Alien worlds resembling giant eyeballs might exist around red dwarf stars, and researchers are now proposing experiments to simulate these distant planets and see how capable they are of supporting life.
May 03, 2013
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It was a Friday afternoon, Aug. 31 of last year, that Eric Agol, a 42-year-old associate professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, looked at his computer screen and saw something astounding.
Apr 28, 2013
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(Phys.org) —Because it has no source of energy, a dead star—known as a white dwarf—will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable ...
Apr 24, 2013
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NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to five small planets around a slightly smaller star than our Sun. Two of them are super-Earth planets, most likely made of rock or ice ...
Apr 22, 2013
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NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission to fly in 2017. TESS will follow in the footsteps of NASA's pioneering Kepler Mission, continuing ...
Apr 22, 2013
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(Phys.org) —NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature ...
Apr 18, 2013
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(Phys.org) —Researchers at The University of Auckland have proposed a new method for finding Earth-like planets and they anticipate that the number will be in the order of 100 billion.
Apr 03, 2013
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The solar system's configuration is learned in grade school, and forever committed to memory with the help of foam balls, deconstructed coat hangers, and paint. It's a fairly straightforward arrangement: ...
Mar 21, 2013
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Mankind should not assume that it will definitely find life on alien planets according to a hypothesis being presented at the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, this week. Professor Charles Cockell, Director ...
Mar 12, 2013
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The number of potentially habitable planets is greater than previously thought, according to a new analysis by a Penn State researcher, and some of those planets are likely lurking around nearby stars.
Mar 12, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like ...
Feb 25, 2013
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Although hundreds of planets orbiting other stars have been discovered in the past 15 years, we cannot yet answer the age-old question of whether any of these planets are capable of sustaining life. However, ...
Feb 15, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Researchers working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project have completed their first "directed" search of a part of space and report in a paper they've uploaded to the ...
Feb 08, 2013
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Using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized ...
Feb 06, 2013
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Researchers searching the galaxy for planets that could pass the litmus test of sustaining water-based life must find whether those planets fall in a habitable zone, where they could be capable of having ...
Jan 30, 2013
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