Related topics: stars

After Kepler, what is next for the planet hunters?

At the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society earlier this month, the NASA Kepler Space Telescope team announced its 1,000th discovery of a planet outside our solar system. This brings the total number of confirmed ...

Study says solar systems like ours may be common

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nearly one in four stars like the sun could have Earth-size planets, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study of nearby solar-mass stars.

Astronomers find 'snooker star system'

Astronomers at The University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have helped discover an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker.

Evidence of the amino acid tryptophan found in space

Using data from the Spitzer space observatory, Dr. Susana Iglesias-Groth, a researcher from The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found evidence for the existence of the amino acid tryptophan in the interstellar ...

A planetary system from the early Universe

A group of European astronomers has discovered an ancient planetary system that is likely to be a survivor from one of the earliest cosmic eras, 13 billion years ago. The system consists of the star HIP 11952 and two planets, ...

Astronomers discover dark past of planet-eating 'Death Star'

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Chicago, has made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth's sun. Especially intriguing is the star's unusual ...

Old stars may be the best places to search for life

Once upon a cosmic time, scientists assumed that stars apply an eternal magnetic brake, causing an endless slowdown of their rotation. With new observations and sophisticated methods, they have now peeked into a star's magnetic ...

Survivor of stellar collision is new type of pulsating star

A team of astronomers from the UK, Germany and Spain have observed the remnant of a stellar collision and discovered that its brightness varies in a way not seen before on this rare type of star. By analysing the patterns ...

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