground, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Abell 2744: A cosmic collision between four galaxy clusters that has taken place over 350million years has been pieced together by scientists
Lead researcher Julian Merten said: 'Like a crash investigator piecing together the cause of an accident, we can use observations of these cosmic pile-ups to reconstruct events that happened over a period of hundreds of millions of years.
'This can reveal how structures form in the Universe, and how different types of matter interact with each other when they are smashed together.'
Abell 2744 is the result of a simultaneous collision of at least four separate galaxy clusters and this complex collision has produced strange effects that have never been seen together before.
When huge clusters of galaxies crash together, the resulting mess is a treasure trove of information for astronomers.
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Researcher Renato Dupke said: 'We nicknamed it Pandora's Cluster because so many different and strange phenomena were unleashed by the collision. Some of these phenomena had never been seen before.'
Among these is a 'bullet' near the core of the cluster, where the gas of one cluster collided with that of another to create a shock wave. The dark matter passed through the collision unaffected.
In another part of the cluster there seem to be galaxies and dark matter, but no hot gas. The gas may have been stripped away during the collision, leaving behind no more than a faint trail.
Even odder features lie in the outer parts of the cluster. One region contains lots of dark matter, but no luminous galaxies or hot gas. A separate ghostly clump of gas has been ejected, which precedes rather than follows the associated dark matter.
Treasure trove of information: The central part of Abell 2744 as its individual culsters merge together
This puzzling arrangement may be telling astronomers something about how dark matter behaves and how the various ingredients of the Universe interact with each other.
The scientists have made an animation that reconstructs how the remarkable merger event that created Abell 2944 might have happened.
In the video, the red regions are clouds of very hot gas, detected by their X-ray emission; the blue clouds are regions rich in dark matter that can only be discovered indirectly by their gravitational influence.
It shows how these different components behaved over a period of several million years, leading up to their currently observed positions.
Abell 2744 was studied in more detail than ever before by combining data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Japanese Subaru telescope, the Nasa/Eureopean Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope, and Nasa's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The galaxies in the cluster are clearly visible in the VLT and Hubble images.
Although the galaxies are bright they make up less than 5 per cent of the mass there. The rest, around 20 per cent, is gas, which is so hot that it shines only in X-rays, and dark matter, around 75 per cent, which is completely invisible.
To understand what was going on in the collision the team mapped the positions of all three types of matter in Abell 2744.
Incoming: Scientists made an animation that reconstructs how the remarkable merger event that created Abell 2944 might have happened
Dark matter is particularly elusive as it does not emit, absorb or reflect light, but only makes itself apparent through its gravitational attraction.
To pinpoint the location of this mysterious substance the team exploited a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This is the bending of light rays from distant galaxies as they pass through the gravitational fields present in the cluster.
The result is a series of tell-tale distortions in the images of galaxies in the background of the VLT and Hubble observations.
By carefully plotting the way that these images are distorted, it is possible to map quite accurately where the hidden mass - and hence the dark matter - actually lies.
By comparison, finding the hot gas in the cluster is simpler as Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory can observe it directly. These observations are not just crucial to find out where the gas is, but also to show the angles and speeds at which different components of the cluster came together.
It seems that the complex collision has separated out some of the hot gas and dark matter so that they now lie apart from each other, and from the visible galaxies.
Galaxy clusters are the biggest structures in the cosmos, containing literally trillions of stars. The way they form and develop through repeated collisions has profound implications for our understanding of the Universe.
Moist black hole home to largest and farthest water reservoir ever detected in the universe
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Mass of water vapour is 140trillion times the size of all the water in the world's oceans combined
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The reservoir is 30billion trillion miles away
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It takes light 12billion years to reach Earth from there
The largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe has been discovered 30billion trillion miles away.
Looking into a quasar - one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos - researchers have found a mass of water vapour that's at least 140trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times bigger than the sun.
Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12billion years to reach Earth.
The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6billion years old.
An artist's impression of a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where scientists have found the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe
Matt Bradford, a scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: 'The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water.
'It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.'
A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that is steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy.
Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbours a black hole 20billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
Since astronomers expected water vapour to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise, according to Mr Bradford.
There's water vapour in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, as most of our galaxy's water is frozen.
Nevertheless, water vapour is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar.
In this particular quasar, the water vapour is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years - a light-year is about six trillion miles - and its presence indicates that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards.
Although the gas is a chilly -53C (-63F) and is 300trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere, it's still five times hotter and ten to 100 times denser than what is typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.
The water vapour is just one of many kinds of gas that surround the quasar, and its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in both X-rays and infra-red radiation.
'It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times'
The interaction between the radiation and water vapour reveals properties of the gas and how the quasar influences it.
For example, analysing the water vapour shows how the radiation heats the rest of the gas.
Furthermore, measurements of the water vapour and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest that there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its size.
Whether this will happen is not clear as some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or may be ejected from the quasar.
