NASA / ESA via AFP - Getty Images

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nebula known as IRAS 05437+2502, or "Ira's Ghost."

Did you know that NASA has a spokesman who talks to dead people? That's not the only thing that's spooky about the space effort. Halloween is the perfect time to touch upon the freaky side of the final frontier.

This week The Washington Post profiled Rob Gutro, the deputy news chief at Goddard Space Flight Center, who happens to be a meteorologist as well as a medium. When he wears his space-agency hat, Gutro deals with research into hurricanes and other types of storms. But in his other life, he tromps through haunted buildings, communes with spirits and snaps pictures of ghostly orbs.

It's not as if Gutro's spiritualist side is a big secret: He's written a book about his experiences, titled "Ghosts and Spirits: Insights From a Medium." And it's not unusual for folks who work at NASA to delve into mysterious phenomena. One of the prime examples is Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, who had such a deep spiritual awakening during his 1971 mission to the moon that he went on to establish the Institute of Noetic Sciences and look into UFOs and psychic phenomena.

But Gutro is on less solid ground when he contends that there's a scientific foundation for psychic phenomena. For example, in the Post's profile he notes that due to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed. "It can only be transformed, so after we pass, that energy that's within us has to go somewhere," he said. "It can choose to be an earthbound ghost, or it can choose to be a spirit and cross over."

I may not be a medium, but I think I hear physicist Richard Feynman rolling over in his grave.

As for those ghostly orbs, most experts dismiss the bright circles as optical effects caused by reflections off particles of dust or fog. If you think there's more to the orbs or the other spooky phenomena that Gutro has gotten himself into, please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Cosmic ghosts galore
The cosmos turns out to have mysteries and ghosts galore, but of a natural rather than supernatural variety. The reflection nebula pictured above is an example. The ghostly star-forming region, about 380 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, was first noted in infrared images taken by the IRAS satellite in 1983 and was given the name IRAS 05437+2502. The Hubble Space Telescope snapped a much sharper picture, but astronomers still couldn't quite figure out what was creating the bright boomerang-shaped feature near the center of the frame.

Right now, the leading hypothesis is that a young star zoomed through the cloud of gas and dust, sparking bright emissions as it passed through. But the fact that the mystery hasn't yet been conclusively resolved led some observers to assume that astronomers were spooked by "Ira's Ghost."

NASA / Hubble Heritage Team

NGC 6369, or the Little Ghost Nebula, was discovered by the 18th-century astronomer William Herschel.

The "Little Ghost Nebula" poses less of a conundrum. Hubble took this picture of the nebula, also known as NGC 6369, in 2002. The image clearly shows the ghostly rings of gas that are being blasted away by a star 2,000 to 5,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus. It's that ghostly appearance that gave the nebula its nickname.

The name is apt in an additional way: This is a star that's giving up the ghost. Astronomers call such objects planetary nebulae because they have the rounded appearance of a planet when viewed through a small telescope. But the gaseous shells actually signal the last stages of a sunlike star's life. In 10,000 years or so, the gaseous rings will dissipate, leaving behind a stellar ember that will gradually wink out of existence.

Our own sun will face a similar fate, billions of years from now, and not even the First Law of Thermodynamics can head off the extinction. Now there's a spooky thought. ...

More cosmic ghosts:

• The inside story of a dying star
• Tracing the stages of a star's death
• Colorful nebula in distant star cluster
• New clues to amazing shapes in space
• October's edition of Month in Space Pictures

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

A New York police officer stands at the scene of a suspected bomb contained in a UPS package at a bank in Brooklyn today.

Today's reports of suspicious packages sent from Yemen can add a real-life fear factor to the fictional scares that folks typically experience during Halloween weekend. Whether the scares are make-believe or real, neuroscience provides some strategies for channeling our fear response in the right way.

Millions of years of evolution have optimized our brains' hard wiring to cope with immediate threats -- such as the predators that crossed paths with our ancestors in Africa, said Andreas Keil, a psychologist at the NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida.

"Today, we rarely experience the lions that want to eat us, or snakes that want to kill us ... but we respond a lot to cues where somebody tells us through a newspaper article or a Twitter tweet that a threat is around," Keil told me. "The brain's response to those cues is a lot like the response to the real thing."

Acute vs. chronic stress
Successfully coping with a stressful episode actually produces rewards in the brain, said Ki Ann Goosens, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research who specializes in the study of fear, anxiety and stress. "It's good to be in a state of moderate arousal," she said. "That can actually enhance your ability to perform."

In contrast, chronic stress is bad for the brain. "Unfortunately, there's less known about the effects of chronic stress," Goosens told me. "The effects that it has on the cells of the brain aren't uniform. For a lot of the cells in the brain, their function is impaired. You can cause atrophy of cells in the brain."

One of the targets of chronic stress is the hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a key role in managing memory. "You can imagine that if you have atrophy in this structure, often it's associated with memory impairment," Goosens said. But chronic stress actually causes the opposite response in a different part of the brain, known as the amygdala. Stress boosts activity in the amygdala.

"You might think, 'Well, great, there's a part of my brain that's enhanced by chronic stress,'" Goosens said. "But it turns out that the amygdala is particularly involved in negative emotions, like fear. ... It's actually maladaptive, because you're better at processing bad things."

Goosens' lab is focusing on the health effects of long-lasting stress -- effects that appear to range from cardiovascular disease to mental disorders.

"If you're someone who's never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but you have a genetic predisposition for, let's say, bipolar disorder, and you experience a strong, lasting stressor -- for example, someone in your family dies -- then there's a higher likelihood that the illness would be triggered," she said. "Or if you're somebody who has been diagnosed, then you're more likely to start showing symptoms of mania or depression."

Controlling the fear response
So what does all this have to do with terrorism alerts? Our brains and our bodies are better-equipped to handle well-defined threats that come along with an action plan and a sense of resolution.

