A new study by an international team of astronomers reveals that four Earth-sized planets orbit the nearest sun-like star, tau Ceti, which is about 12 light years away and visible to the naked eye. These planets have masses ...
Astronomy
Aug 9, 2017
17
1445
In the search for planets similar to our own, an important point of comparison is the planet's density. A low density tells scientists a planet is more likely to be gaseous like Jupiter, and a high density is associated with ...
Astronomy
Jul 11, 2017
0
171
Rocky planets are probably a whole lot more common in our galaxy than astronomers previously believed—according to the latest release of Kepler Space Telescope data last week—a scenario that enhances the prospects for ...
Astronomy
Jun 29, 2017
3
247
NASA's Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range ...
Astronomy
Jun 20, 2017
2
20
Since the mid-1990s, when the first planet around another sun-like star was discovered, astronomers have been amassing what is now a large collection of exoplanets—nearly 3,500 have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led ...
Astronomy
Jun 19, 2017
5
609
(Phys.org)—European astronomers report the detection of a new extrasolar world several times more massive than Earth. The newly found exoplanet, classified as a so-called "super-Earth," is circling a nearby star designated ...
Scientists suggest in a new study the existence of a planetary object called a "synestia," a huge, spinning, donut-shaped mass of hot, vaporized rock, formed as planet-sized objects smash into each other.
Astronomy
May 22, 2017
0
573
If you could travel back in time 41,000 years to the last ice age, your compass would point south instead of north. That's because for a period of a few hundred years, the Earth's magnetic field was reversed. These reversals ...
Earth Sciences
May 16, 2017
5
177
New work from Carnegie's Stephen Elardo and Anat Shahar shows that interactions between iron and nickel under the extreme pressures and temperatures similar to a planetary interior can help scientists understand the period ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 20, 2017
0
29
A rocky planet discovered in the "habitable" zone of the star nearest our Sun may be covered with oceans, researchers at France's CNRS research institute said Thursday.
Astronomy
Oct 6, 2016
18
7
