Spot that blue dot
Astronomers will be soon peering through their space telescopes - looking for oceans on alien planets.
Scientists have come up with a new technique that will allow them to detect liquid water on Earth-sized worlds.
According to the Register, boffins have used images taken of our own planet from the comet-hunting Deep Impact probe in the far reaches of our solar system to develop a way of spotting the tell-tale signs of a oceans.
They used the way the Earth's light changes as it rotates to confirm the existence of the wet stuff on the surface.
And now they can take this to their hunt for alien water-skiers.
To understand the difficulty they face here's a shot of the Earth taken back in 1991 from four billion miles away by Voyager 1.
The 'pale blue dot', as Weird Science hero Carl Sagan put it, represents all of us on our lonely journey through the cosmos... sorry, got a little carried away there.
Weird Science Factoid: The star "Lucy" in constellation Centaurus is actually a huge cosmic diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion carats. I guess the song came first.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
This is concrete proof that the universe is vast and infinite.
This is magnificent. Seeing new discoveries in space always excite me.
Proof that we really are just specks in the universe..
Intriguing article...
That's really cool. I wouldn't expect anything less if it's taken that far away.
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I suddenly feel so insignificant./
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Could it be possible that that planet is the new earth? It looks really beautiful.
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This is magnificent. Seeing new discoveries in space always excite me.
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