News tagged with distant planet
Free-floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by factors of thousands
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director ...
May 10, 2012 |
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Flipping hot Jupiters: Why some planets orbit the wrong way
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the last few years astronomers have observed that in some extrasolar systems the star is spinning one way and the planet, a "hot Jupiter," is orbiting the star in the opposite direction. ...
May 11, 2011 |
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Faraway Eris is Pluto's twin: Dwarf planet sized up accurately as it blocks light of faint star
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have measured the diameter of the dwarf planet Eris by catching it as it passed in front of a faint star. This was seen by telescopes in Chile, including the TRAPPIST telescope ...
Oct 26, 2011 |
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How to keep lonely exoplanets snug -- just add dark matter
Dark matter, inferred to exist from its gravitational effects on the universe, is still a mystery to scientists. But a new study says that dark matter could help life evolve and survive on distant worlds outside ...
Jun 23, 2011 |
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Scattered light could reveal alien atmospheres
The light scattered off distant worlds could help reveal details about their atmospheres that no other method could uncover, scientists find.
Feb 20, 2012 |
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Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips
(PhysOrg.com) -- Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Kepler Explorer, an innovative app for iPads ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 03, 2012 |
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City lights could reveal E.T. civilization
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner ...
Nov 03, 2011 |
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Uranus auroras glimpsed from Earth
(Phys.org) -- For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 13, 2012 |
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Far-out photosynthesis
Photosynthesis maintains Earth's habitability for life as we know it, and shapes the way we search for habitable worlds around distant stars. Scientists have discovered a microbe that can use low-energy light ...
Mar 16, 2012 |
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Life possible on 'large parts' of Mars: study
Australian scientists who modelled conditions on Mars to examine how much of the red planet was habitable said that "large regions" could sustain life.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Dec 12, 2011 |
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Astronomers Find Super-Earth Using Amateur, Off-the-Shelf Technology (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based ...
Dec 16, 2009 |
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Finding Twin Earths: Harder Than We Thought
(PhysOrg.com) -- Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to ...
Mar 20, 2009 |
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Birth of a baby planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Sydney astronomer, Professor Peter Tuthill, is one of an international team of astronomers who have announced a major step forward in the quest to find planets in orbit around ...
Mar 02, 2011 |
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Magnetic fields set the stage for the birth of new stars
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have, for the first time, measured the alignment of magnetic fields in gigantic clouds of gas and dust in a distant galaxy. Their results ...
Nov 16, 2011 |
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The Eerie Silence
Why have we not made contact with aliens after so many years searching the depths of space? The Eerie Silence, a new book by SETI researcher Paul Davies, provides a fresh and thoughtful look at this question.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 15, 2010 |
4.8 / 5 (36) |
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