Distant moons may provide evidence of life beyond Earth, researchers say
Is there life beyond Earth? The answer to that age-old question may be on a moon we can't yet see.
Is there life beyond Earth? The answer to that age-old question may be on a moon we can't yet see.
Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Antioquia (Medellin-Colombia), have devised a novel method for identifying rings around extrasolar planets (exorings). The method is ...
Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, USA, have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much ...
Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th century Polish astronomer and mathematician, wasn't the first to suggest that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe—the idea originated with the ancient Greeks—but he was the first to prove ...
With about 4,000 planet candidates from the Kepler Space Telescope data to analyze so far, astronomers are busy trying to figure out questions about habitability. What size planet could host life? How far from its star does ...
Scientists hunting for life beyond Earth have discovered more than 1,800 planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, in recent years, but so far, no one has been able to confirm an exomoon. Now, physicists from The University ...
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) was built for one purpose: imaging extrasolar planets. In the seven months since it came online, GPI is proving to be an order-of-magnitude improvement-so much so that it may rewrite the rules ...
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1994. Twenty years later, NASA's exoplanet catalog lists more than 1700 planets confirmed around other stars. Most of these extra-solar-systems have been measured by changes in light ...
Among the most sought-after prizes in astronomy these days are "exomoons," or moons orbiting exoplanets. Although astronomers have detected more than a thousand exoplanets, any exomoons they might harbor have so far eluded ...
As a species, human beings are obsessed with the idea that there may be aliens out there, somewhere beyond our planet.