Found: Firm place to stand outside solar system

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand — if only it weren't so broiling hot.

As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can't be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet.

Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.

"We basically live on a rock ourselves," said co-discoverer Artie Hatzes, director of the Thuringer observatory in Germany. "It's as close to something like the Earth that we've found so far. It's just a little too close to its sun."

So close that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.

"It's hot, they're calling it the lava planet," Hatzes said.

This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It's in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

In addition, the planet is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth's and it has a mass about five times the Earth's.

Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they'll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.

"The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe," Boss said.

(The image provided by the European Southern Observatory Wednesday Sept. 16, 2009 shows an artist rendition … )

Thanks to news.yahoo.com

Anunnaki, Human Evolution, and Planet X Nibiru

Our DNA has been manipulated in the past by beings that passed
themselves off as
gods.. In Sumer, the alien race of gods were known as the
Anunnaki. In Greece,
the Annodoti. In the Celtic lore, the Tuatha de Danaan.
In the Semetic
scriptures (Torah, Talmud, Old Testament, and other
Apocryphal texts like the
Book of Enoch), they are called The Nephilim, The
Sons of God, or The Watchers.

The gods themselves had their own
monarchy, with laws of succession
similar to our own, and they built a
global empire upon the Earth, with great
cities, temples and monuments, and
mighty nations established on several
continents. They created mankind as a
slave race to work on their farms and in
their gold mines, among other
things. The Sumerian legends are very clear: man
was made to bear the yoke
of the gods. Man was separate from the gods, like a
domesticated animal, and
there was a great cultural taboo amongst the gods
against sharing any of
their sacred information with humanity, even things such
as writing and
mathematics. These gods ruled directly over Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and the
Indus Valley, and their rule is recorded in the histories of all three
civilizations.

At some point, it is told, some of the gods broke
rank.
This is again recorded in just about every culture on Earth that has a
written
or oral history of legends. Some of the gods, finding human females
most
appealing, intermarried with them (breaking, of course, a major taboo
within
their own culture), and creating a race of human/god hybrids.

However,
these actions (the interbreeding and sharing of secrets
with humans) incurred
the wrath of the Most High God, and a number of other
gods who were disgusted by
this interracial breeding. This sparked the
massive and devastating battle of
the gods that has come down to us in the
legends of both the War in Heaven, and
the Deluge. Then, in order to cleanse
the Earth,s surface of the curse of
humanity, they covered it with a flood.
Interestingly, this flood is mentioned
in the legends of almost every
ancient culture on Earth.

These Anunnaki
are said to occupy another
planet in our solar system (known to scientists as
'Planet X'). This planet
is called Nibiru, and is situated somewhere beyond
Pluto. This planet,
unlike other planets in our solar system, moves clockwise,
rather than
counter clockwise. It was a collision of Nibiru with another planet
in our
solar system which created Earth. Nibiru's orbit passes through our solar
system only once every 3,600 years.