Huge Alien Planet Forcing Host Star Age Prematurely

A nearby star is not acting its age, thanks to the influence of a massive exoplanet.

The close-orbiting alien planet, known as WASP-18b, is apparently disrupting the magnetic field of its host star so much that the object is behaving like a much older star, researchers said.

"WASP-18b is an extreme exoplanet," study lead author Ignazio Pillitteri, of the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo in Italy, said in a statement.

"It is one of the most massive hot Jupiters known and one of the closest to its host star, and these characteristics lead to unexpected behaviour. The planet is causing its host star to act old before its time."

Artist's concept depicting the giant alien planet WASP-18b and its star, which are about 330 light-years away. 

Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

The star WASP-18, which lies about 330 light-years away, is about as massive as our own sun.

The gas giant WASP-18b weighs in at more than 10 times the mass of Jupiter and completes one orbit around the star in less than 23 hours, leading scientists to classify it as a "hot Jupiter."

WASP-18b's tight orbit has led scientists to estimate that it may have only one million years of life or so remaining before it's destroyed by the parent star.

Pillitteri's team targeted WASP-18 with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and found it to be relatively quiet, a characteristic of older stars.

Young stars tend to be more active, with stronger magnetic fields, larger flares and more intense X-ray emission.

Stellar activity is connected to rotation, a process that slows with age.

Observations of WASP-18 using Chandra revealed no X-ray emission.

This by itself would suggest that the star has an age similar to the sun's 5 billion years, researchers said.

However, Pillitteri and his team used other data as well as theoretical models to calculate that WASP-18 is actually just 500 million to 2 billion years old, and thus approximately 100 times less active than a star its age should be.

"We think the planet is aging the star by wreaking havoc on its innards," said co-author Scott Wolk, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Massachusetts.

WASP-18b's strong gravitational pull may be disrupting the star's magnetic field, researchers said.

The planet's tug exerts forces similar to those imposed on Earth's tides by the moon, but on a much larger scale.

Levels of protein SIRT6 appear to impact lifespan of mice

Researchers in Israel have found that genetically altering male mice to cause them to express more of the protein SIRT6 allowed them to live up to fifteen percent longer.

Haim Cohen and colleagues at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, describe in their paper published in Nature, how they veered from following the crowd studying SIRT2 and instead chose to look at SIRT6.

In so doing, they discovered that when the mice under study were caused to express more SIRT6, the older males tended to metabolize sugar at a faster rate than normal, which led, they believe, to protecting them from metabolic disorders and a longer lifespan.

They found that the median lifespan for the transgenic male mice was fourteen and a half percent longer than normal in one line and almost ten percent in another, while there was no statistical difference in the females.

They also measured maximum lifespan and found it grew by nearly sixteen percent in one line of the mice and just over thirteen percent in another. This the group says, shows that mice tend to live longer if they express more SIRT6.

Levels of protein SIRT6 appear to impact lifespan of mice

Scientists Nearer to Finding Solution for Age-Related Problems

A team of scientists from the Salk Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Lausanne have created super strong mice by controlling its natural muscle growth.

This invention will help solve genetic muscular degeneration and other age-related problems.

The scientists changed the activity of certain genes by tweaking a genome regulator called NCOR1.

They suppressed a thyroid hormone which regulates growth in most mammals and created mice that were twice as strong as normal.

According to Johan Auwerx, the lead author from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), "This could be used to combat muscle weakness in the elderly, which leads to falls and contributes to hospitalizations."

"In addition, we think that this could be used as a basis for developing a treatment for genetic muscular dystrophy."

"There are now ways to develop drugs for people who are unable to exercise due to obesity or other health complications, such as diabetes, immobility and frailty," said Ronald M Evans, a professor at the Salk Institute.

"We can now engineer specific gene networks in muscle to give the benefits of exercise to sedentary mice."

It may be recalled that cell biology expert Norman S Wolf dealt with muscular degeneration in his book 'Comparative Biology on Aging.' Wolf had argued that by restricting calories and doing regular exercise, humans could slow aging process and reduce muscular degeneration.

In the present case, the mice, which underwent genetic mutation, became true marathoners, running faster and longer before showing any signs of fatigue. They were able to cover almost twice the distance compared to the normal mice. They also exhibited better tolerance to cold.

Unlike "genetic accelerators," the new work shows that suppressing an inhibitor is a new way to build muscle, which in this experiment confirmed that the muscle fibers of the modified mice are denser, more massive, and the cells in the tissue contain higher numbers of mitochondria-cellular organelles that deliver energy to the muscles.

Auwerx said that if these results were confirmed in humans, the experiment would attract attention especially from the athletes and medical experts.

The Salk Institute conducts biological research on molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience and plant biology. Five scientists from here have won Nobel Prizes.

Recently, the institute discovered a safer way to cure asthma, allergies and arthritis. It has also done research on a drug that reduces baldness.

The EPFL (Switzerland) focuses on education, research, technology and has conducted several researches on subjects like microbiology and robotics.

Astronomically Large Lenses Measure Age And Size Of Universe

When a large nearby object, such as a galaxy, blocks a distant object, such as another galaxy, the light can detour around the blockage. But instead of taking a single path, light can bend around the object in one of two, or four different routes, thus doubling or quadrupling the amount of information scientists receive.

As the brightness of the background galaxy nucleus fluctuates, physicists can measure the ebb and flow of light from the four distinct paths, such as in the B1608+656 system imaged above. (Image courtesy Sherry Suyu of the Argelander Institut fur Astronomie in Bonn, Germany.)


Using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other galaxies, researchers have a newly precise way to measure the size and age of the universe and how rapidly it is expanding, on a par with other techniques.

The measurement determines a value for the Hubble constant, which indicates the size of the universe, and confirms the age of the universe as 13.75 billion years old, within 170 million years. The results also confirm the strength of dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.

These results, by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, the University of Bonn, and other institutions in the United States and Germany, will be published in The Astrophysical Journal in March.

The researchers used data collected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and showed the improved precision they provide in combination with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

The team used a technique called gravitational lensing to measure the distances light traveled from a bright, active galaxy to the earth along different paths. By understanding the time it took to travel along each path and the effective speeds involved, researchers could infer not just how far away the galaxy lies but also the overall scale of the universe and some details of its expansion.

Oftentimes it is difficult for scientists to distinguish between a very bright light far away and a dimmer source lying much closer. A gravitational lens circumvents this problem by providing multiple clues as to the distance light travels. That extra information allows them to determine the size of the universe, often expressed by astrophysicists in terms of a quantity called Hubble's constant.

"We've known for a long time that lensing is capable of making a physical measurement of Hubble's constant," KIPAC's Phil Marshall said. However, gravitational lensing had never before been used in such a precise way. This measurement provides an equally precise measurement of Hubble's constant as long-established tools such as observation of supernovae and the cosmic microwave background. "Gravitational lensing has come of age as a competitive tool in the astrophysicist's toolkit," Marshall said.