"It's best to think about these fear episodes as networks that belong together in the brain," Keil said, "and one thing that goes with the fear response is to have an action plan. If I have no action plan, that will change the way the brain responds to the threat. ... The response is more unpleasant."

That may be why so many people find scary movies and Halloween-style frights to be absolutely pleasurable. Such experiences let people experience the chemical high that goes along with the fear response, in a safe and controlled environment. In such a situation, it's easy to know what to do. "The action plan is to sit there and eat popcorn while the zombies are wreaking havoc," Keil said.

In a way, the make-believe scares serve as "practice runs" for coping with real-life dangers -- and if they're handled in the right way, terrorism alerts can provide similar opportunities for visualizing how to deal with an immediate threat. "I get the benefit of the tickling of my fear system, but at all times I'm in control of my fear response," Keil said.

The action plan is an important part of the process.

"With a terror alert, what are you going to be doing?" Keil said. "When an alert doesn't come with a recommendation for what people shoud do, there's a vague fear that's less appropriate and less functional."

Even if the authorities don't provide those recommendations, it's a good idea to take the opportunity to review your own personal emergency response plan. "That's so in line with common sense you don't even have to ask a brain scientist," Keil said.

Goosens has another piece of common-sense advice: Don't fret alone. Being part of a group makes it easier to cope with fear -- whether it's stimulated by a visit to a haunted house or an actual terror threat. "That reduces your stress response while you're exposed to the threat, and when you're being social, you're activationg parts of your brain that are associated with reward," she said. "One of the things about people who are exposed to chronic stress is that they often exhibit social withdrawal or abnormal social interaction."

Filling in the gaps
Risk consultant David Ropeik -- a former msnbc.com contributor whose most recent book is titled "How Risky Is it, Really?" -- said that it's important for government officials and news media to fill in the gaps in information about a threat as fully as they can.

"The psychological effect is called 'representativeness bias,'" he told me. "We take partial information, and when we don't have more, we fit that information itno the pattern that we already know and seems to make sense. Yemen? Ding-ding-ding-ding. Possibly explosive? Ding-ding-ding-ding. It's a mental shortcut that we use to make decisions about whether we're in danger."

That effect meshes perfectly with our hard-wired response to perceived threats. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the hominids who were careful about keeping their distance from an unknown creature usually fared better than those who blithely walked into the predator's lair. But if the information gaps aren't eventually filled in, there could be negative consequences, particularly in a modern global society.

"If the pattern forms in our minds, that Muslims are dangerous and that chemicals are dangerous, and if we don't find out the truth about all that, then we're left with that pattern. Everything fits the pattern, so we have Islamophobia and all sorts of stereotypes," Ropeik said. "The government and the media need to take more responsibility for clarifying those scary circumstances that, down the road, turn out not to fit the pattern. Because the more we have a pattern in our mind, the more it binds us to irrational representativeness bias. And that's bad for our health."

What do you think? Is the news a source of chronic stress? Do you feel as if the gaps in our information about terror threats are being closed? Is there a psychological benefit to putting real-world worries aside and watching "Saw 3D" instead? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below. 

Halloween tales from the crypt:

• 2002: Ghostly mysteries solved
• 2003: Why we seek out an eek
• 2004: Sharing your scares
• 2005: Ghosts on the rise
• 2006: Bring me your ghost stories!
• 2007: The science of spooks
• 2008: Chasing phantoms on film
• 2008: The science of bloodsuckers
• 2009: Seven ghoulish discoveries
• 2010: TODAY celebrates Halloween 
• 2010: Superstitions getting more common
• Inside Science: Why we love to scare ourselves

To learn more about the workings of the brain, check out our interactive "road map to the mind." Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alan Boyle writes: A pint-sized helicopter that gets its energy from a laser beam ran for more than 12 hours straight overnight, breaking an endurance record for laser-powered hovering.

It may look like a toy or a UFO, but the Pelican quadrocopter is actually a prototype for a new generation of mini-drones designed for military use.

The Pelican's landing came this morning -- 12 hours, 26 minutes and 56 seconds after it rose up from the floor of the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, Wash., just north of Seattle.

"It's been a satisfyingly boring night," Tom Nugent, president and co-founder of LaserMotive, told me when I arrived at the museum at 7 a.m. this morning.

Nugent's Seattle-area company won $900,000 last year in the NASA-backed Beam Power Challenge, thanks to the quickness of its laser-powered tether climber. Today's challenge was all about hang time rather than speed or altitude: The Pelican -- built by Ascending Technologies, a German company specializing in flying robots -- never flew much higher than 30 feet, and an autonomous control system kept it pretty much in the same position for hour after hour.

The Ascending Technologies executives who sat behind the computers controlling the craft had little to do except to adjust the software every once in a while. "We act as safety pilots," Michael Achtelik, the German company's CEO, told me.

LaserMotive developed the diode-laser beam system that kept the Pelican aloft. Near-infrared light from the equivalent of 250,000 laser pointers were focused and sent up to shine onto the quadrocopter's photovoltaic array, using a system of lenses and mirrors in the back of a delivery truck. The laser system served as a "wireless extension cord" for the Pelican, Nugent said. But the copter also had a battery capable of keeping the rotors running for a few minutes, just in case something went wrong with the 2.5-kilowatt laser.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

LaserMotive President Tom Nugent's reflected image shows up in a mirror that's part of the optics for the beam power system.

Jordin Kare, another one of LaserMotive's co-founders and a pioneer in the field of laser propulsion, said the laser generated enough radiation to heat up your hand if you stuck it in the beam, but nowhere near enough to blast a hole in it. "We've actually cooked hot dogs with that laser, and it takes about four or five minutes," Kare told me. "Not exactly a death ray."

Nevertheless, the copter control team wore protective glasses while the beam was on. Onlookers like myself were kept behind a line of airport-style dividers ... and were advised not to stare at the spots of laser light that reflected off the museum's ceiling. "That is actually 1,000 times brighter than it looks," Kare said.

