Illustration of the flare from magnetar Swift J195509+261406. A starquake is probably what triggered the object

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Swift has made another unusual discovery. The orbiting satellite detected a very strange star that “twinkled” with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished. Back in June the satellite detected a spike of gamma-rays that lasted less than five seconds. But this high-energy flash wasn’t a gamma-ray burst — the birth cry of a black hole far across the universe. It was something much closer to home. During the next three days, the object brightened and faded in visible light. It flashed over 40 times! Eleven days later, it flashed again, this time at infrared wavelengths. Then, it disappeared from view!

Jupiter from the VLT. Credit: ESO

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Everyone loves twinkling stars and moonlit nights—EXCEPT astronomers. But astronomers are crafty people, so they’ve come up with ways to mitigate the distortion that Earth‘s thick atmosphere causes for ground based telescopes (from which stars appear to twinkle). And now, a new image-correction technique has delivered the sharpest whole-planet ground-based picture ever. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) performed a record two-hour observation of Jupiter using a breakthrough technique to remove atmospheric blur. And what a result! Just take a look at that gorgeous image…And this new image reveals changes in Jupiter’s smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is, are there any other Earths out there, and if so, how many?

We know that there are over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and that a lot of them have planets. But we’re still groping round trying to nail down the frequency of planets, and how many are rocky bodies like Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter).

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A new study using the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that planets like Earth may be common! The procedure was actually rather simple. They looked at over 300 sun-like stars, and grouped them by ages (very young, young, middle aged, etc). They then used Spitzer to look for the presence of dust around the stars; dust glows in the infrared when warm, and the temperature (and thus the distance of the dust from the star) can be found.

Given the number of solar systems in our universe the probability of the existence of another earth like planet, has to be nearly 1. However until now this is just theory. This could be quite an exciting step forward to finding other sources of life in our universe.