Cecil Hotel

It is a budget hotel with 600 rooms and has a reputation for hosting transients for $US470 a month.

Since its construction in 1927 it has been the focus of suicides, murders, mystery disappearances and serial killers. Now the infamous haunt is the site of a ghost hunt.

This photo was taken by resident Koston Alderete, showing a mysterious figure hanging outside a fourth-floor window of the hotel.

The home of serial killers

In the past, the Cecil Hotel was home to 'Night Stalker' Richard Ramirez, an American serial killer, rapist and burglar during 1984-85. The satanist's crimes terrorised Los Angeles, before he was finally captured and convicted of 13 murders.

He lived on the Cecil's top floor in a $14-a-night room as he slaughtered his victims.

Richard Schave who conducts crime tours of the Cecil, told CNN: He was "just dumping his bloody clothes in the dumpster at the end of his evening and going in the back entrance".

Ramirez was sentenced to death in a gas chamber in 1989, and on receiving his sentence showed no remorse, stating: "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."

Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger also stayed at the hotel in 1991 for five weeks. During this time he murdered three prostitutes, who would enter his room via the fire escape for a measly $30.

This occurred after he had been jailed and released in Austria for similar murders. He was released as an example for rehabilitation and was hired by an Austrian magazine to be a crime writer in Los Angeles.

The disturbed crime journalist is believed to have been paying homage to his subject, Richard Ramirez, when he beat, sexually assaulted and then strangled the women with their own bra straps.

 

Suicide tower and bizarre deaths

The horrors started long before for the Cecil. During the 50s and 60s, the hotel was known as a suicide hotspot.

In 1962, Pauline Otton, 27, threw herself to her death from a ninth-floor window after arguing with her husband. She landed on pedestrian George Gianinni, 65, on the street below, killing him instantly. She was just one of numerous guests who ended their lives while staying at the run-down hotel.

In an unsolved murder in 1964, Pigeon woman, Goldie Osgood, who enjoyed feeding the birds in a nearby square, was found dead in her room. She had been stabbed, strangled and raped - and then had her room ransacked.

Tour guide Richard Schave put the disturbing events in history down to the crowd at the hotel.

"This was just a place where people who were really down on their luck were going," Schave said. "These hotels are filled with people who are at the edge of being integrated in society."

 

Mysterious death of Elisa Lam

 
a corpse was discovered in a water tank at the hotel after guests complained of foul-smelling black water coming from their taps.

In February 2013, a maintenance worker, on investigating the water cisterns on the roof of the Cecil, discovered the decomposed body of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam at the bottom of the tank.

Residents had brushed their teeth, drank and bathed in the water for 19 days.

A guest at the hotel said the water "tasted horrible" with "a very funny ... disgusting taste. It's a very strange taste. I can barely describe it."

The mysterious death of Lam added to the horrific history of the hotel.

The 21-year-old checked into the Cecil on January 26, 2013, and she went missing on February 1.

CCTV footage released of Lam shows her acting bizarrely, hiding in the lift, and then pressing all the buttons before peering out strangely. She eventually exits the lift and gestures to someone - or something - outside the doors.

After this, Lam vanished. Her body was discovered in the tank on the secured and alarmed rooftop over two weeks later.

How Lam got to the roof is a mystery, as law enforcement said it can only be accessed via a locked door and fire escape.

To an observer it looks as if Lam has consumed drugs when she is filmed in the lift, yet no substances were found in her system during an autopsy.

The coroner ruled her death "accidental due to drowning", yet many questions remain unanswered. What actually happened to Lam may never be known.

                        

Earth’s Twin Planets

Gliese 581 is a star of spectral type M3V (a red dwarf) about 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. Its estimated mass is about a third of that of the Sun, and it is the 89th closest known star to the Sun. Observations suggests that the star has a planetary system consisting of three planets, designated Gliese 581 b, c and e in order of discovery. Additional outer planets, which received the designations Gliese 581 d, f, and g have been proposed, but the evidence that led to the discovery claims has been shown to be the result of stellar activity mimicking the radial velocity variations due to orbiting planets.

Gliese 581

Gliese 581 has been the subject of a "huge amount of attention" in the quest to discover the first habitable extrasolar planet; first for c, and then d and g. Gliese 581 c, the first low-mass extrasolar planet found near a habitable zone, was discovered in April 2007. It has since been shown that under known terrestrial planet climate models, Gliese 581 c is likely to have a runaway greenhouse effect, and hence is probably too hot to be habitable, analogous to Venus. The proposed planets Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 g also received attention as being located within the habitable zone, but their existence has subsequently been put into doubt by some authors.

On 27 November 2012, the European Space Agency announced a debris disk, with at least ten times as many comets as the Solar System. This put constraints on possible planets beyond 0.75 AU.

Gliese 581 is known at least from 1886, when it was included to Eduard Schönfeld's Southern Durchmusterung (SD) — the fourth part of the Bonner Durchmusterung. The corresponding designation is BD -7 4003.

Kepler-22b is an extrasolar planet orbiting G-type star Kepler-22b. It is located about 600 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. It was discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in 2011 and was the first known transiting planet to orbit within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star.

Kepler-22b

The planet's first transit in front of its host star was observed on Kepler's third day of scientific operations, in 12 May 2009. The third transit was detected on 15 December 2010. Additional confirmation data was provided by the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based observations. On 5 December 2011, the confirmation of the existence of Kepler-22b was announced

The only parameters of the planet's orbit that are currently available are its period, which is about 290 days, and its inclination, which is approximately 90°, so that it transits the disk of its star as seen from Earth.

No information is available about the shape of the planet's orbit. Many extrasolar planets are known to move in highly elliptical orbits. It is only known that its average orbital distance is within its host star's habitable zone. If Kepler-22b has a highly elongated orbit it may well only spend a small fraction of its time within this habitable zone, which would cause extreme temperature differences on the planet and might make it inhospitable.

In order to obtain information about the shape of the planet's orbit, other methods of planetary detection, such as the radial velocity method, need to be used. While such methods have been performed on the planet after its discovery, they have not yet detected what the orbital eccentricity of the planet actually is, and have as of March 2012 only set an upper limit on the mass of the planet.