Astronomers have found a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years away. They were detected as they passed in front of their parent star, the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. Three of them lie in the habitable zone and ...
Astronomy
Feb 22, 2017
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Long before Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, it seems that the inner solar system may have harbored a number of super-Earths—planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If so, those planets are long gone—broken ...
Astronomy
Mar 23, 2015
19
2132
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late ...
Astronomy
Oct 20, 2011
12
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, ...
Astronomy
Feb 2, 2011
87
0
When our sun was a young star, 4.56 billion years ago, what is now our solar system was just a disk of rocky dust and gas. Over tens of millions of years, tiny dust pebbles coalesced, like a snowball rolling larger and larger, ...
Astronomy
Jan 9, 2024
0
56
A small international team of space scientists has discovered a pair of planets that bear a striking resemblance to Neptune and Jupiter circling a star similar in nature to our sun. The group has published their findings ...
There's something about our solar system that appears to be unusual. For some reason, most of our bigger planets are far away from our host star, while closer in are smaller, rocky worlds, including Earth itself.
Astronomy
Jun 23, 2015
1
515
The vast quantity of planets and planetary candidates identified by NASA's Kepler spacecraft has revealed an array of systems. Some have Jupiter-sized planets close to the Sun, while others show only a handful of planets. ...
Astronomy
Jun 8, 2015
7
81
The protoplanet Vesta has been witness to an eventful past: images taken by the framing camera onboard NASA's space probe Dawn show two enormous craters in the southern hemisphere. The images were obtained during Dawn's year-long ...
Space Exploration
Jan 3, 2013
0
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of researchers from the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have discovered that debris that caused a "lunar cataclysm" on the moon 4 billion years ...
Space Exploration
Feb 28, 2012
3
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