Mr Bradford's team started making their observations in 2008, using an instrument called Z-Spec at the Caltech Submillimetre Observatory (CSO), a ten-metre telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Z-Spec is an extremely sensitive spectrograph, requiring temperatures cooled to within 0.06C above absolute zero.
The instrument measures light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum called the millimetre band, which lies between infra-red and microwave wavelengths.
The researchers' discovery of water was possible only because Z-Spec's spectral coverage is ten times larger than that of previous spectrometers operating at these wavelengths.
The astronomers made follow-up observations with the Combined Array for Research in Millimetre-Wave Astronomy, an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains in southern California.
The research will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Forget little green men on Mars - aliens could be right here on Earth, a leading scientist has claimed.
Cosmologist Paul Davies said it was 'entirely reasonable' to believe that we share the planet with a form of life different to anything we know of.
This 'life, but not as we know it' might be lurking in poisonous lakes or deep under the sea or could even be inside our bodies.
Professor Davies said: 'It could be right under our noses, or even in our noses. It could even be that "weird life" and real life are intermingled.'
Film fiction in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind': But real aliens could be too small to see, Professor Paul Davies says
Calling on scientists to launch a 'mission to Earth', he said it was possible that life had evolved more than once, meaning we are not alone on our planet.
He said: 'Life as we know it appears to have had a single common ancestor, yet could life on Earth have started many times?
'Might it exist today in extreme environments and remain undetected because our techniques are customised to the biochemistry of known life?
'If someone discovers shadow life or weird life, it will be the biggest sensation in biology since Darwin. We are simply saying "Why not let's just look for it?"
'It doesn't cost much compared with looking for weird life on Mars.'
Professor Davies, of Arizona State University, said any aliens that do exist on Earth will be too small for the naked eye to see.
Their unusual biochemistry could allow them to thrive in arsenic-rich lakes or in blistering hot vents underneath the ocean.
There is even a theory that alien particles, a tenth the size of bacteria, live inside our bodies and trigger the formation of kidney stones, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference in Chicago heard.
A view of Mars from the Hubble Telescope. But alien life could be closer to home
The British-born professor said: 'Although such claims remain controversial, it is conceivable that at least some of these Lilliputian forms are alien organisms employing a radically alternative biochemistry.
'Even if alternative life does not exist now, it might have flourished in the distant past before dying out for some reason.
'In that case, scientists might still be able to find markers of their distinct biology in the geological record.
'If alternative life had a distinctly different metabolism, say, it might have altered rocks or created mineral deposits in a way that cannot be explained by the activities of known organisms.'
Even some of the bacteria that scientists find difficult to grow and work with might be weird life with an alien biochemistry, the Chicago conference heard.
The professor said that if life is proved to have evolved more than once on Earth, it would vastly boost the case for there being life on other planets.
He said: 'As more terrestrial environments are explored, it seems very likely that new and ever more exotic forms of life will be discovered.
'If this search were to uncover evidence for a second genesis, it would strongly support the theory that life is a cosmic phenomenon and lend credence to the belief that we are not alone in the universe.'
Jill Tarter of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project, said: 'It is really important to engage people in thinking about astrobiology and life as we don't know it on Earth.
'As we do so, it expands our perspective, it changes our point of view and it trivialises the differences between humans.
'If we can get the world to think about life in a different way, all humans as being one species, I think we can do a lot to change the world.'
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The star-forming region of Messier 17 has been photographed in incredible detail for the first time thanks to a powerful new telescope with a 268 mega-pixel camera
The state-of-the-art 2.6 metre telescope has a field of view twice as broad as the full moon. It is the largest in the world exclusively surveying the sky in visible light. It is the latest addition to the European Space Organisation's array.
It is equipped with a 268 mega-pixel camera called OmegaCAM that is designed to capture even the fainter parts of space and can map the sky quickly and with fine quality.
The telescope will work alongside 'Vista' - an infrared survey telescope - and together they will create some of the best images of space ever seen.
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It is housed at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, and is next to another four powerful telescopes.
Tim de Zeeuw, ESO director general, said: 'I am very pleased to see the impressive first images from the VST and OmegaCAM. The unique combination of the VST and the Vista infrared survey telescope will allow many interesting objects to be identified for more detailed follow-up observations with the powerful telescopes of the VLT.'
The second images to be released from the VST has been described by the ESO as 'possibly the best ever portrait of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri.'
It is the largest globular cluster in the sky, but the very wide field of view of VST and OmegaCAM was able to encompass even the faint outer regions of the spectacular object. This splendid view includes about 300,000 stars.
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The dark matter galaxy that could be orbiting our Milky Way
A satellite galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter could be orbiting the Milky Way, a new image has revealed.
It is one of 24 neighbouring galaxies spotted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has recorded the night sky in greater detail than ever before.
The recently discovered galaxy 'Segue 1' orbits the Milky Way, and is believed to be composed of mainly dark matter
The results have doubled the number of known dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
The latest finding is particularly significant as it appears to have a very low light-to-mass ratio - a billion times less bright than the Milky Way itself.
