The extraterrestrials in Chevy's Volt commercial. (Credit: Chevrolet)

This American football championship game has historically been the most-watched program on American television. In fact, the 2011 Super Bowl had the largest audience ever for a U.S. television broadcast at 111 million viewers. This year’s big game could repeat last year’s record-breaking viewership. But something else from the 2011 Super Bowl that will certainly be repeated this year is the appearance of extraterrestrial-themed advertisements.

The ET theme was dominant in commercials that aired during the 2011 Super Bowl. Several extraterrestrial-themed movies were advertised during the broadcast, and multiple car companies featured extraterrestrial characters in their ads. Last year, Chevrolet used a character from Transformers: Dark of the Moon in one of their commercials. The company is going with an even stronger extraterrestrial theme this year. Motor Authority reports that “Chevy has enlisted the little-green-men-brigade to sell Volt sedans and Silverado pickups during this year’s big game.” The commercial for the Volt is filled with little extraterrestrial characters and UFOs.

I have a feeling that the extraterrestrial theme will be popping up in several other commercials too.

The Super Bowl takes place Sunday, February 5 at 6:30 PM ET on NBC.

Watch Chevrolet’s Volt commercial below:

Artist's conception of the alien planet GJ 667Cc (Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science)

This giant planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth. According to Space.com, a team of scientists, which included Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the Carnegie Institution for Science, determined this planet’s location to be within the habitable zone of its host star — “a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.” Anglada-Escudé stated, “This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it.”

Space.com explains that the researchers suspect “potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible,” based on the new findings.

The team’s research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Orbital positions of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. (credit: NASA Ames/Dan Fabrycky, University of California, Santa Cruz)

Astrobiology Magazine describes the findings:

The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen are between Earth and Neptune in size. Further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our Sun.

2011 was an exciting year with the release of Kepler data. And much more data will continue to be released in 2012. As MSNBC explains, the mission has successfully confirmed 61 planets, and has identified another 2,326 planetary candidates that have yet to be confirmed.

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