Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars have the same three layers? ...
Astronomy
Feb 8, 2016
8
2966
Determining the size of an Earth-size exoplanet by the amount of starlight it blocks hundreds of light-years away once was the realm of science fiction. Measuring the mass of such a small planet based on its gravity was ...
Astronomy
Jun 18, 2015
0
657
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
News flash: The Milky Way galaxy just got a little weirder. Back in 2011 astronomers were amazed when NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered a planet orbiting a double star system. Such a world, they realized, would have double ...
Astronomy
Sep 13, 2012
35
0
NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory ...
Astronomy
Aug 28, 2012
15
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cornell scientists are boldly going where no water molecule has gone before -- that is, when it comes to pressures found nowhere on Earth.
Condensed Matter
Jan 17, 2012
3
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to an article recently published in The Astrophysical ...
Astronomy
Nov 10, 2011
34
0
(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
Jupiter has gotten whacked again.
Astronomy
Jun 4, 2010
12
0
The unique two thin rings around the Centaur Chariklo could be shaped by an even smaller satellite. Chariklo is a Centaur, which are small bodies similar to asteroids in size but to comets in composition, that revolve around ...
Astronomy
Feb 6, 2024
0
113