Yale Professor of Astronomy Marla Geha, who led the team that made the discovery, believes that the galaxy, named 'Segue 1' is mainly composed of dark matter.
The scientists studying the galaxy believe this is due to the fact that despite having a mass of a million suns, it is not nearly as bright as it should be.
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'I’m excited about this object,' she said. 'Segue 1 is the most extreme example of a galaxy that contains only a few hundred stars, yet has a relatively large mass.
'These dwarf galaxies tell us a great deal about galaxy formation, for example, different theories about how galaxies form predict different numbers of dwarf galaxies versus large galaxies. So just comparing numbers is significant.'
The discovery of dark matter is often significant to astronomers, who believe it makes up around 85 per cent of the mass in the universe. Despite the fact that it does not absorb or emit light, it is possible to examine it's gravitational effect on surrounding matter. The scientists hope that discoveries lke Segue 1 will provide clues about how galaxies evolve.
'The galaxies I now consider bright used to be the least luminous ones we knew about,' Geha continued. 'It’s a totally new regime. This is a story that’s just unfolding.'
The team's findings will shortly be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Outer space: This view of Omega Centauri includes around 300,000 stars
UK astronomers are now gearing up to survey the sky in earnest. They will lead two of the VST’s three surveys over the next five years.
Professor Tom Shanks of Durham University will be leading the ATLAS survey which will focus on understanding dark energy.
He said: 'VST ATLAS combined with the VISTA Hemisphere Survey offers a new window on the Southern Sky, reaching from the ultraviolet to the infrared.
'At a step, these Southern Hemisphere surveys will overtake those in the north in terms of depth and wavelength coverage. Their large sky area will make them a powerful base for future cosmological surveys of the Universe, based on luminous galaxies and quasars seen out to billions of light-years.
'By combining these with new cosmic microwave background data from the European Planck satellite, there will be new opportunities to test the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion and hence the existence of dark energy.'
Professor Janet Drew of the University of Hertfordshire is leading the VPHAS+ survey which will image the central star-rich plane of the Milky Way and its central bulge, mapping the stellar and gaseous content.
She said: 'This survey will bring to galactic astronomy a huge resource, both in terms of excellent (and inspiring) imagery of the many nebulous regions it contains providing insights on how stars are born and die, and in terms of uniform quantitative photometry of 100s of millions of stars that will support the continuing effort to disentangle how our own dust-obscured galaxy is organized.'
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Life on Mars theory goes up in a puff: Scientists find methane gas would make planet poisonous
The discovery of seasonal plumes of methane on Mars was embraced as evidence of life on the red planet.
With most of the methane on Earth produced by living organisms, the Nasa finding earlier this year was a tantalising sign we may not be alone in the universe.
But alas, it now seems it could actually be the opposite.
Are we alone? Scientists believed methane gas on Mars was proof of life on the planet - but now that theory could be wrong
French scientists say the methane means Mars would be a very difficult place to live - even for the hardiest bacterial alien.
Their calculations suggest the methane in the plumes is being broken down extremely quickly, probably by aggressive chemicals on the planet's surface.
Any living organisms would also fall foul of the 'chemical weapons', the journal Nature reports.
The researchers, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said: 'This would suggest an extraordinarily harsh environment for the survival of organics on the planet.
'This would leave little hope that life as we know it can exist at present or that evidence of past life can be preserved in the shallow surface layer.'
Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society, said: 'The surface is very cold and the atmosphere, such as it is, is not only very thin but would be poisonous to us.'
But he added life could be hanging on below the surface.
'It is just possible that if you drilled down 10 or 20 or 100 metres, you would find it,' Dr Massey said.
'If you want to settle the debate, it means sending probes, or ultimately, people, to the source of the methane to check it out.
'Everybody wants to know if there is life elsewhere in the Universe and finding life on Mars is a big start.'
Mark Sephton, a University College London scientist who is researching life detection instruments for a 2018 European robotic mission to Mars, said: 'I am one of those people who believes life is a natural consequence of the environment.
'I think there probably was something on Mars in the early days and we will hopefully find the remains of that life.'
Last month, Buzz Aldrin, said the Moon race was dead and Nasa should focus its energies on Mars instead.
The second man to walk on the Moon said: 'America helped to take the world to the moon 40 years ago and America certainly can help lead the world in the direction of Mars.
'All we need it determination, imagination and willingness.'
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A window to other words: The VST is based in Chile
About 30 terabytes (three million million bytes) of raw data will be produced by OmegaCAM each year. These data will be processed and archived at data centers in Europe including the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU).
Once the images from the VST have been processed, huge lists of the objects found, as well as the images themselves will be made available to astronomers around the world for scientific analysis.
Scientists have captured the first high-resolution image of a distant quasar using a new radio telescope that will one day search for life on other planets.
The quasar, a distant galaxy many billions of light years away, is the first major success a pan-European array of telescopes which will help astronomers answer some of the most fundamental questions about our existence.
