Keyword: exoplanets
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Explanation: Over 4000 planets are now known to exist outside our Solar System. Known as exoplanets, this milestone was passed last month, as recorded by NASA's Exoplanet Archive. The featured video highlights these exoplanets in sound and light, starting chronologically from the first confirmed detection in 1992 and continuing into 2019. The entire night sky is first shown compressed with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy making a giant U. Exoplanets detected by slight jiggles in their parents-star's colors (radial velocity) appear in pink, while those detected by slight dips in their parent star's brightness (transit) are shown...
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Industrial-scale agriculture has changed the make up of our atmosphere. So "exofarms" ought to be visible on Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. One of the key developments separating modern civilization from the hunter gatherer societies of the past is the invention of farming, which took place about 10,000 years ago. This began with the cultivation of wild plants and the domestication of various animals for dairy products and meat. The big advantage of farming is that it sustains a much larger population than hunting and gathering. This led to the emergence of cities, the sharing of natural resources and of...
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In a study published on March 15, 2022...MIT astronomers report that three, and potentially four, planets that were originally discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope are in fact misclassified. Instead, these suspected planets are likely small stars. The team used updated measurements of planet-hosting stars to double-check the size of the planets, and identified three that are simply too big to be planets. With new and better estimates of stellar properties, the researchers found that the three objects, which are known as Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b, are now estimated to be between two and four times the size of Jupiter....
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Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory's facilities has resulted in the identification of as many as 170 potential 'rogue' worlds in our corner of the galaxy. If a good fraction of them are confirmed to be planets, it would suggest the Milky Way is swarming with solar exiles. "There could be several billions of...
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Astronomers first learned about free-floating planets in the 1990s, but many unanswered questions remain, such as the conditions under which they form, their size and composition, and their relative abundance in the galaxy. This effectively doubles the total number of known free-floating planets—a sign that the total population of rogue planets in our galaxy is huge. The newly detected rogue planets were detected in nearly 20 years’ worth of astronomical data, including observations gathered by the European Southern Observatory, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the Subaru Telescope, and ESA’s Gaia satellite.
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Scientists have accidentally discovered details about a "very exciting" planet orbiting a nearby star system, which is thought to contain more water than Earth.... ...It orbits a sun-like star around 50 light years away from us that is visible with the naked eye, has a mild atmospheric temperature and appears to contain a large amount of water. Researchers already knew that the planet was there because previous studies of the star, called Nu2 Lupi, showed that it had three planets orbiting it called b, c, and d. ...Using Cheops, researchers determined that planet d has a radius 2.5 times bigger...
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About 41 light-years from Earth is an exoplanet that lost one atmosphere but has seemingly gained a new one. Scientists also believe the planet, known as GJ 1132 b, has evolved quite drastically from a gaseous world to a rocky one the size of Earth... ...Pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at GJ 1132 b revealed a surprise. The telescope showed that the planet has developed a toxic and hazy "secondary atmosphere" made of hydrogen, methane, hydrogen cyanide and a haze of aerosol, like the smog we have on Earth. So how did this poisonous atmosphere come to be?
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The first planet to be discovered outside our solar system isn't a planet at all, and may be a giant dust cloud created by the collision of two icy asteroids, a study finds. Twelve years ago, astronomers spotted what they thought was a Saturn-like planet in the Fomalhaut star system 25 light years from Earth, and called it Fomalhaut b. But now researchers from the University of Arizona claim the visible and infrared images of the 'planet' captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were actually of a cosmic collision. The team studied the images in more detail and found they...
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A new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet orbiting a star beyond the Sun... the planet's surface may resemble those of Earth's Moon or Mercury: The planet likely has little to no atmosphere and could be covered in the same cooled volcanic material found in the dark areas of the Moon's surface, called mare. Discovered in 2018 by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS) mission, planet LHS 3844b is located 48.6 light-years from Earth and has a radius 1.3 times that of Earth. It orbits...
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Earth's nearest neighbours have turned into uninhabitable hellholes. Understanding their transformation will teach us which rocky exoplanets might be fit for life CLOSE to the sun lie a pair of sizzling coals. You could be forgiven for thinking these strange worlds were two circles of hell: Mercury, a black and blasted plain, and Venus, a sweltering world beset by rain of pure acid. But for all the terror of their outward appearance, their insides are remarkably familiar. Along with Earth and Mars, they form the solar system’s only rocky planets, a stark contrast to the bloated gas giants that make...
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For almost a decade, astronomers have tried to explain why so many pairs of planets outside our solar system have an odd configuration—their orbits seem to have been pushed apart by a powerful unknown mechanism. Yale researchers say they've found a possible answer, and it implies that the planets' poles are majorly tilted. NASA's Kepler mission revealed that about 30% of stars similar to our Sun harbor "Super-Earths." Their sizes are somewhere between that of Earth and Neptune; they have nearly circular and coplanar orbits; and it takes them fewer than 100 days to go around their star. Yet curiously,...
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Teaming up to explore the galaxy with an AI assist. First light for TESS. This is the ifrst science image taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. NASA/MIT/TESS ==================================================================== The researchers at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) in Mountain View California just spent the summer working on out-of-this-world problems. They came from all over the globe and all different disciplines; computer science engineers, planetary scientists, even a particle physicist. For eight weeks they dug through data and maps, created worlds and atmospheres, sorted them, and tested their computer algorithms against the simulations. Their final products are still rough,...
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Star Trek’s Spock comes from the planet Vulcan, which of course doesn’t exist. But new research might give us the next best thing—an exoplanet orbiting the real-life star that Vulcan is said to be orbiting in the Star Trek universe. In 1991, Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter to Sky & Telescope about what kind of star the planet Vulcan was likely to orbit. In that letter, he specifically picks out one such star, 40 Eridani. Later, 40 Eridani became the canon Vulcan star system featured in a handful of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.
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Scientists have shown that water is likely to be a major component of those exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) which are between two to four times the size of Earth. It will have implications for the search of life in our Galaxy. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in Boston. The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission...
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The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars. The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands...
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One month after its launch, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has sent back an initial test image that shows more than 200,000 stars in the southern sky. TESS’ image was taken by one of its cameras with a two-second exposure. The picture is centered on the constellation Centaurus, with the edge of the dark Coalsack Nebula at upper right and the star Beta Centauri prominent along the lower edge. The picture provides only a hint of what TESS will be seeing once it starts delivering science-quality images next month. When all four wide-field cameras are in operation, TESS’ images...
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Despite being only 4.3 light-years away from Earth, the trio of stars comprising Alpha Centauri still holds a lot of mysteries. It being the closest star system to us, you'd think we'd have teased out most of its secrets by now, but in fact we're still learning basic stuff about it. We know some of the basics, of course. The system has two stars that orbit each other in a binary, one of which (called Alpha Centauri A) is much like the Sun and the other (Alpha Cen B) is a tad smaller and cooler. Nearby is a third star,...
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From blob-like jellyfish to rock-like lichens, our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognise some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. ‘The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,’ said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. ‘The question is,...
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the...
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Astronomers monitoring the Kepler space telescope have detected nearly 1,300 planets flying in orbit around distant stars, a cosmic search that began nearly 10 years ago inside a rusty old telescope dome at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose. From the size and orbits of the new-found “exoplanets,” the astronomers said at least 550 could be rocky planets much like Earth, and at least nine are orbiting at just the right distance from their stars to lie inside their “habitable zones” where temperatures would be just right for liquid water, the one ingredient essential for life to...
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