Hubble spies a rebel

Most galaxies possess a majestic spiral or elliptical structure. About a quarter of galaxies, though, defy such conventional, rounded aesthetics, instead sporting a messy, indefinable shape. Known as irregular galaxies, this ...

Coldest brown dwarfs blur lines between stars and planets

(Phys.org) —Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of such objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one ...

Free-floating planets may be born free

Tiny, round, cold clouds in space have all the right characteristics to form planets with no parent star. New observations, made with Chalmers University of Technology telescopes, show that not all free-floating planets were ...

Modeling Jupiter and Saturn's possible origins

New theoretical modeling by Carnegie's Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by the Astrophysical Journal.

Stellar winds

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Sun, glowing with a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius, warms the Earth with its salutary light. Meanwhile the Sun's hot outer layer (the corona), with its temperature of over a million ...

Rocky planets could have been born as gas giants

When NASA announced the discovery of over 1,200 new potential planets spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope, almost a quarter of them were thought to be Super-Earths. Now, new research suggests that these massive rocky planets ...

Keck Telescopes Take Deeper Look at Planetary Nurseries

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory have peered far into a young planetary system, giving an unprecedented view of dust and gas that might eventually form planets similar to Jupiter, Venus, or even ...

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