As part of the project British universities are joining forces with experts from around the country to construct what will be the first major radio telescope to be built in the UK for decades.
The first high-resolution image of a distant quasar taken as part of a Europe wide project using radio telescopes. The first image shows fine details of the quasar 3C 196 observed at wavelengths between 4 and 10 musing just a small fraction of the final LOFAR array that will cover large parts of Europe
The European Low Frequency Array (Lofar) will collect data which the scientists hope will enable them to detect when the first stars in the universe were formed as well as observe some of the most distant galaxies.
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This could help them to reveal how the universe evolved.
The first stage of the Lofar telescope involves 96 radio antennae being erected this week in a field at the Chilbolton Observatory near Andover, Hampshire.
This will be followed with 5,000 separate antennae being stationed all over Europe with some already in place in the Netherlands, Germany with others planned in France, Sweden and Poland.
The antennae installed across Europe will work at the lowest FM frequencies accessible from Earth and will be connected using sophisticated computing and high-speed internet.
Professor Bob Nichol, of the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: 'The Lofar telescope will produce an enormous volume of data which will enable a significant amount of science, from monitoring the sun's activity or 'space weather' to potentially searching for alien intelligence.
'Maybe we can answer the age-old question 'Are we alone?'.'
Some of the 96 radio antennae installed for the new European Low Frequency Array (Lofar) telescope at the Chilbolton Observatory near Andover, Hampshire
Astronomers are launching the telescope to search for the origins of the universe and even to find intelligent alien lifeforms - all by listening to the skies using a massive FM radio receiver
A super-computer based in the Netherlands will use digital electronics to combine the signals from the antennae to make images of the entire radio sky.
Professor Rob Fender, of the University of Southampton and principal investigator of the Lofar-UK project, said: 'Lofar is an amazingly simple concept because the antennae are made from everyday components.
'But it is also immensely complex because of the huge amounts of radio data that these antennae produce.
'At the Chilbolton site, seven petabytes of raw data will be produced each year, which must be transferred in real time to Holland.
'That's like streaming 100 high definition TV channels for every second of every day for the next five years.'
Lofar-UK is funded through a collaboration of UK universities with the SEPnet consortium and the UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council.
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| A pioneering spacecraft that will land on a comet almost 600 million miles from Earth, has entered the loneliest leg of its mission.
Scientists at the European Space Agency have shut down most of the Rosetta probe's systems placing the comet-hunter in to a long, dark hibernation.
The craft will now coast in silence for 31 months, looping its way into deep space until it wakes up in 2014 for arrival at its comet destination.
The centre of the Milky Way galaxy and constellation Scorpius. In March, the comet happened to be located in this direction although it is invisible (red box)
The location of the comet: Rosetta takes a snap of its destination (in grey box) with its OSIRIS camera
Today’s event marks the end of the first phase of Rosetta’s ten-year cruise. It has already taken some impressive images of Earth, Mars and the Lucretia asteroid.
The deep sleep is necessary because the craft’s solar panels cannot
Rosetta is heading toward a rendezvous with 67-P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is still some 100 million miles away.
Only the computer and several heaters will remain active. These will be automatically controlled to ensure that the entire satellite doesn’t freeze as its orbit takes it from 410 million miles from the Sun out to 490 million miles and back between now and 2014.
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'We sent the command via NASA’s 70 m Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, ensuring the signal was transmitted with enough power to reach Rosetta, which is now 549 million km from Earth,' said ESA’s Spacecraft Operations Manager Andrea Accomazzo.
'We’ll monitor via ESA’s 35m station at New Norcia in Australia for a few days to see if any problems occur, but we expect to receive no radio signal until 2014. Rosetta’s on her own now.'
2014: An artist's impression of the Rosetta Spacecraft reaching the comet 67-P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
On 20 January 2014, a timer will wake the slumbering spacecraft, which will then transmit a signal to Earth to announce its revival.
Mission controllers will then spend several weeks gradually warming up and reactivating the spacecraft in preparation for its rendezvous with the comet in July 2014.
Mission controllers at ESOC, ESA’s Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, have spent most of the past year preparing for hibernation.
A special hibernation mode of the spacecraft was designed by engineers at EADS Astrium, the main industrial prime contractor that build Rosetta, to allow it to survive the large distances from the Sun during its cruise.
Asteroid encounter: Rosetta pictures the asteroid Lutetia during its closest approach on July 10, 2010
All of the scientific instruments were switched off by the end of March. In April and May, with Rosetta orbiting at more than 600 million km from the Sun, tests were conducted with the solar arrays to confirm that sufficient power would be available for today’s hibernation.
Today Rosetta automatically started spinning just before the final shut-down command was sent, as this will stabilise the probe while the normal attitude control system is off throughout hibernation.
'With flybys of asteroids Steins in 2008 and Lutetia in 2010, Rosetta has already delivered excellent scientific results,' says Paolo Ferri, Head of ESOC’s Solar and Planetary Mission Operations Division.