Just a few minutes after 8 a.m., the laser beam was switched off, and Achtelik fiddled with a hand-held controller to bring the copter down for its landing. "We've just flown for the first time a battery-powered vehicle and charged it while it was flying," Dave Bashford, LaserMotive's vice president of operations, told about 20 spectators at the museum. (In August, LaserMotive pulled off a string of laser-powered flights lasting up to six hours, but in those cases the copter was tethered inside a booth.)

So now what?

Nugent said that LaserMotive will be "going after research-and-development contracts to integrate this into existing UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] that are being developed by the military." For example, laser-powered copters could perform on-the-road reconnaissance missions when convoys travel through a combat zone. The beam would come from a portable laser source sitting in the back of a Humvee.

Building a copter that's lightweight as well as battle-tough could be a challenge. Back in 2003, NASA built an experimental laser-powered aircraft that worked well enough inside a building but couldn't stand up to the gusty winds blowing outside. Kare said LaserMotive planned to procure a Puma UAV for future testing.

Looking farther ahead, Nugent said beam-powered aircraft could be used as portable platforms for aerial imaging or civilian communications. "You can have your own personal 'geosynchronous satellite' above you in the atmosphere," he said. Beam systems could come into play in space exploration as well -- perhaps in the form of laser-powered rovers or mini-aircraft on Mars. That's a big reason why NASA provided the prize money for the Beam Power Challenge in the first place.

LaserMotive's prize-winning performance last year proved that beam systems could work over a distance of a kilometer (0.6 miles), and now the company is talking about extending that range to tens or hundreds of kilometers. "I've actually done a design for powering a lunar base from Earth," Kare said. He's also fleshing out a concept he came up with in 1991 to launch single-stage vehicles into orbit using heat exchanger thrusters that are powered by intense laser light.

Ultimately, LaserMotive wants to take beam systems where no lasers have gone before. "We're going for solar system domination," Nugent joked.

Correction for 12:30 a.m. Oct. 29: Tom Nugent points out that LaserMotive's system focuses near-infrared light from the equivalent of 250,000 laser pointers, not 250. I don't know how the wrong number ended up in my notes ... maybe I was dazzled by the laser light. In any case, the number is fixed. Sorry about the error.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Paul Schemm / AP

A stela at the Egyptian museum in Cairo shows Pharaoh Akhenaten, Queen Nefertiti and their children worshipping the sun in the more natural artistic style of the time. Akhenaten's sighting of a "shining disk" descending from the sky is included on a list of 500 unexplained aerial observations made before the industrial revolution, drawn up by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck.

Alan Boyle writes: One of the best-known scientific sleuths of UFO sightings is focusing his search not on today's flying saucers, but on the sky wonders of antiquity.

Jacques Vallee, the French-born computer whiz and venture capitalist who also served as the model for Francois Truffaut's UFO-hunting character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," says such sightings show that the UFO phenomenon did not start in 1947. He's a co-author of a newly published book, "Wonders in the Sky," that lists 500 unexplained aerial observations dating back as far as 1460 B.C. and going up to the dawn of the industrial age in 1879. (That 500th case involved an unknown "airship" that was sighted over eastern Iowa, where I grew up. Coincidence? I think not.)

Vallee and fellow researcher Chris Aubeck also delve into longstanding UFO legends that they've excluded from their list for various reasons. For example, take the story about Alexander the Great seeing a flying object that shot out a blaster ray. "We traced the story and discovered it was about the use of gunpowder, not an unexplained flying object," Aubeck and Vallee write.

About 90 percent of UFO reports turn out to have perfectly natural explanations, but Vallee says the reports that remain unexplained are provocative enough that they deserve more thoroughgoing study. He stated his case this week during a telephone conversation. By the way, when he points out that the modern flying-saucer era began in my "neck of the woods," he's not talking about eastern Iowa, but about western Washington, where msnbc.com is headquartered. (Coincidence? I think not.)

Here's an edited transcript:

Cosmic Log: It's interesting to see that these sorts of sightings go back into antiquity. It almost makes one feel as though this is a phenomenon that goes along with being human.

Jacques Vallee: It certainly has had an impact on humanity. We're staying away from theories, because we don't think we're ready to have a good hypothesis about this phenomenon. What we're trying to do is ... well, as you know, when you're doing science you want to know how did something begin, and what were the conditions under which it began. So far, if you read most UFO books, they say this started in 1947. In fact, they say it started in your neck of the woods when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold described seeing six objects similar to saucers in flight. The problem with that is, it didn't start in 1947. We have cases just like it earlier in the 20th century, and when you look at the literature of the 19th century, we find experiences of the same kind.

Courtesy of Chris Aubeck

Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, seen here in a 2003 photo, are co-authors of "Wonders in the Sky."

Forty years ago, I published a book called "Passport to Magonia," saying, "Look, this is very similar to ancient folklore, about elves and demons and angels and other types of creatures, leprechauns and so on, who in many cases were also coming from the sky and were doing very similar things." Of course this became folklore, and the question I raised was, are we being faced with the same kind of folklore with modern UFOs? Could there be a real phenomenon underneath all of this that has not been recognized? Whether or not it's extraterrestrial is a different question. Of course, it could be. It's a big universe out there. Many astronomers -- including myself -- strongly believe that there is life throughout the cosmos.

But we still need to know the characteristics of the phenomenon. And thanks to the Internet, now we have the means to look at vast collections of records, from newspapers and books, from museum collections. Chris Aubeck is an Englishman living in Madrid who is very much a scholar of history and languages, and he contacted me about doing this research together. So we merged our databases. He had assembled a remarkable network of people in Russia, Germany, Latin America, the U.S. and so on who were interested in the same kind of research. We started tracking down every case, trying to find original references. It took six years. Nobody got paid. It's very much a labor of love. I think all of us fell in love with the material, it's so rich and so interesting.

Q: How does one approach a study of this sort of thing? The scientific study of these observations, and the assessment of it, is so fraught with difficulty. Some people might say there's a high "giggle factor."

