NASA's Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, has discovered its first five new exoplanets.Named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b, the planets were announced Monday, Jan. 4, by the members of the Kepler science team during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington."The discoveries show that our science instrument is working well," says William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki is the mission's science principal investigator. "Indications are that Kepler will meet all its science goals."

The five planets are quite a bit larger than Earth. Known as "hot Jupiters" because of their high masses and extreme...

Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry. The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. The mtDNA is another line of evidence that indicates at least one individual was of East Asian descent.

"These preliminary isotopic and mtDNA data provide tantalizing evidence...

A BRITISH stargazer has taken an amazing video of a UFO crossing the face of the sun. Malcolm Park was taking a series of photos of the huge star through a specially filtered telescope when a strange object began to drift across it. Malcolm, of South West London, said: "I was recording activity on the sun when I caught this strange encounter. It looks like an irregularly-shaped lump of rock and is clearly rotating very quickly. "I wondered if what I captured was a piece of space junk or, with the way it was tumbling, a small asteroid."

Malcolm said he had ruled out the possibility of a plane or a bird because of the strange shape and absence of any wings. Robin Scagell, vice-president of the UK's Society for Popular Astronomy, said: "This is a...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before. Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of...

Researchers hypothesize that a miles-long crack in the Ethiopian desert may eventually become an ocean. A new study from the journal Geophysical Research Letters reports that a 20-foot wide crack in the center of the Ethiopian desert will eventually become a new ocean. In a recently released study, scientists revealed how a rift from a volcanic eruption tore open a 35-mile crack in just days, reports MNN.The 60-kilometre (35-mile) split in the desolate Afar region, which was the result of two volcanic eruptions in September 2005, has enabled scientists to further examine the earth's tectonic movements, said a report published in the Geophysical Research Letters.

"The significance of the finding is that a huge magnetic deformation can happen within a few days like in...

One of history's greatest mysteries -- the family lineage of the boy pharaoh King Tut -- may soon be solved. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has announced on Sunday he would hold a press conference on Feb. 17 to reveal the results of DNA tests on the world's most famous pharaoh. The long awaited announcement will be "about the secrets of the family and the affiliation of Tutankhamun, based on the results of the scientific examination of the Tutankhamun mummy following DNA analysis," Hawass said in a statement.

King Tut's DNA results will be most likely compared to those made of King Amenhotep III, who may have been Tutankamen's grandfather. The best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt, King Tut has been puzzling scientists...

A newly found 29-foot-long tyrannosaur flashed more teeth than the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex, with which it shared a common ancestor, according to a paper in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Remains of the badlands dinosaur, Bistahieversor sealeyi, were collected in the first paleontological excavation from a federal wilderness area, the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness of New Mexico. The dino's remains were removed VIP-style, airlifted by a helicopter operated by the Air Wing of the New Mexico Army National Guard.

"Bistahieversor sealeyi is the first valid new genus and species of tyrannosaur to be named from western North America in over 30 years," said co-author Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History....

Researchers using a diamond paste to polish a slice of meteorite stumbled onto something remarkable: crystals in the rock that are harder than diamonds. A closer look with an array of instruments revealed two totally new kinds of naturally occurring carbon, which are harder than the diamonds formed inside the Earth. "The discovery was accidental but we were sure that looking in these meteorites would lead to new findings on the carbon system," said Tristan Ferroir of the Universite de Lyon in France. Ferroir is the lead author of a report in the new diamond in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the...

The first images have been revealed from a telescope that can map the sky much faster and deeper than any other. The Vista (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is dedicated to mapping the sky in infrared light. Spectacular images, including some of the centre of our Milky Way, show, astronomers say, that the UK-designed telescope is working "extremely well". It is based at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile. When the UK was first negotiating to join ESO, Vista became an in-kind payment towards its subscription.

It was formally handed over to ESO at a ceremony in Garching, Germany on 10 December 2009. Now that the telescope is up and running, its surveys will help astronomers to understand the nature and origin...

Two skulls originally found in 1967 have been shown to be about 195,000 years old, making them the oldest modern human remains known to science. The age estimate comes from a re-dating of Ethiopian rock layers close to those that yielded the remarkable fossils. The skulls, known as Omo I and II, push back the known presence of Homo sapiens in Africa by 40,000 years. The latest dating work is reported in the science journal Nature. It puts the specimens close to the time expected for the evolutionary emergence of our species. Genetic studies have indicated Homo sapiens arose in East Africa - possibly Ethiopia or Tanzania - just over 200,000 years ago.

"These are the earliest known examples of our own species and that suggests they lived earlier still," commented...