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Paris (AFP) - The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say. The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost. Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some as the most distant planet from the Sun. In a study published in the latest issue of the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers propose that "at...

Presently, our solar system is known to contain 4 fully-fledged rocky worlds: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars; 2 ice-giants: Neptune and Uranus; 2 gas-giants, Saturn and Neptune; 5 dwarf-planets, Ceres. Pluto, Eris, MakeMake, Haumea; around 100 moons; and an unknowable number of comets, asteroids and minor planets. Indeed, we’ve only begun to understand the full scope of our local corner of our galaxy, and new information emerges on a monthly-basis, yet there a number of seemingly obvious things that remain unknown. For instance, long before Pluto’s existence was deduced, astronomers scoured the outer solar system in search of another large...

To find out, scientists turned to chemistry. Here on Earth, about one in every 3,000 molecules of water is made with a deuterium atom instead of a hydrogen atom. A deuterium atom is similar to a hydrogen atom except that its nucleus contains a proton and a neutron, instead of a lone proton. (Both atoms also contain a single electron.) That makes deuterium twice as heavy as hydrogen, which is why water molecules made with deuterium atoms (HDO) are known as “heavy water.” At the time that our sun was born, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen throughout the universe...

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A strange ribbon of energy and particles at the edge of the solar system first spotted by a NASA spacecraft appears to serve as a sort of "roadmap in the sky" for the interstellar magnetic field, scientists say. By comparing ground-based studies and in-space observations of solar system's mysterious energy ribbon, which was first discovered by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) in 2009, scientists are learning more details about the conditions at the solar system's edge. The study also sheds light into the sun's environment protects the solar system from high-energy cosmic rays. The ribbon is roughly perpendicular to the...

When a person thinks about light, usually the first thing that will come to mind is the sun. We have been taught that the sun is the center of the solar system and thus it is the light of the world. This ball of fire that life on earth depends upon, is so massive in size that it contains 99.85% of all the matter in the Solar System, or 332,800 times that of earth. The distance from earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles, which would take you 71 years to travel going 150 mph. The sun creates energy...

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Our solar system is four and a half billion years old, but its formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan. Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that tick at different paces, according to how far back one looks. Nuclear clocks, used for dating, are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, the time it takes for half of...

For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots – a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles. In the new observations, which are the first to glimpse the Uranian aurora with an Earth-based telescope, the researchers detected the luminous spots twice on the dayside of Uranus – the...

Jupiter might be having a change of heart. Literally. New simulations suggest that Jupiter's rocky core has been liquefying, melting, and mixing with the rest of the planet's innards. With this new data, astronomers hope to better explain a recent puzzling discovery of a strange planet outside of our solar system. "It's a really important piece of the puzzle of trying to figure out what's going on inside giant planets," said Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not affiliated with the research. Conventional planetary formation theory has modeled Jupiter as a set...

The moon maybe palely alone in the night sky today but according to scientists it is possible that the there was a second, smaller moon 4.4 billion years ago. A paper published in the journal Nature theorized that there was a smaller moon created in the same impact that created the moon. Astronomers, Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz have long wondered why the moon had two incongruous sides, one smooth with flat plains and another side full of rugged mountains and craters. The astronomers started thinking that the mountainous region had been...

Life as we know it exists on a cozy planet in a stable orbit around a sun shining brightly in its sky. But a new study hints that the most common life in the universe might exist deep inside eternal-night worlds far from any star, adrift in the icy dark of interstellar space. Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University estimate that "nomad" planets, ejected from their home stellar system and now free-floating through the Milky Way, could outnumber stars by as many as 100,000 to 1. Earlier estimates were more like a...

With all the attention that astronomers have lavished on old Sol over the centuries, you'd think that by now they'd know its diameter to, oh, 10 or 12 significant digits. During the past 40 years, astronomers have attempted to measure the Sun's sizedozens of times using various methods. The dashed line corresponds to a radius of 696,000 km, the value most often used. While the Sun's girth has indeed been measured dozens of times over the past 40 years, the results haven't converged on a single value and scatter by as much as ± 0.1%. One big reason is that,...

Lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan don’t do the wave very well. Radar images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show glassy smooth surfaces, even on bodies like Ligeia Mare, a large sea roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles) wide. There are patterns on the shoreline of the southern hemisphere's Ontario Lacus that might be from waves, but the features aren’t definitive. Winds haven’t been too high on Titan since Cassini first arrived in Saturn's system in 2004, so the lack of waves is odd but understandable. The ESA’s Huygens probe sent back amazing surface images, including snapshots of delta-looking features, when it made...

Most stars are born in clusters rather than singly, and there’s plenty of evidence that the Sun was too. For one thing, the material of the infant solar system (as preserved in the earliest meteorites) was enriched by fresh supernova debris from at least one very young, massive star (having 15 to 25 solar masses) that exploded less than 5 light-years away, no more than 2 million years after the Sun's formation. Today no such massive star exists within 300 light-years of the Sun. Clearly, the early solar system had stars close around it. But that was 4.57 billion years...

When squeezed to pressures and temperatures like those inside giant planets, water molecules are less squeezable than anticipated, defying a set of decades-old equations used to describe watery behavior over a range of conditions. Studying how molecules behave in such environments will help scientists better understand the formation and composition of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune, as well as those being spotted in swarms by planet hunters. The new work, which appears in the March 2 Physical Review Letters, also suggests that textbooks about planetary interiors and magnetic fields may need reworking. “At this point, it’s worth putting together...

NASA / GSFC: Using the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), NASA has sampled the galactic wind that has traveled from outside our solar system. Four types of atoms were found to be different from what we have in our Solar System.

Closest approach to be 3:28 PST Tuesday afternoon.

Quit snickering! Something on Uranus has erupted and now scientists are all in a tizzy about what and why it might be.The news is exciting for a number of reasons. The simplest being we know very little about Uranus, mostly due to its incredible distance form Earth and because it's, well, frankly one of the more "boring" planets out there.But now, apparently, it's amazing again, all because of a mystery explosion in its atmosphere. Why is the explosion important? Mostly because Uranus's unique axis (on its side), amongst other things:"The reason we care about the clouds on the planet Uranus...

If Uranus was not tilted in one blow, as is commonly thought, but rather was bumped in at least two smaller collisions, there is a much higher probability of seeing its moons orbit in the direction we observe. By European Planetary Science Congress, AAS Division for Planetary Science — Uranus’ highly tilted axis makes it something of an oddball in our solar system. The accepted wisdom is that Uranus was knocked on its side by a single large impact, but new research rewrites our theories of how Uranus became so tilted and also solves fresh mysteries about the position and...