'Hibernation is a necessary step to reach the final target. We are now looking forward to 2014, when Rosetta becomes the first spacecraft to track the life of a comet as it arcs in toward the Sun.'
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New team can find no trace of Gliese 581g in same data
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Original researcher backs his findings: 'We have yet to make a false claim'
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New claim casts doubt on whether Earth-like planet is orbiting distant star
Its discovery last month captured the imaginations of millions around the globe.
And the news that an Earth-like planet had been found which could support life and which lay only 20 light years away sparked feverish speculation that we may not be alone in the universe.
But now a group of scientists have claimed that Gliese 581g, a rocky world just three times the size of Earth, may not even exist.
The devastating claim has been made by a group of Swiss astronomers who have cast doubt on the original research and say that they can find no trace of the planet in their own analysis of the same data.
This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth. The four tiny planets in the background are the planets that have already been discovered. The closer, blue and green planet is 581G, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered
In the original announcement last month a team led by Dr Stephen Vogt from the University of California said that Gliese 581g lay in its star's 'Goldilocks zone' - the region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers.
Planets orbiting distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. Instead, astronomers look for tell-tale gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit.
But Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, told a conference in Torino, Italy, that a combination of old and new data acquired by his team shows no sign of the planet.
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Pepe said: 'If a signal corresponding to the announced Gliese 581g planet was present in our data we should have been able to detect it.'
Francesco Pepe has analysed data from the same instrument but says that his team have not seen evidence of 581g
His team had access to the same sets of data that the original researchers who trumpeted the existence of the planet to worldwide fanfare at the end of September.
Those measurements revealed a total of four planets circling the star. The team’s latest report also includes an additional 60 measurements made with the sensitive HARPS spectrograph on a telescope at La Silla, Chile.
They discovered the existence of the four planets circling Gliese 581, which had already been confirmed, but could find no sign of Gliese 581g - the planet which had gripped the public's imagination.
Pepe told the conference: 'From these data we easily recover the four previously announced planets. However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days'.
He told New Scientist that he was not trying to undermine Dr Steven Vogt who led the original study at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
'We are not trying to prove the nonexistence of a planet,' Pepe said. 'It's really difficult to prove that something does not exist. We are just saying we do not see a significant signal that is really different from noise.'
Steven Vogt, who did not attend the meeting in Turin, told New Scientist said that HIRES data – which were not used by the Geneva team – were needed in order to see the planet.
The orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system are compared to those of our own solar system. The Gliese 581 star has about 30% the mass of our sun, and the outermost planet is closer to its star than we are to the sun. The 4th planet, G, is a planet that could sustain life.
He told the magazine: 'I feel confident that we have accurately and honestly reported our uncertainties and done a thorough and responsible job extracting what information this data set has to offer.'
He added: 'In 15 years of exoplanet hunting, with over hundreds of planets detected by our team, we have yet to publish a single false claim, retraction, or erratum.'
The Swiss team has not yet published its results in a peer-reviewed journal - crucial if its doubts are to be taken seriously by the scientific community.
Last month researchers said that the discovery of Gliese 581g suggested the universe is teeming with world like our own.
If it exists, it is so far away, spaceships travelling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make the journey. If a rocket was one day able to travel at a tenth of the speed of light, it would take 200 years to make the journey.
The findings come from 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The planet orbits a small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra. The planet, named Glieseg, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away - so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.
It takes just 37 days to orbit its sun which means its seasons last for just a few days. One side of the planet always faces its star and basks in perpetual daylight, while the other is in perpetual darkness.
The most suitable place for life or future human colonists would be in the 'grey' zone - the band between darkness and light that circles the planet.
'Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,' said Dr Vogt who reported the find in the Astrophysical Journal.
Astronomers have now found six planets in orbit around Gliese 581 - including the no-disputed 'g' - the most discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system.
Its star is a red giant - a massive star near the end of its life. It is too dim to see in the night sky from Earth without a telescope.
Astronomers have found nearly 500 exoplanets - or planets outside our own solar system.
However, almost all are too big, made of gas instead of rock, too hot or too cold for life as we know it.
Physicists have detected a particle of dark matter for the first time in human history, a number of U.S laboratories announced today.
Should the findings be confirmed it will have an Earth-shattering effect on our understanding of how galaxies form.
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This dark matter map was created by the Hubble Telescope by measuring light from distant stars thought to have been deflected by dark matter. The map of half the Universe reveals dark matter filaments, collapsing under the relentless pull of gravity and growing clumpier over time
Dark matter is believed to make up 90 per cent of the mass of the Universe. We can't see it but scientists think it is there due to the gravitational force it exerts.
It could help account for the 'missing mass' in the Universe that would explain why galaxies rotate at their current speeds.
An experiment half-a-mile down a Minnesota mine has focused on finding Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which are thought to make up dark matter.
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The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) is using 30 ultra-cold germanium and silicon detectors far away from the hail of cosmic rays that strike Earth every day. It is believed the crystals will vibrate if struck by a WIMP.