A: We went beyond the giggle factor. Today there are pilots and military people willing to talk openly about what they've seen. The records of many countries have been made available. You know, I'm a member of the expert committee for the aerial phenomena study group of the French equivalent of NASA, CNES. It has been working on this phenomenon officially since 1975 and has a database. I built one of the early databases of sightings. My background is in computer science, so I started looking for patterns. Of course we all know that 90 percent of the reports are explainable, as illusions or airplanes, or meteors or atmospheric phenomena. The second part of our book is all about the cases that we have excluded, and why we did. But you're left with a significant number -- dozens of thousands of cases -- all unexplained. Not only are they unexplained, but they're also very well documented, well enough that scientists can begin to look for patterns in the phenomenon.

That's what I've been doing. That's what my earlier books were about. I've been doing that with a small group of scientists from other parts of the world who are very interested in this phenomenon. Again, I have no firm conclusion, but this certainly behaves like a technology that's very much in the science of our own. I'm interested in the physics of this. There are radar records, visual observations, electromagnetic observations, so there is quite a bit of material that one can begin to work with.

Q: I suppose the fact that these sightings in the sky, at least the small percentage that are unexplained, could be taken as evidence that there are entities that have been around here for a long time. It's not as if someone just showed up in 1947 and said, "We're going to save humanity from themselves." It could suggest that alien visitors have been here for a long time, but there could be other explanations. For example, it could say something about how our mind works ... that this is a purely psychological or mental phenomenon.

A: It's not simply a psychological phenomenon. Many of the cases, both ancient and modern, involve a number of trained people -- sometimes the entire crew of an aircraft. ... There is a database of over 500 reports by pilots in the first person. This is not hearsay, this is not a case of "my nephew told me there was something that a pilot saw." This is first person, and official reports by pilots which in many cases involved near-collisions. So this is serious business, and everybody knows it.

There is a reaction of ridicule simply because we don't know what it is. The tendency is to laugh, and it's probably a healthy tendency. It's a psychological reaction to protect ourselves from things we don't understand. Many of the reports in our book came from professional scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Two directors of the Paris Observatory. People who have left their name in the history of science, like Lagrange and Messier. These are not casual observers. These are serious men.

Q: This subject sometimes leads people to say that the government must know more than it's telling, and that there's some kind of global conspiracy going on. I think you've resisted that pull to point to conspiracies. But if it seems as if there's credible evidence, how do you avoid falling into that way of thinking?

A: You know, there is a great difference between having a lot of data and having an explanation for something. For example, we have a lot of data about people dying of cancer every day. We have samples, we have X-rays, we have everything about what happened to them. And we've been applying high technology to this problem for 50 years. But we still don't know how to cure cancer. So there's a big difference between saying "the government must have a lot of data" and saying "the government knows what this is."

Tarcher / Penguin

"Wonders in the Sky" chronicles 500 cases of unexplained aerial objects.

The place where I end up is, parts of the government must have a lot of data that should be turned over to the scientific community. What are they afraid of? The way to approach this is to turn over any data to the scientists, and they can compete to try to explain it. That's the way modern software is created. That's the way the Internet was built. I know that from my professional history. As you know, I was involved in ARPANET as a principal investigator. You do it with small teams, working on a competitive basis for two or three years, and that's how you do science. What's wrong with that?

We know there is data. All of us who have investigated this have spoken to pilots and radar operators who said that after a sighting, a couple of people in blue jeans showed up with some identification from somewhere and confiscated the tapes or the film, and they took it somewhere and no one ever saw it again. There's enough of that now that we know that data went somewhere.

You know how the government works: They accumulate things they never do anything with. I'd certainly love to see that data, and many of my colleagues would love to see it. To that extent, I think there should be more openness, especially from the military. They can strip out anything that's confidential or classified. If it's data that came from a special kind of radar, we don't need to know what type of radar. We should just see what the phenomenon was and go on from there. To that extent, I agree with people who say there should be disclosure. I have no evidence to tell me that the government has a solution to this, but I could be wrong. The government doesn't tell me what it does.

Q: You've worked in this field for decades now. How does it make you feel? Do you feel fearful? For a lot of people, this can get to be scary stuff.

A: Well, first of all, I'm certainly not frustrated. We're making a lot of progress, and this book is an example. We think this is only the beginning. This book will stimulate scholars in other countries to start looking at their records. That's exciting.

We've worked for a long time, and we don't have an answer -- but that's the way it works in science. I've worked at the University of Texas on the structure of galaxies, and we still don't know the structure of galaxies. We are puzzled by dark matter and all those things. There are very few sciences where you have definite answers in your lifetime. You can work on cancer research for decades and see only a marginal improvement in rates of success.

Personally, I've nver been afraid of the phenomenon. I'm occasionally awed by it. One thing that kept us going through the six years of the book project was that the material was so amazing. Here you have Michelangelo observing a triangle in the sky. You have Cassini observing something in the sky, and not publishing anything about it until he saw it a second time, some years later. You're touching upon not only the history of science, but also the history of culture.

Q: If there was anything you could change about the way anomalous phenomena are reported in the media, what would it be? What would be your prescription?

A: If you go out in the streets of Seattle tonight and see something in the sky, where would you report it? If you call the Air Force, they will say, "We're no longer entrusted with this." If you call an observatory, they will laugh at you. If you call the police, they will say, "We've got more important crimes to go after." You have no place to go. So you might call the newspaper, and the newspaper will write a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article about somebody who maybe had a little bit too much to drink. And that's the end of that. You'll never report anything anymore after that.

Why not have a series of small scientific projects with a well-advertised reporting number, where people can be taken seriously? Again, most of those reports will be explained very quickly. People do misunderstand Venus for a spacecraft, they do misinterpret the moon rising through a layer of fog as a flying saucer. Most of these witnesses are really genuinely looking for an ordinary explanation, and if you give it to them, they will be happy. But once in a while you have something that does not have the usual explanation, and then you have to do research.

