News tagged with distant planet

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 26, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (15) | comments 9 | with audio podcast

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 ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jun 23, 2011 | popularity 3.5 / 5 (11) | comments 39 | with audio podcast

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. ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created May 11, 2011 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (10) | comments 23 | with audio podcast

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 16, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (29) | comments 10

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 20, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (16) | comments 1

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

created Apr 13, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (6) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

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

created Apr 03, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (6) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

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 ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Mar 16, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (6) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

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.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 20, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (13) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

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

created Dec 12, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (16) | comments 41

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 16, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (5) | comments 11 | with audio podcast

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 03, 2011 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (29) | comments 54 | with audio podcast

How to learn a star's true age

(PhysOrg.com) -- For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. In space, the same is true of the actual stars. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created May 24, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

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 ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 02, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (9) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

A New Way to Find Earths

Astronomers have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach might even be sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around distant stars.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jul 09, 2010 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (22) | comments 5 | with audio podcast