Now head of CDMS Dan Bauer said they have spotted two particles with all the expected characteristics of dark matter.
The physicist cautions, however, that there’s about a one in four chance that ordinary subatomic particles, rather than dark matter, could account for the signals.
The Large Hadron Collider is expected to create Big Bang conditions next month. It is hoped the accelerator will create dark matter particles
Theorist Craig Hogan from the University of Chicago said the finds are 'potentially very exciting.
He said three or four more WIMP-like interactions recorded over the next few years by the experiment, would constitute proof of dark matter.
'That would be a huge transformation in how we do science,' Dr Hogan said.
'We would have a new form of matter to study.'
The detectors are being upgraded with three times as much germanium making detections more likely.
- What does our local universe look like? This spectacular image shows close to 50,000 galaxies in the nearby universe, which were detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light.
The resulting image is an incredible tapestry of galaxies that helps scientists understand how the universe formed and evolved. It is the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created.
It was created using data from Thomas H. Jarrett, who works as a software engineer for the space telescope's WISE and Spitzer as well as a support scientist for 2MASS.
Incredible tapestry: This spectacular image shows close to 50,000 galaxies in the nearby universe, which were detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light and is the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created The dark band across the image centre is blocked by dust in the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Away from the Galactic plane, however, each dot represents a galaxy, color coded to indicate distance.
- Bluer dots represent the nearer galaxies in the 2MASS survey, while redder dots indicating the more distant survey galaxies that lie at a redshift near 0.1.
Named structures are annotated around the edges. Many galaxies are gravitationally bound together to form clusters, which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters, which in turn are sometimes seen to align over even larger scale structures.
Karen Masters from the University of Portsmouth presented the map last month at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
'The 2MASS Redshift Survey is a wonderfully complete new look at the local universe - particularly near the Galactic plane,' she said.
'We're also honoring the legacy of the late John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a guiding force behind this and earlier galaxy redshift surveys.'
A galaxy's light is redshifted, or stretched to longer wavelengths, by the expansion of the universe. The farther the galaxy, the greater its redshift, so redshift measurements yield galaxy distances - the vital third dimension in a 3-D map.
Scientists from the red-shift survey (2MRS) chose galaxies to map from the 2MASS project, which had scanned the entire night sky over four years in three infra-red bands.
Near-infrared light penetrates intervening dust better than visible light, allowing astronomers to see more of the sky.
But without adding redshifts, 2MASS makes only a 2-D image. Some of the galaxies mapped had previously-measured redshifts, and John Huchra started painstakingly measuring redshifts for the others in the late 1990s using mainly two telescopes: one at Mount Hopkins in Arizona and one at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The last observations were completed by 2MRS observers on these telescopes shortly after Huchra's death in October 2010.
Robert Kirshner, Huchra's colleague at the Center for Astrophysics, said: 'John was instrumental in setting up the 2MASS telescope at Mount Hopkins, seeing the infrared side of the project through, and making a much more complete survey of the local universe.
'It's a wonderful tribute to John that his colleagues have finished the infrared-selected galaxy redshift survey that John started.'
Massive local structures, like the Hydra-Centaurus region (the "Great Attractor") were previously hidden almost behind the Milky Way but are now shown in great detail by 2MRS.
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Hubble spots blue star 'spat out' by Milky Way travelling through space at 1.6million mph
Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a rare hypervelocity star that was spat out of the centre of our galaxy and is travelling three times as fast as the Sun.
Scientists believe that it was created when three stars travelling together passed too close to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way around a hundred million years ago.
One of the stars was captured while the other two were flung out of the galaxy and merged to form a super-hot blue star travelling at around 1.6 million miles per hour.
A Nasa graphic showing how the 'blue straggler' was spat out of the centre of our galaxy
Known as HE 0437-5439 it is one of the fastest stars ever detected and is the first to be directly linked with the centre of the galaxy.
'Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star came from by measuring the star's direction of motion on the sky. Our measurements point directly to the Milky Way center.' said astronomer Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Brown, a member of the Hubble team that observed the star, is the lead author on a paper about the finding published online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Brown said, 'These exiled stars are rare in the Milky Way's population of 100 billion stars. For every 100 million stars in the galaxy, there lurks one hypervelocity star.'
The stellar outcast already is cruising in the Milky Way's distant outskirts about 200,000 light-years from the galaxy's centre.
Using Hubble to measure the runaway star's direction and determine the Milky Way's core as its starting point, Brown and Gnedin's team calculated how fast the star had to have been ejected to reach its current location.
'Studying these stars could provide more clues about the nature of some of the universe's unseen mass, and it could help astronomers better understand how galaxies form,' said team leader Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The Hubble image which pinpoints the blue star as it hurtles through space at unimaginable speeds
The star's age is another mystery. Based on the speed and position of HE 0437-5439, the star would have to be 100 million years old to have journeyed from the Milky Way's core.