So I would set up four or five small projects around the country, just looking into this with no preconceived notions, not saying that this is an invasion by E.T. or anything like that. Potentially this is a very important phenomenon.

Jacques Vallee's top-ten list of pre-20th-century unexplained aerial objects:

• July 7, 1015: Objects emerge from "mother stars" over Kyoto, Japan.
• Oct. 2, 1235: Stars are seen circling over Japan. Astrologers say "it is only the wind making the stars sway."
• June 3, 1277: Chinese poet Liu Ying immortalizes flying-saucer sighting in a poem titled "Event Seen at Dawn."
• Nov. 1, 1461: The legal adviser to Philip III, duke of Burgundy, describes a bright object that spirals upward, spins around, rolls over "like a loose watch" and disappears.
• 1513: Michelangelo observes a triangular light with three tails of different colors. He even paints a picture of it, but the painting has not survived.
• March 1638: Puritan settler James Everell and two companions report seeing a bright object appearing in the sky above Massachusetts' Muddy River ... and experiencing the "missing time" phenomenon.
• Sept. 14, 1641: An Armenian chronicler describes the appearance of a light that "revolved like a wheel" in the sky and moved away.
• Jan. 25, 1672: While serving as the director of the Paris Observatory, astronomer Giovanni Cassini spots an object he takes to be a moon of Venus. He announces the discovery after seeing the object again in 1686. But no such moon exists. (The hypothetical moon, which came to be known as Neith, was reported by other astronomers as well. Scientists have speculated that the object was actually an optical illusion or a nearby star.)
• Sept. 7, 1820: Astronomer Francois Arago, director of the Paris Observatory, watches a formation of unknown objects making turns with "military precision" during a lunar eclipse.
• June 18, 1845: Crewmates on the British brig Victoria report seeing "three luminous bodies" rise from the sea between Malta and Turkey. 

More on UFOs and aliens:

• UFOs explained, from N.Y. to Texas
• UFOs in China? The tales keep on coming
• Share your UFO stories
• UFO book based on questionable foundation
• Skeptic misses the point behind UFO book
• UFO cases that still generate buzz
• What to do if we find extraterrestrial life

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Updated 3:30 p.m. ET Oct. 27

For some billionaires, space travel is a cause worth big bucks. The examples range from Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, who's putting together what's likely to be the first suborbital spaceline, to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who is backing the publicity-shy Blue Origin space venture (and benefiting from NASA funding).

But how far are deep-pocketed space fans willing to go? Pete Worden, the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, recently hinted that billionaires are being recruited to kick in contributions for a deep-space mission known as "the Hundred Year Starship." The idea builds on the long-discussed concept of sending people on one-way missions to space destinations, in hopes of jump-starting colonization of the final frontier.

Worden is quoted as saying NASA has already committed $100,000 to the project, with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency providing another $1 million in funding. His comments, made at the Long Now Foundation's "Long Conversation" event on Oct. 16 in San Francisco, were reported by KurzweilAI's Amara D. Angelica.

Worden said NASA and DARPA have "just started" the project. "We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund," he was quoted as saying.

"The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds," he said. "Twenty years ago, you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired."

Actually, quite a few people have been talking about the idea, although deep-space colonization has not previously been mentioned as part of NASA's official space vision. Two researchers discussed the options for one-way trips to Mars this month in the Journal of Cosmology, and at this month's International Astronautical Congress in Prague, experts reviewed the possibilities for interstellar trips.

Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion. "His response was, 'Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2 billion?' So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price," Angelica quoted Worden as saying.

When it comes to sending colonists to other planetary systems, Page and his fellow billionaires shouldn't expect a quick return on their investment. "If we expect to be sending hundreds of people out to colonize another planet, we're really talking about something that's going to take 100 years or more to really make happen effectively," Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, said on MSNBC today.

Click on the video above to hear the whole discussion, then add your comments below.

Update for 3:30 p.m. ET Oct. 27: The Tau Zero Foundation was established to support private initiatives on interstellar flight. Last week the head of the foundation, former NASA researcher Marc Millis, wrote an exclusive piece for msnbc.com on the progress being made toward missions beyond our solar system. Here are Millis' thoughts on the "Billionaires Wanted" announcement:

"I was surprised to see the announcement.  I just left NASA due in large part to the indifference within NASA toward anything beyond the von Braun visions, including advanced propulsion research and interstellar missions.  That work was active in the late 1990s, but got 'differed' (the euphemism at the time for 'canceled') around 2003.  With my retirement, I'm devoting more time now to our Tau Zero Foundation for research and education toward interstellar flight that has more operating flexibility than when I was at NASA.

"That this announcement came from Pete Worden, however, was less surprising, since he has been getting Ames to delve into all sorts of interesting things beyond NASA's 'business as usual.'  Their dealings with Google is one example.  Singularity University is another.

"Supporting the 2009 International Space University Summer Session is yet another, especially considering how such things were viewed within's NASA culture during and after the Dan Goldin years.

"I recall discussions from our own NASA Glenn management to the effect that 'we can't do that (novel working relations and ISU support) and don't know how Worden's doing it."  I applaud Pete Worden for being able to embark on such novel approaches, especially realizing the difficulty of doing so in the NASA culture.

"That said, I was confused as to why DARPA would be interested in star flight, why they would turn to Worden for such a thing, and why the technology cited as an example of relevance was only 'microwave thermal propulsion.' I did not recognize the names of the cited experts as the ones that I know who work on that topic (such as Frank Mead, Jim Benford, etc.) That idea has been around for a long while and is not really at the top of the list for 'interstellar' approaches.  It is surprising to see these new folks as the focal point.

"Regarding the level of DARPA support, $1 million might sound like a lot to the layman, but it's really only enough for one focused task or a handful of smaller research tasks.  That is not much in the grand scheme of things.  Also, NASA contribution of $100K is enough for about a half-year of labor.  For NASA in such lean times, that is actually a modest overture to the topic.

