A nebula known as "the Spider" glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies near a much smaller object ...
Astronomy
Apr 15, 2016
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63
An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has obtained the most detailed 'fingerprint' of a rocky planet outside our solar system to date, and found a planet of two halves: one that is almost ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2016
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914
When a team of astronomers found a galaxy in the direction of Ursa Major two years ago, they weren't sure what to make of it.
Astronomy
Mar 29, 2016
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220
The last decade has seen a bonanza of exoplanet discoveries. Nearly 2,000 exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—have been confirmed so far, and more than 5,000 candidate exoplanets have been identified. Many of ...
Astronomy
Mar 29, 2016
2
506
For centuries, the solar system was viewed as a standard blueprint for planetary systems in the universe, with a star (our sun) at the center of a circular track, and a planet orbiting within each lane. Smaller, rockier planets ...
Astronomy
Mar 28, 2016
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59
By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 ...
Astronomy
Mar 3, 2016
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The early universe was a chaotic mess of gas and matter that only began to coalesce into distinct galaxies hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. It would take several billion more years for such galaxies to assemble ...
Astronomy
Jan 7, 2016
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988
Astronomers are finding dozens of the fastest stars in our galaxy with the help of images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2016
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1065
(Phys.org)—HAT-P-26b is an inflated, Neptune-mass exoplanet located about 437 light years from Earth, which orbits its parent star HAT-P-26 every 4.23 days. The planet has a relatively low surface gravity that is well suited ...
Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to study the atmospheres of ten hot, Jupiter-sized exoplanets in detail, the largest number of such planets ever studied. The ...
Astronomy
Dec 14, 2015
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2714