But its mass -nine times that of our sun - and blue colour mean that it should have burned out after only 20 million years far shorter than the transit time it took to get to its current location.
This concept for imparting an escape velocity on stars was first proposed in 1988. The theory predicted the Milky Way's black hole should eject a star about once every 100,000 years.
The triple-star system contained a pair of closely orbiting stars and a third outer member also gravitationally tied to the group. The black hole pulled the outer star away from the tight binary system.
The doomed star's momentum was transferred to the other two stars boosting the duo to escape velocity from the galaxy.
Clearest ever image of 'dark matter' at heart of distant galaxy cluster captured by Hubble
This picture is one of the sharpest and most detailed maps of dark matter in the universe.
Dark matter is an invisible and unknown substance that makes up the bulk of the mass in the cosmos.
A team from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the Hubble space telescope to chart the invisible matter in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located 2.2billion light years away.
A Hubble image of a distant galaxy cluster which contains about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. It helps scientists work out how much dark matter exists in the cluster
The cluster's gravity, the majority of which comes from dark matter, acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from distant galaxies behind it.
This effect, called gravitational lensing, produces multiple, warped, and greatly magnified images of those galaxies.
Astronomers can estimate how much dark matter exists within the galaxy cluster by studying the distorted images.
The new images may help astronomers understand more about dark energy helped form the universe after the Big Bang.
Dark energy pushes galaxies apart from one another by stretching the space between them, thereby suppressing the formation of giant structures called galaxy clusters.
By studying these distorted images, astronomers estimated the amount of dark matter within the cluster.
The findings show that Abell 1689 is much denser in dark matter than expected for a cluster of its size.
Dan Coe, from the Nasa’s JPL said: 'Galaxy clusters, therefore, would had to have started forming billions of years earlier in order to build up to the numbers we see today.
‘At earlier times, the universe was smaller and more densely packed with dark matter. Abell 1689 appears to have been well fed at birth by the dense matter surrounding it in the early universe. The cluster has carried this bulk with it through its adult life to appear as we observe it today.'
Cosmic crash reveals new clues into dark matter 'scaffolding' that holds universe together
A spectacular intergalactic collision has revealed new clues about one of the mysteries of the universe, scientists say.
The blues and pinks of this 'giant cosmic car crash', as astronomers have dubbed it, provide fresh evidence for the existence of so-called dark matter.
The snapshot of galaxy clusters smashing into one another, captured with powerful telescopes, also gives new clues about the properties of this enigmatic substance.
This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a spectacular intergalactic collision that took place 100 million years ago
Scientists believe dark matter, although invisible to the naked eye, provides a vital 'scaffolding' for the universe, forming a framework for planets, stars, galaxies - and therefore life as we know it.
It is thought there is six times more dark matter than other matter in the universe.
Experts believe as the universe was being formed after the Big Bang, the gravitational force of this huge quantity of dark matter formed planets and galaxies, shaping the cosmos.
The pink in the picture indicates ordinary matter - mostly hot gas - and the blue area is believed to show the presence of dark matter.
The cluster is made up of hundreds of galaxies, and is about half way across the universe - 5.7 billion light years away.
The intergalactic smash happened about 100 million years ago.
Astronomer Richard Massey, from the University of Edinburgh, said life would not have come into being without this matter so any new clues are a step forward in researching the make-up of the universe.
He said the universe could not have formed 'without the dark matter scaffolding being there in the first place.
'It is very important and crucial. Life wouldn't exist without this stuff.'
This image of the cluster, known as MACSJ0025.4-1222, was captured with Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
As the two clusters merged at millions of miles an hour, the picture indicates the hot gas collided and slowed down, researchers said. But the dark matter did not, they believe, shown by the wider spread of blue.
The separation of the pink and blue provides evidence for dark matter and backs the view that dark matter particles react only very weakly with each other or not at all, apart from the pull of gravity.
Mr Massey added: 'The unusual configuration of this cosmic collision enables astronomers to study mysterious, invisible dark matter.'
The discovery backs up evidence from an earlier image of colliding galaxies, the Bullet Cluster, which also showed evidence of a separation of dark and ordinary matter.
The latest study was carried out by an international team of astronomers, led by Marusa Bradac of the University of California Santa Barbara and Steve Allen, of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford.
Their results will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
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Scientists have witnessed a massive black hole swallowing up and ripping apart a star.
A powerful beam of energy that had crossed 3.8billion light years of space was the last gasp of the ill-fated star.
The bright flash of gamma rays was detected by the Swift satellite within the constellation of Draco.
An artist's impression of a star about to be consumed by a giant black hole. Scientists have detected a massive black hole consuming and ripping apart a star within the constellation of Draco
The fiery depths of space: Astronomers capture dazzling rainbow nebula swirling around supergiant star
This is the incredible moment a supergiant star is transformed into a rainbow of dazzling colours as it fires gasses into space.
Red star Betelgeuse was captured by astronomers who used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Infa-red imaging recorded the star's nebula - clouds of gases - being spewed into outer space in immense flame-like patterns.
