Space and astronomy news
When you walk across your lawn or down the street, you move on the surface of a surprisingly layered world. Some of those layers are rock, others are molten. A surprising amount of water is mixed into those layers, as well. It turns out that most planets have more of it “deep down” than we imagined.
Continue reading “There’s More Water Inside Planets Than We Thought”
What is the true definition of a planet, and could there be a more refined definition in the future? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated the potential for a new definition of a “planet”. This study holds the potential to challenge the longstanding definition outlined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which established IAU Resolution B5 in 2006, resulting in demoting Pluto from a “planet” to a “dwarf planet”.
Continue reading “Officially, Only the Sun Can Have Planets. Is it Time to Fix the Definition of “Planet”?”
The three-body problem is one of Nature’s thorniest problems. The gravitational interactions and resulting movements of three bodies are notoriously difficult to predict because of instability. A planet orbiting two stars is an example of the three-body problem, but it’s sometimes called a “restricted three-body problem.” In that case, there are some potential stable orbits for a planet.
A new study shows that the nearby Alpha Centauri AB pair could host a Super Jupiter in a stable orbit.
Continue reading “Alpha Centauri Could Have a Super Jupiter in Orbit”
There’s no perfect way of doing anything, including searching for exoplanets. Every planet-hunting method has some type of bias. We’ve found most exoplanets using the transit method, which is biased toward larger planets. Larger planets closer to their stars block more light, meaning we detect large planets transiting in front of their stars more readily than we detect small ones.
That’s a problem because some research says that life-supporting planets are more likely to be small, like Earth. It’s all because of moons and streaming instability.
Continue reading “If We Want To Find Life-Supporting Worlds, We Should Focus on Small Planets With Large Moons”
Does another undetected planet languish in our Solar System’s distant reaches? Does it follow a distant orbit around the Sun in the murky realm of comets and other icy objects? For some researchers, the answer is “almost certainly.”
Continue reading “New Evidence for Our Solar System’s Ghost: Planet Nine”
Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is challenging. Millions of objects of wildly different masses interacted for billions of years, seeking natural stability. But its history—including the migration of the giant planets—explains what we see today in our Solar System and maybe in other, distant solar systems.
New research shows that giant planet migration began shortly after the Solar System formed.
Continue reading “The Giant Planets Migrated Between 60-100 Million Years After the Solar System Formed”
There’s a population of planets that drifts through space untethered to any stars. They’re called rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs.) Some FFPs form as loners, never having enjoyed the company of a star. But most are ejected from solar systems somehow, and there are different ways that can happen.
One researcher set out to try to understand the FFP population and how they came to be.
rogue
That stars can eat planets is axiomatic. If a small enough planet gets too close to a large enough star, the planet loses. Its fate is sealed.
New research examines how many stars eat planets. Their conclusion? One in twelve stars has consumed at least one planet.
Continue reading “One in Twelve Stars Ate a Planet”
In the 1960s, NASA engineers developed a series of small lifting-body aircraft that could be dropped into the atmosphere of a giant planet, measuring the environment as they glided down. Although it would be a one-way trip to destruction, the form factor would allow a probe to glide around in different atmospheric layers, gathering data and transmitting it back to a parent satellite. An updated version of the 1960s design is being tested at NASA now, and a drop-test flight from a helicopter is scheduled for this month.
Continue reading “Improving a 1960s Plan to Explore the Giant Planets”
Planets orbit stars. That’s axiomatic. Or at least it was until astronomers started finding rogue planets, also called free-floating planets (FFPs). Some of these planets were torn from their stars’ gravitational grip and now drift through the cosmos, untethered to any star. Others formed in isolation.
Now, astronomers have discovered that some FFPs can orbit each other in binary relationships as if swapping their star for another rogue planet.
Continue reading “Radio Telescope Confirms Free-Floating Binary Planets in the Orion Nebula”