A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Clumps of stars of the Milky Way can help the search for extra terrestrial intelligence (Seti), research suggests
Because of their abundance of stars, these "globular clusters" were an early favourite in the Seti field. But recent efforts to scour the sky for planets orbiting alien stars have had little success within star clusters. Now, two astronomers say there is good reason to keep up the search. Rosanne Di Stefano from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US, and Alak Ray from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, have described what they call the "globular cluster opportunity". At an average age of 10 billion years (much wrinklier than the Sun, at four billion), globular clusters don't have many young stars, rich in the metallic elements needed to build planets. But Dr Di Stefano, speaking in Florida at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, pointed out that recent discoveries had placed exoplanets - especially small, rocky ones like Earth - around stars much less metal-rich than our Sun."When Seti first ...