'Goldilocks' clue to habitable planets
The bad news: Earth's oceans will evaporate away. The good news: It won't happen for another billion years or so.
The bad news: Earth's oceans will evaporate away. The good news: It won't happen for another billion years or so.
Astronomy
Dec 11, 2013
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(Phys.org) —Theoretical astrophysicist Abraham Loeb of Harvard University has uploaded a paper he's written to the preprint server arXiv, in which he suggests that conditions shortly after the Big Bang may have been just ...
(Phys.org) —An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington astronomers have found, and knowing that may help in the ...
Astronomy
Dec 9, 2013
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As NASA's Dawn mission draws closer to its encounter with the dwarf planet Ceres in early 2015, excitement continues to mount for scientists looking forward to what the satellite might observe. Britney Schmidt, of the George ...
Space Exploration
Dec 5, 2013
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Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system – located about 150 ...
Astronomy
Oct 10, 2013
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(Phys.org) —NASA has narrowed to four the number of potential landing sites for the agency's next mission to the surface of Mars, a 2016 lander to study the planet's interior.
Space Exploration
Sep 4, 2013
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(Phys.org) —It might be easier than previously thought for a planet to overheat into the scorchingly uninhabitable "runaway greenhouse" stage, according to new research by astronomers at the University of Washington and ...
Astronomy
Jul 30, 2013
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(Phys.org) —In a bit of cosmic irony, planets orbiting cooler stars may be more likely to remain ice-free than planets around hotter stars. This is due to the interaction of a star's light with ice and snow on the planet's ...
Astronomy
Jul 19, 2013
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(Phys.org) —Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of astronomers have been able to detect the tell-tale spectral fingerprint of water molecules in the atmosphere of a planet in orbit around another star. The discovery ...
Astronomy
Jul 5, 2013
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If one looks only for the shiniest pennies in the fountain, chances are one misses most of the coins because they shimmer less brightly. This, in a nutshell, is the conundrum astronomers face when searching for Earth-like ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2013
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