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The planet, according to a study published online Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is unlike anything in our own solar system. Eleven times more massive than Jupiter, planet HD 106906 b orbits a single sun-like star at a distance of 60 billion miles - about 650 times the distance Earth is from our own sun. "This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said study coauthor Vanessa Bailey, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona.

Washington: In an encouraging sign of life beyond earth, Nasa scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. Though the presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exo-planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds, Nasa said. The strengths of their water signatures varied, it said. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the other three planets, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b,...

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

KOI-351 is “the first system with a significant number of planets (not just two or three, where random fluctuations can play a role) that shows a clear hierarchy like the solar system — with small, probably rocky, planets in the interior and gas giants in the (exterior),” Dr. Juan Cabrera, of the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center, told Universe Today.

You may have thought that NASA's Kepler spacecraft was finished. Well, think again. A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again. A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler's search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae. In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft, ending new data collection for the original mission. The spacecraft required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of...

A quiet milestone in modern astronomy may soon come to pass. As of today, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia lists a current tally of 998 extrasolar planets across 759 planetary systems. And although various tabulations differ slightly, very soon we should be living in an era where over one thousand exoplanets are known. The history of exoplanet discovery has paralleled the course of the modern age of astronomy. It’s strange to think that a generation has already grown up over the past two decades in a world where knowledge of extrasolar planets is a given. I remember hearing of the promise...

In 1995 the simultaneous discovery of extrasolar planets – planets orbiting stars other than the sun and brown dwarfs bigger than giant planets but smaller than stars – revolutionized astronomy. But no existing telescope is large enough to show details on exoplanets and brown dwarfs: we can only see them as faint points of light... In October 2012 we turned both the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth at 18,000 miles per hour, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which drifts in space 100 million miles away, to precisely the same target to try something new. Our target was a brown...

Today everybody wants to talk about it (exoplanets) and write about it. There’s a lot of hype. But back then it was very quiet. There was a huge amount of skepticism too. People don’t like change. I want you to imagine a world where the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are very far from the star and the terrestrial planets like Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are very close to the star. People had constructed theories on how planetary bodies form based on that one example. So when the first planets around sun-like stars were found, they were Jupiter-mass...

All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun, Petigura said. But the team’s analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun. ... If the stars in the Kepler field are representative of stars in the solar neighborhood, then the nearest (Earth-size) planet is expected to orbit a star that is less than 12 light-years from Earth and can be seen by the unaided eye. Future instrumentation to image and take spectra of these Earths need only...

Explanation: Even though Kepler-78b is only slightly larger than the Earth, it should not exist. Its size is extraordinary only in the sense that it is the most similar in size to the Earth of any exoplanet yet directly discovered. Its orbit, however, is extraordinary in the sense that it circles a Sun-like star 40 times closer than planet Mercury. At such a scathing distance, even rock is liquid. Models of planet formation predict that no planet can form in such a close orbit, and models of planet evolution predict that Kepler-78b's orbit should decay -- dooming the planet to...

Happy 50th birthday to the telescope that brought us the first map of Venus, revealed ice on Mercury, and more. When Cornell University built the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico -- near the equator, so it could observe the planets without needing to move its 1,000-foot-wide reflector -- people hadn't even set foot on the moon yet. They wouldn't for another six years. Since its construction, Arecibo has contributed to generations of astronomy. Researchers first set its radar and radio instruments to discover basics, such as the speed of Mercury and Venus' rotations and the surface features of the moon...

Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues set out to determine the amount of iron in the early solar system. To do so, they measured nickel-60, a decay product of iron-60, in eight meteorites known to have formed at different times during the first 3 million years of the solar system. The meteorites that formed more than about a million years after the start of the solar system contain significantly more nickel-60 than do those that formed earlier, the team found. In a neighborhood of young stars, only a supernova could have produced iron-60, the parent of...

HD 209458b, shown in red in an artist's conception, is the first confirmed "cometary planet," experts say. Image courtesy G. Bacon, NASA/ESAAn alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail, astronomers announced Thursday. (Related: "Odd Star Sheds Comet-like Tail.") About 153 light-years from Earth, planet HD 209458b hugs its star so tightly that the planet's atmosphere is likely a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius) an a year passes in just 3.5 days—making Mercury's 88-day orbit seem downright leisurely.That tight orbit also means this gas giant—meaning...

Front Page > Science & Space Pluto Mission Takes Aim at Last Unvisited PlanetBrian HandwerkNational Geographic News February 15, 2005 Amateur astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto 75 years ago this week. The last planet found in our solar system remains the only one never visited by an Earth probe—but NASA's New Horizons mission hopes that distinction won't last much longer. "We're planning on a launch in January of 2006," said program executive Kurt Lindstrom from NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters. "This year we are assembling [the spacecraft] and beginning testing." If the mission launches on time, the craft would reach...

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes. It was identified from its faint and unique heat signature by the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) wide-field survey telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Follow-up observations using other telescopes in Hawaii show that it has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets found orbiting around young stars. And yet PSO...

This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago -- a newborn in planet lifetimes.

Kepler 7-b was one of the first five planets to be confirmed by the Kepler spacecraft. Orbiting just 5.6 million miles (9 million km) from its host star in the constellation Lyra, the planet sizzles with a surface temperature between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees F (815-980 degrees C). While that’s twice as hot as our solar system’s scorcher planet Venus, scientists were puzzled why Kepler-7b wasn’t even hotter given how close it is to its sun. Kepler tracked the hot world through its moon-like phases for more than three years to create a rough map that showed a bright spot...

With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the Sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space. Interplanetary spacecraft often use a maneuver called a gravity assist in order to reach their targets. Voyager 2 famously used gravity assists to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the late 1970s and 1980s. Cassini used two assists at Venus and one each at Earth and...

After a year roaming the surface of Mars, NASA has failed to find any evidence that its atmosphere is supporting life, it was revealed today. The Curiosity rover currently scanning the Red Planet has not detected any methane, a gas that is produced by living things. Since landing in Gale Crater last year, every morning and evening the car-size probe has analyzed Mars’ air and scanned it with a tiny laser in search of the greenhouse gas. Not finding it means that it is unlikely that microbes capable of producing the gas are living below the planet’s surface, scientists said...