Life and universe

The search for God particle

The year 2010 also saw the humankind’s search for the ‘The God particle’ which we now call ‘Higgs boson’. The term was coined by the physicist Leon Lederman in his 1993 popular science book with the same title. The Higgs boson is a particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles. First hypothesised in 1964, the Higgs boson, if discovered, would be a vital missing piece of the model that physicists use to describe elementary particles and their interactions: ‘The Standard Model’.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the giant laboratory just at the outskirts of Geneva, which was activated on 10 September 2008, is expected to provide experimental evidence that will confirm or reject the particle’s existence when it becomes fully operational. If the results are verified, the experiment will provide possible solution to one of the great outstanding problems in physics of the 20th century: the origin of all mass.

Earth like planets

In the year 2010, scientists discovered a ‘super-Earth’ codenamed GJ 1214b some 40 light years away and of the size 2.6 times bigger than Earth. The planet hugs its parent star at a distance of only two million kilometres -- 70 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun.

The planet travels across the disc of its parent star once every 38 hours as it orbits and the astronomers believe that conditions on its surface are hot.

Another newly discovered extra-solar planet, CoRoT-7b, is the closest physical match of the Earth with a mass of about five Earths and a radius of about 1.7 Earths. It is 500 light years distant and is very similar to our Sun.

The planet was discovered circling a star some 480 light years from Earth. It is, however, a threatening place and unlikely to harbour life as it is so close to its star that temperatures might be above 4,000 degrees F (2,200 C) on the surface lit by its star and as low as minus 350 F (minus 210 C) on its dark side.

Another form of life found on earth

Researchers have made a discovery that can further boost the search for other life on Earth and beyond. It is the finding of bacteria that can thrive on arsenic in place of phosphorus. The “extremophile” bacteria were found in a briny lake in eastern California in the US. Not only do the bacteria survive on arsenic, it also grows by incorporating the element into its DNA and cell membranes.

The discovery was made by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a former postdoctoral scientist in Anbar’s research group at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.