Colorful: The Betelgeuse supergiant star's rainbow nebula which is not usually visible is captured by infa-red imaging. The black disk is part of the bright nebula that was masked in order to see the red surface of the star
The incredible images were released by the European Southen Observatory as the enormous star enters the last stages of its life. It is the first time such detail has been shown around a star's nebula.
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star that forms the shoulder of the hunter in the constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and s also one of the biggest, being almost the size of the orbit of Jupiter - around four-and-a-half times the diameter of the Earth's orbit
The VLT image shows the star's surrounding nebula, which is much bigger than the supergiant itself, stretching 37 billion kilometres away from the star's surface - around 400 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.
Standing out: The bright, pinkish-white star at upper left of Orion, known as the 'hunter', is Betelgeuse
Red supergiants like Betelgeuse represent one of the last stages in the life of a massive star. In this short-lived phase, the star increases in size and sends material into space at a tremendous rate.
The process by which material is shed from a star like Betelgeuse involves two stages. The first is the formation of huge plumes of gas extending into space from the star’s surface.
The plumes are caused by the vigorous up and down movement of giant bubbles in Betelgeuse’s atmosphere.
The nebula itself cannot be seen in visible light, as the very bright Betelgeuse completely outshines it.
The irregular shape of the material being emitted indicates that the star did not eject its material in a symmetric way.
Experts therefore believe that the bubbles of stellar material and the giant plumes they originate may be responsible for the clumpy look of the nebula.
It is thought that the the material visible in the new image is most likely made of silicate and alumina dust.
The small red circle in the middle has a diameter about four and half times that of the Earth's orbit and represents Betelgeuse's visible surface.
The black disc corresponds to a very bright part of the image that was masked to allow the fainter nebula to be seen.
The telescope's images were taken through infra-red filters sensitive to radiation of different wavelengths. The blue part of the nebula corresponds to shorter wavelengths and red to longer.
Ribbon in the dust: The strange twisted ring of gas at the centre of the Milky Way
A bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy has been observed by the Herschel Space Observatory.
Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before.
But Herschel's view reveals the entire ring for the first time - and a strange kink that resembles a ribbon has astronomers scratching their heads.
New horizons: This bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy was observed by the Herschel Space Observatory
Nasa researcher Alberto Noriega-Crespo, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: 'We have looked at this region at the centre of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared.
'But when we looked at the high-resolution images using Herschel's sub-millimetre wavelengths, the presence of a ring is quite clear.'
The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency-led mission with important Nasa contributions.
It sees infrared and sub-millimetre light, which can readily penetrate through the dust hovering between the bustling centre of our galaxy and us. Herschel's detectors are also suited to see the coldest stuff in our galaxy.
When astronomers turned the giant telescope to look at the centre of the Milky Way, it captured unprecedented views of its inner ring - a dense tube of cold gas mixed with dust, where new stars are forming.
Astronomers were shocked by what they saw - the ring, which is in the plane of our galaxy, looked more like an infinity symbol with two lobes pointing to the side.
In fact, they later determined the ring was torqued in the middle, so it only appears to have two lobes. To picture the structure, imagine holding a stiff, elliptical band and twisting the ends in opposite directions, so that one side comes up a bit.
'This is what is so exciting about launching a new space telescope like Herschel,' said lead researcher Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in Rome, Italy.
'We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the centre of our own galaxy.'
Highlighting the ribbon: The Herschel telescope sees infrared and sub-millimetre light, which can readily penetrate through the dust hovering between the bustling centre of our galaxy and us
Observations with the ground-based Nobeyama Radio Observatory in Japan complimented the Herschel results by determining the velocity of the denser gas in the ring.
The radio results demonstrate that the ring is moving together as a unit, at the same speed relative to the rest of the galaxy.
The ring lies at the centre of our Milky Way's bar - a bar-shaped region of stars at the centre of its spidery spiral arms. This bar is actually inside an even larger ring.
Other galaxies have similar bars and rings. A classic example of a ring inside a bar is in the galaxy NGC 1097, imaged here by Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope. The ring glows brightly in the center of the galaxy's large bar structure. It is not known if that ring has a kink or not.
The details of how bars and rings form in spiral galaxies are not well understood, but computer simulations demonstrate how gravitational interactions can produce the structures.
Some theories hold that bars arise out of gravitational interactions between galaxies. For example, the bar at the centre of the Milky Way might have been influenced by our largest neighbour galaxy, Andromeda.
The twist in the ring is not the only mystery to come out of the new Herschel observations.
Astronomers say that the centre of the torqued portion of the ring is not where the centre of the galaxy is thought to be, but slightly offset.
The centre of our galaxy is considered to be around Sagittarius A, where a massive black hole lies.
According to Dr Noriega-Crespo, it's not clear why the centre of the ring doesn't match up with the assumed centre of our galaxy.
'There's still so much about our galaxy to discover,' he said.
The study is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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