Scientists at UCL have observed how a widespread polar wind is driving gas from the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. The team analysed data gathered over seven years by the international Cassini probe, and found that the ...
Space Exploration
Jun 18, 2015
0
3995
Determining the size of an Earth-size exoplanet by the amount of starlight it blocks hundreds of light-years away once was the realm of science fiction. Measuring the mass of such a small planet based on its gravity was ...
Astronomy
Jun 18, 2015
0
657
Astronomers have detected wildly changing temperatures on a super Earth – the first time any atmospheric variability has been observed on a rocky planet outside the solar system – and believe it could be due to huge amounts ...
Astronomy
May 5, 2015
2
1085
On 6 November 2010, the light of the star known as NOMAD1 0856-0015072 in the Cetus constellation dimmed. What had happened? A dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system had moved in front of the distant star - its name: ...
Space Exploration
Apr 23, 2015
0
116
Only around 60 million kilometres closer to the Sun than Ceres, another large rock is orbiting in the remote asteroid belt: Vesta. Although its diameter of approximately 530 kilometres makes it a bit too small to be counted ...
Space Exploration
Apr 21, 2015
0
88
Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circling such binary stars, and many researchers ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2015
0
103
Long before Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, it seems that the inner solar system may have harbored a number of super-Earths—planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If so, those planets are long gone—broken ...
Astronomy
Mar 23, 2015
19
2132
European Southern Observatory (ESO) gears up for the exoplanet hunting. The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a wide-field observing system made up of an array of twelve telescopes was installed at ESO's Paranal Observatory ...
Space Exploration
Mar 2, 2015
0
45
Scientists from Queen's University Belfast have partnered with leading astrophysicists across Europe for a ground-breaking space research project that will form a crucial step in the quest to study small, rocky planets orbiting ...
Astronomy
Jan 14, 2015
0
26
Astronomers could soon be able to find rocky planets stretched out by the gravity of the stars they orbit, according to a group of researchers in the United States. The team, led by Prabal Saxena of George Mason University, ...
Astronomy
Dec 15, 2014
0
0