"For a comparison, during my years with the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project (1996-2002), we were able to leverage around $1.6 million in total spread over seven years to assess about a dozen approaches, produce 16 peer-reviewed articles. Then, using volunteers and discretionary time thereafter, we managed to compile the book 'Frontiers of Propulsion Science.' It felt really good to accomplish that.

"But the part of the news that really threw me for a loop was for Worden, as a NASA official, to suggest philanthropic support.  I was not allowed to do that as NASA.

"That's a great idea -- in fact, that is precisely what my Tau Zero Foundation is trying to do.  We're taking the approach of first building a repertoire of progress to demonstrate that we can indeed take on the challenge.  I want the people who donate to know that their funds go to the folks who can make real progress. I'm proud of all the progress that our volunteers have been making in that regard.

"I really should compile a list of all the publications resulting from their work (add to the to-do list).

"If, and when, billionaire philanthropists do want to contribute toward star flight, I hope they shop around first."

Visit the Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

IEM

A chart shows share prices on the Iowa Electronic Markets for the projected outcome of the 2010 congressional elections. The blue line is the trend for Democratic control of House and Senate. Green stands for GOP control of House, and Democratic control of Senate. Red represents a Republican sweep, and the black line shows the prospects for a Democratic-led House and a GOP-led Senate.

Political prediction markets suggest that the outcome of next week's congressional elections is settled, with Republicans taking control of the House and Democrats slightly favored to hold onto a majority of sorts in the Senate. That forecast follows the current conventional wisdom. The interesting part is how the markets arrive at that conclusion: Rather than relying on polls of registered or likely voters, the markets render their judgment based on real-money bets from hundreds of traders.

It's the closest thing to political gambling, and it's perfectly legal.

 For more than 20 years, the Iowa Electronic Markets have let Internet users buy and sell "shares" in political propositions -- for example, RH_NRS10 in the chart above stands for the proposition that Republicans will control the House and non-Republicans (Democrats and independents) will hang onto a Senate majority. You could buy into that proposition today at around 73 cents a share. If that's the way the election turns out, you receive $1 per share. If the outcome is different, you get zip. Nada. Nothing.

The IEM has special dispensation from the Securities and Exchange Commission to run this kind of operation because it's regarded as a University of Iowa research project with the purpose of studying  how real-money behavior plays out in non-traditional markets. Similar set-ups have been put into force or at least proposed for box-office prediction, flu forecasting and even terror threats. (That last idea didn't get very far.)

In the political sphere, the IEM has done at least as well as the more traditional opinion surveys at predicting election outcomes. The reason has to do not only with the oft-cited "wisdom of crowds," but also with the fact that the potential payoff entices knowledgeable traders to swoop in on what they perceive as a good deal. That produces a market that quickly reflects the latest line on how the contest will turn out. Like the Vegas line on next weekend's big game, the result is authoritative but not foolproof.

Today, the average share prices on the IEM are 72.6 cents for a Republican House and a Democratic Senate; 15.3 cents for a GOP sweep; 12 cents for a Democratic sweep; and 0.2 cents for a Democratic House and Republican Senate. Just in the past couple of days, there's been a significant uptick in the Democratic-sweep share price, perhaps due to reports about Dem-friendly trends in early voting.  Someone who bought the NRH_NRS10 stock at 8.3 cents a share could have made a 44 percent profit in just a couple of days, even if the Democrats tank next week. Now that's the free market in action!

If you're looking for the markets to send an overall message that's different from what pundits are seeing in the polls, that's not likely to happen. The traditional view is echoed not only by the IEM, but also by Intrade, an Irish-based online trading site that deals in political propositions as well as other prediction markets. Intrade's clients are basically putting 90 cents on a proposition that pays off $1 if the Republicans win the House, and 57 cents for a $1 payoff if the Democrats hang onto the Senate.

The judgment from the political market may be going against the Democrats, but President Barack Obama can still take heart from the early line for 2012. Intrade's traders lean toward the view that a Democrat will win the presidential election two years from now (61 cents vs. 39 cents for a GOP candidate). Will that view change after next Tuesday's election? Watch the final week of the campaign unfold in msnbc.com's Decision 2010 section, and tune in next week for your market update.

Visit the Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Evan Twomey / WWF

The frog known as Ranitomeya benedicta is one of more than 1,200 species discovered in South America's Amazon region over the past decade. Click through a slideshow featuring the amazing species of the Amazon.

The World Wildlife Fund is highlighting the more than 1,200 species that have been discovered in the Amazon region over the past decade, in hopes of gaining support for protecting such species over the decades to come.

The WWF's 58-page report -- titled "Amazon Alive: A Decade of Discoveries 1999-2009" -- is being released to coincide with this month's conference on the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan. Representatives from scores of nations around the world are meeting to consider strategies for preserving biodiversity, in the Amazon and elsewhere.

The Amazon rainforest, which takes in areas of nine countries (Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana), is one of the world's biggest hot spots for diversity. Those 1,200 species average out to one discovery every three days. But the Amazon is also under threat: Over the past 50 years, at least 17 percent of the rainforest has been destroyed, the WWF says. That translates into an area twice the size of Spain.

"What's scary to me is the fact that we're losing so much habitat every day in the Amazon," Meg Symington, the WWF's managing director for the Amazon, told me today. "If we keep destroying the habitat, we don't even know how many species we're losing."

Traditionally, one of every 10 known species in the world has been found in the Amazon. "Once everything is known, I expect it will be more like 30 percent of all species on Earth," she said.

Some of those species could be important for human welfare as well as the health of the Amazonian ecosystem. As an example, Symington pointed to poison-tree frogs such as Ranitomeya benedicta, discovered in 2008 in Peru. "They have chemicals in their skin that turn out to be very important for medical purposes," she said.

So what do all these species need to be protected from? The threats include deforestation for cattle ranching and agriculture, as well as mining and infrastructure projects that have been planned with too much emphasis on economic development and not enough emphasis on environmental protection. For example, a tree porcupine on the WWF's species list was discovered during wildlife rescue efforts at a hydropower dam site.

