Written by David G.C. Jones

Physical Sciences: Year In Review 2006

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Written by David G.C. Jones


By late 2006 more than 200 extrasolar planets had been detected in orbit around relatively nearby stars. Most had been found indirectly by tracking the motion of individual stars and detecting the small variations in velocity of a star caused by one or more planets in orbit around it. The planets detected by this method were typically 100–1,000 times the mass of the Earth (the mass of Jupiter is about 320 times that of the Earth), and none had been imaged directly. Since 2000 several extrasolar planets had been found through an entirely different observational technique—gravitational microlensing. The technique depended on an effect first discussed by physicist Albert Einstein. In his 1916 paper on general relativity, he showed how light that passed a massive object would be deflected by the object’s gravity. In a later paper he showed that a star could act as a gravitational lens that would focus the light from more distant stars that lay along the same line of sight. Several astronomical groups—PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork), OGLE (the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment), and MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics)—were searching for such lensing events. In early 2006 the groups announced that they had detected the signature of a microlensing event produced by a planet with a mass only 5.5 times that of the Earth, which made it the first Earth-like planet detected outside the solar system. The planet is in orbit around a relatively low-mass red dwarf star about 20,000 light-years from Earth, and it orbits the star at a distance about two and a half times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Red dwarf stars are the most abundant stars in the galaxy, so the discovery suggested that Earth-like planets might be quite common.

Galaxies and Cosmology

The 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, for two major contributions to cosmology. Using detectors aboard NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in 1989, they confirmed to a high precision that the universe is bathed in a blackbody microwave background radiation and that the radiation exhibits small spatial intensity fluctuations consistent with the formation of galaxies. (See Nobel Prizes.) These two observations provided very strong support for the idea that the universe evolved from a hot, dense explosive event, popularly called the big bang. Subsequent observations by other space missions and a number of ground-based telescopes provided further details about the nature of the big bang. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, found that the event took place about 13.7 billion years ago and that the density of the universe is very near its closure value, which in topological terms means that the universe is spatially flat.

In March 2006 the WMAP team, headed by Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., announced the results of observations of the polarization, or preferred alignment, of the background radiation. The polarization they observed implied that galaxies first formed about 400 million years after the big bang. The observed power spectrum of fluctuations from point to point in space suggested, but did not necessarily prove, that the known universe began with a very rapid inflationary phase during which the universe expanded by a factor of 1026 within a fraction of a second. The WMAP data also confirmed with unprecedented precision that the universe contains 4.4% ordinary (atomic) matter and 22% invisible (probably cold) dark matter. The remaining mass-energy content of the universe seemed to be a little-understood form of energy responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe and commonly referred to by astronomers as dark energy.

Space Exploration

For launches in support of human spaceflight in 2006, see Table.

Human Spaceflight Launches and Returns, 2006
Country Flight Crew1 Dates2 Mission/payload
Russia Soyuz TMA-8 (up) Pavel Vinogradov Jeffrey Williams Marcos Pontes March 30 transport of replacement crew to ISS
Russia Soyuz TMA-7 (down) William McArthur Valery Tokarev Marcos Pontes April 8 return of departing ISS crew to Earth
U.S. STS-121, Discovery Steven W. Lindsey Mark E. Kelly Michael E. Fossum Piers Sellers Lisa Nowak Stephanie Wilson Thomas Reiter (u) July 4–17 delivery of supplies and equipment to ISS; transport of an additional station crew member
U.S. STS-115, Atlantis Brent Jett Christopher Ferguson Joseph Tanner Daniel Burbank Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper September 9–21 delivery of P3/P4 integrated truss segment (with solar arrays) to ISS
Russia Soyuz TMA-9 (up) Mikhail Tyurin Michael Lopez-Alegria Anousheh Ansari3 September 18 transport of replacement crew to ISS
Russia Soyuz TMA-8 (down) Pavel Vinogradov Jeffrey Williams Anousheh Ansari3 September 29 return of departing ISS crew to Earth
U.S. STS-116, Discovery Mark Polansky William Oefelein Robert Curbeam Joan Higginbotham Nicholas Patrick Christer Fuglesang Sunita Williams (u) Thomas Reiter (d) December 9–22 delivery of P5 truss segment to ISS; station crew exchange
1For shuttle flight, commander and pilot are listed first; for Soyuz flights, ISS commander is listed first. 2Flight dates for shuttle and Shenzhou missions; Soyuz launch or return date for ISS missions. 3Flew as a paying passenger. u = ISS crew member transported to station. d = ISS crew member returned to Earth.

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