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Newfound planet is Earth-mass but gassy

An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Surprisingly, ...

Tatooine-like planet discovered (w/ video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Although cold and gaseous rather than a desert world, the newfound planet Kepler-16b is still the closest astronomers have come to discovering Luke Skywalker's home world of Tatooine. Like Tatooine, Kepler-16b ...

The sun is a normal star after all, confirms study

With data from the Kepler (NASA), Gaia (ESA) and SOHO (NASA/ESA) satellites, a team, led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researcher Ângela Santos, seems to have put an end to the idea that the sun ...

Discovery of an extrasolar earth-sized planet

(PhysOrg.com) -- There are now over 490 confirmed extrasolar planets. The vast majority are gas giants like Jupiter, but they are much stranger because many orbit close to their stars and so are much hotter than Jupiter (some ...

Our sun may have eaten a super-Earth for breakfast

Our solar system sure seems like an orderly place. The orbits of the planets are predictable enough that we can send spacecraft on multi-year journeys to them and they will reliably reach their destinations. But we've only ...

Kepler solves mystery of fast and furious explosions

The universe is full of mysterious exploding phenomena that go boom in the dark. One particular type of ephemeral event, called a Fast-Evolving Luminous Transient (FELT), has bewildered astronomers for a decade because of ...

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