The boom in biofuels has led to an even more intense Amazonian land rush, Symington said. "What was once very inaccessible is now part of the global economy," she observed.

The "Amazon Alive" study was commissioned with the idea of releasing it during the biodiversity conference, Symington said. WWF is hoping this month's meeting will spark new efforts to protect the world's biological wellsprings. "Since the Amazon really is an ecosystem that transcends national boundaries, we think there are many opportunities for regional collaboration on protected areas," she said.

That's the approach that the WWF has been taking, illustrated by its collaboration with a Latin American regional network known as Redparques. Symington said she'd like to see the countries represented at the biodiversity meeting "recommit themselves to aggressive targets" for habitat protection -- targets that have been unmet so far.

To get a sense of what's at stake, check out this slideshow of exotic species from the WWF's list. And then feast your eyes on these other examples of biodiversity:

• New species from New Guinea
• Scientists finish first sea census
• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• Three 'lost' amphibians found
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2009
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• The strange species of Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under .. underground
• Eight 'extinct' species found alive and kicking

Visit the Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

There's a certain grace to the interplay of DNA and RNA molecules ... and the scientists who study those molecules can be graceful as well. Evidence for that hypothesis is provided by the winners of this year's "Dance Your Ph.D." contest, led by Carleton University researcher Maureen McKeague. The journal Science has sponsored the contest annually since 2008 to reward efforts that transform research into interpretive dance. In this case, the reward was $1,000, and a rare chance to highlight complex chemistry with jazzy showtunes.

McKeague and her colleagues at Carleton's DeRosa Lab put together a medley to demonstrate a chemical technique known as SELEX, or systemic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment. The technique produces short segments of DNA and RNA called aptamers, in a process that mimics the natural phenomena of evolution and survival of the fittest. McKeague's mission is to find aptamers that can offer a cheap and accurate method to measure levels of the amino acid homocysteine in blood samples. High levels of homocysteine have been linked to cardiovascular disease.

Discoblog's Jennifer Welsh says the soundtrack for the dance of the molecules is "worthy of its own 'Glee' episode." I, for one, would welcome an episode in which the kids in New Directions take their inspiration from biology class. Failing that, I'd love to see a "Dance Your Ph.D." entry that incorporates tunes from "Rocky Horror Picture Show," a la "Glee." Let's take "The Quantum Mechanics of Time Travel Through Post-selected Teleportation" ... and then let's do the time warp again.

Watch videos from all four finalists in the "Dance Your Ph.D. Contest" at the ScienceNow website. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Nick Howes

Comet Hartley 2 exhibits a green coma as well as a reddish tail in this picture from British astrophotographer Nick Howes.

Comet Hartley 2's close approach to Earth wasn't as spectacular as some might have expected, but the real show should come in a couple of weeks, when NASA sends a spacecraft past Hartley 2 for some ultra-close-ups.

Skywatchers had been hoping that the comet would become bright enough to see with the naked eye by the time it zoomed past Earth. But even at its closest -- 11.2 million miles as of 8 a.m. ET Wednesday -- you would have needed a pair of binoculars to get a decent view.

Seeing Hartley 2 is even more challenging now that the moon is getting close to full. "Glaring moonlight will make the comet difficult to observe for the next week at least," SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips writes. The fact that the comet is so close to Earth isn't necessarily an advantage. That just means the comet's glow is spread out over a wider area of the sky.

 What's more, the comet hasn't developed a dramatic tail ...yet. You can just make out a tail of streaming reddish dust in the photo above, captured by British astrophotographer Nick Howes early today. As the comet nears its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 28, it may well develop a more prominent tail.

But the best view of Hartley 2 is likely to come just before 10 a.m. ET Nov. 4, when NASA's DIXI/EPOXI spacecraft is due to pass within 450 miles (700 kilometers) of the comet's nucleus. There'll be tons of observations made between now and the big day, as outlined in the EPOXI team's schedule of events.

For the latest comet imagery, keep tabs on the EPOXI Facebook page -- and watch for more from the EPOXI website in the days leading up to this year's coolest cometary close encounter.

Bonus round: SpaceWeather.com explains why Hartley 2 has that green glow. It's because the jets spewing out from the comet's nucleus contain cyanogen, a poisonous gas found in many comets, as well as diatomic carbon (C2). Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight. The reddish color of the tail is due to sunlight reflected by the dust streaming from the nucleus. Click the links on SpaceWeather.com's webpage for more views of the comet from around the world.

More about comets:

• Flash interactive: Inside a comet
• Halley's Comet sparks meteor shower
• Comet may not have rocked the Stone Age

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

L. Calcada / ESO

An artist's impression shows the young galaxy UDFy-38135539 gathering up the hydrogen and helium gas surrounding it and forming many young stars. Astronomers have determined that UDFy-38135539 is the most distant known galaxy.

Astronomers have confirmed that an incredibly faint galaxy in the constellation Fornax is the most distant known object in the universe, shining more than 13 billion light-years away and reflecting an era when stars were just beginning to emerge from a cosmic fog.

The galaxy, known as UDFy-38135539, is one of several super-distant objects picked out from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most sensitive snapshot ever taken of deep space. In time, astronomers may well spot objects that are even farther away, but this particular galaxy was the first of its type to go through the arduous process of having its measurements checked.

In fact, the astronomers behind the observations say they couldn't have seen UDFy-38135539 unless there were other, fainter galaxies nearby to help clear out the space around it. "Without this additional help, the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog, and we would not have been able to detect it," Durham University's Mark Swinbank said in a news release from the European Southern Observatory.

The ESO researchers, led by Matt Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris, published their findings in this week's issue of the journal Nature. Those findings shed unprecedented light (so to speak) on a mysterious period in the development of the universe, about 600 million years after its big-bang origin, when the radiation of the first stars began clearing out the neutral hydrogen that filled the infant universe. That process, known as reionization, transformed the cosmos from an opaque haze to the mostly empty space we know today.

