A planet from another galaxy

WASHINGTON – A hot, gaseous and fast-spinning planet has been found orbiting a dying star on the edge of the Milky Way, in the first such discovery of a planet from outside our galaxy, scientists said Thursday.

Slightly larger than the size of Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, the newly discovered exoplanet is orbiting a star 2,000 light years from Earth that has found its way into the Milky Way.

The pair are believed to be part of the Helmi stream, a group of stars that remains after its mini-galaxy was devoured by the Milky Way some six to nine billion years ago, said the study in Science Express.

"This discovery is very exciting," said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

"Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."

Astronomers were able to locate the planet, coined HIP 13044 b, by focusing on the "tiny telltale wobbles of the star caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting companion," the study said.

They used a powerful telescope owned by the European Southern Laboratory at La Silla Observatory in Chile, located at an altitude of 2,400 meters (7,800 feet) some 600 kilometers (375 miles) north of the capital, Santiago.

The planet is quite close to the star it is orbiting, and survived a phase in which its host star went through a massive growth after it depleted its core hydrogen fuel supply, a phase known as the "red giant" stage of stellar evolution.

"This discovery is particularly intriguing when we consider the distant future of our own planetary system, as the Sun is also expected to become a red giant in about five billion years," said lead researcher Johny Setiawan of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

The exoplanet is likely to be quite hot because it is orbiting so close to its star, completing each orbit in just over 16 days, and is probably near the end of its life, astronomers said.

The star may have already swallowed other planets in its orbit, making the star spin more quickly and meaning that time is running out for the surviving exoplanet.

Astronomers were mystified as to how the planet might have formed, since the star contained few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium and planets typically form out of a complex cloud of spinning space rubble.

"It is a puzzle for the widely accepted model of planet formation to explain how such a star, which contains hardly any heavy elements at all, could have formed a planet," said Setiawan.

"Planets around stars like this must probably form in a different way."

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg prefers underdogs

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts great opportunity for entrepeneurs, whereas larger companies could struggle

San Francisco, California: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg favors the little guy, but that attitude can pose obstacles for popular websites that want to work with his company.

Apple and Google, which are among the biggest technology businesses in the world, find themselves stonewalled at times by Zuckerberg and company. That sometimes results in less functional applications.

Apple launched its music-centric social network, called Ping, as part of an iTunes update that contained a Facebook component. But Apple had to remove integration with the world's largest social network hours after Ping launched. Last week Twitter announced an agreement with Apple's Ping.

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, spurned Facebook for what he considered were "onerous terms."

When questioned about this in an interview onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said with a shrug, "It's fine."

Then Zuckerberg pointed out that the two work together in many ways. For example, Facebook's app "is on the vast majority of iPhones," he said at an event earlier this month at Facebook's Palo Alto, California, headquarters.

As for Facebook's relationship with Google, the two are in the midst of a public spat about letting users import and export personal data between the social network and Gmail. Facebook, which launched an email service on Monday, doesn't let users easily migrate addresses to other apps.

Zuckerberg said at the conference on Tuesday that this move was meant to protect the private contact information of a user's friends. He backtracked near the end of that fireside chat and highlighted the data export issue as a potential mistake.

"I've made so many mistakes in running the company so far," he said. "We still make mistakes all of the time." The trouble, he said, is figuring out which of the company's myriad problems "really matter."

Zuckerberg also seemed to distance himself from Google, the undisputed leader in search, last month when Facebook announced a deal with Microsoft's Bing.

"They're just trying to rapidly gain [market] share by doing awesome stuff," Zuckerberg said of Microsoft at the Bing event. "They're really the underdog here."

But Microsoft wasn't spared from criticisms during Tuesday's event. Microsoft, a massive computer software company and an investor in Facebook, has thousands of engineers, Zuckerberg pointed out; Facebook has fewer, and is therefore seen by developers as a more effective and attractive employer, he said.

Zuckerberg makes it known that he has a soft spot for budding entrepreneurs. When asked about "The Social Network" -- the film based on the founding of Facebook -- Zuckerberg boasted of fan mail from people who say his story inspired them to become entrepreneurs.

His mission is to "enable others to build" social networking services, which can be accomplished using Facebook's platform, he said. Small-time developers can freely make use of Facebook's offerings, but larger companies must work directly or be locked out.

Despite amassing 500 million people actively using the service, Zuckerberg still doesn't consider Facebook a giant company. "In some ways, I actually think we're only now entering the zone where a lot of entrepreneurs will consider working with us," he said.

But during Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz's onstage interview earlier Tuesday, she described Facebook as Yahoo's "competition." This sentiment could create even greater disconnects between Facebook's service and popular apps, as is the case with Gmail and Ping.

Without being specific, Zuckerberg derided some large internet companies, saying they won't make it past a social networking revolution.

"Some aren't going to make it," he said on Tuesday. "I think there's an exciting opportunity for some entrepreneurs."

Zuckerberg's advice to "incumbents," as he calls technology giants: "Get on the bus."

But that doesn't mean he's going to make it easy for them to board.

Resource: CNN

Official: Israel to pull out of strategic border town

Israeli soldiers take their positions in the village of Ghajar on November 10, 2010

Jerusalem : Israel's security cabinet tentatively accepted a plan to withdraw the nation's troops from the strategic border town of Ghajar, one of the Mideast's more complicated locations, Cabinet Secretary Tzvi Hauser said Wednesday.

The Foreign Ministry has been authorized to finalize details with the United Nations as soon as possible, Hauser said in a statement.

Final approval of the plan would bring Israel in line with a U.N. Security Council resolution that ended Israel's war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006.

Ghajar was a Syrian village that Israel took control of after the 1967 war and its residents took Israeli citizenship in 1981. In 2000, the United Nations drew the border line between Israel and Lebanon through the middle of village.

During the 2006 war, Israel retook control of the northern half of Ghajar, which it maintains to this day. The town sits on the border between Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Israel has cited security concerns for its continued control of the northern part of the village.

Under an agreement negotiated with the United Nations, Israeli soldiers would secure the southern part of the village, while U.N. soldiers would assume security responsibility for the northern part.

The villagers in Ghajar say the community of 2,300 belongs to neither Lebanon, nor Israel, but instead is in Syria.

"We demand today the return of al-Ghajar village with both parts, north and south as one village with all its land to Syria," according to village spokesman Najib al Khatib.

Resource: CNN