"Measuring the redshift of the most distant galaxy so far is very exciting in itself, but the astrophysical implications of this detection are even more important," Nicole Nesvadba of France's Institute d'Astrophysique Spatiale said. "This is the first time we know for sure that we are looking at one of the galaxies that cleared out the fog which had filled the very early universe."

Further observations are likely to flesh out the scientific story of how the universe emerged from its dark ages.

G. Illingworth / UCO-Lick and UCSC / NASA / ESA / HUDF09

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows several candidates for breaking observational distance records, but confirming those distances is difficult. The inset picture highlights the galaxy UDFy-38135539, which is the farthest observed object to have its distance confirmed.

How the measurement was done
The story of UDFy-38135539 begins with last year's release of the latest Hubble Ultra Deep Field imagery, captured using the Hubble Space Telescope's brand-new Wide Field Camera 3. Astronomers checked the spectral signatures of thousands of faint objects in the picture, looking for the telltale signs of extreme redshift -- that is, a shift in the spectrum that is linked to how far away an object is in our expanding universe.

The ESO astronomers found several galaxies that had their light shifted so far to the red side of the spectrum that they knew those galaxies had to be incredibly distant. Numerically speaking, their redshift had to be greater than 8. But how much greater?

To figure out the precise redshift number, the astronomers booked 16 hours of time on the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile, which is equipped with an ultra-sensitive infrared spectroscopic instrument called SINFONI. After weeks of data analysis, the team ran the numbers and came up with a redshift of 8.55. That meant the galaxy was farther away than the most distant previously known galaxy (redshift 6.96) as well as the most distant previously known object (a gamma-ray burst at redshift 8.2).

That redshift means the light left the galaxy when the 600-million-year-old universe was in its era of reionization. But based on the models for the development of galaxies, UDFy-38135539 would not have had enough power at that time to clear out enough empty space for the light to shine through as it did. That's why scientists suspect that other, undetected galaxies were helping to clear out the bubble of space.

In a Nature commentary, Michele Trenti, an astronomer at the University of Colorado's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, hailed the results as "a fundamental leap forward in observational cosmology." He noted that there was "robust statistical confidence" that the team's interpretation was correct, with only a 0.1 percent chance that the interpretation of the galaxy's spectrum was incorrect.

Trenti said the study "opens up exciting proects for spectroscopy of high-redshift objects" -- not only using the data currently at hand, but also drawing upon future studies to be conducted by Hubble and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Q&A with the research team's leader
The leader of the research team, Matt Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris, answered a couple of my follow-up questions in an e-mail exchange:

Cosmic Log: Could you explain why this observation is so difficult? Of course the faintness of the galaxy is one of the big issues, but I understand that the high redshift is another big issue.

Matt Lehnert: You are correct, it is not only the faintness.  It becomes increasingly difficult because the night sky becomes brighter (which causes more background noise), contains a plethora of emission lines caused mainly by OH molecules in the upper atmosphere of the earth, and light is increasingly absorbed due to many molecules and other complex interactions. We cannot overcome all of these problems. Light lost is light lost.  Having a very efficient spectrograph helps. 

SINFONI is certainly that.  Perhaps the best currently available. You also have to have good data reduction software.  It's not very romantic, but removing those night sky lines is tricky -- they are strong, much, much stronger than the signal, and they vary with time.  Because they are bright, they add lots of noise, but much of that "additional" noise is due to improper removal.  My colleague, Nicole Nesvadba, has literally developed an excellent set of tools for extracting the most out of these data.

Q: Could you please also talk about the significance of the conclusions you reached on the galaxy's place in the epoch of reionization. I understand that the luminosity from the galaxy alone wouldn't have been enough to allow the redshifted photons to escape, and that the assumption is that there were surrounding smaller galaxies that aided in "carving" out a suitable bubble of ionized hydrogen gas. Does this fit with the existing models for galaxy formation during that epoch, or does it rule out any models that theorists have come up with? What do scientists hope to gain by learning more about the reionization epoch?

A: Well ... I always believe that models should be tested with results!  Astronomy is still an empirical science and so much of what we model is based on observational results.

The underlying physics is very complicated.  For example, we really do not have a robust picture of how individual stars form.  As you might imagine, since galaxies are made up of stars, and are to some extent defined by these stars, it is difficult to understand how galaxies form without this essential understanding of how stars form.  Having said all of that, our current models do in fact predict that reionization was mostly due to numerous faint objects and that the first places to be reionized were the ones that had higher densities of objects.  Was it a surprise for me? Yes. Was it a surprise for all astronomers? No way!

What we hope to learn is, what types of galaxies were really responsible and in fact, were only galaxies responsible? There are other ideas, mini-quasars -- small black holes that accrete matter and contribute, to decaying particles, to several other [ideas that have been] at least proposed if not all that plausible.

We would like to know how reionization proceeded. Was it in fits and starts? Did it start in regions of the highest densities and then proceed to the lowest?  How long did it take?  How did this gas cool to form the first galaxies, and how did galaxy formation change because the universe was reionized?

These first galaxies literally changed the state of the universe.  It was most neutral -- composed mainly of hydrogen and helium atoms -- to mostly ionized between galaxies -- composed mostly of protons, electrons, and helium nuclei (although helium re-ionization came later at lower redshifts).

It is a great challenge to understand how did these humble galaxies, humble because they are small, low-mass galaxies, change the state of the universe?  It's an exciting puzzle and a challenge to our understanding of physics.

Correction for 11 p.m. ET: I originally wrote that the galaxy was seen as it was 600,000 years after the big bang, but the figure is actually 600 million years. Sorry for putting the decimal point in the wrong place, and thanks to those who pointed out the error.

In addition to Lehnert, Nesvadba and Swinbank, the authors of "Spectroscopic Confirmation of a Galaxy at Redshift z=8.6" include Jean-Gabriel Cuby, Simon Morris, Benjamin Clement, C.J. Evans, M.N. Bremer and Stephane Basa.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.