Space and astronomy news
[/caption] Everyone is familiar with the fact that the moon changes phases. But what many don’t know is that planets also go through phases. Shown above are the phases for Venus. We look inwards on Venus from a more distant vantage point in our solar system, but in principle, planets in other solar systems would …
[/caption] Once again news from the Kepler mission is making the rounds, this time with a research paper outlining a theory that Earth-like planets may be more common around class F, G and K stars than originally expected. In the standard stellar classification scheme, these type of stars are similar or somewhat similar to our …
Continue reading “How Common are Terrestrial, Habitable Planets Around Sun-Like Stars?”
[/caption] Hip-hip hooray for citizen scientists! The first two exoplanet candidates have been identified by members of the public through the citizen science project Planet Hunters. The project, which began in December 2010, uses public archive data from the planet-hunting Kepler mission, and excitingly, the planets were found within the first month after the project …
Continue reading “Big Find: Citizen Scientists Discover Two Extrasolar Planets”
[/caption] Yesterday astronomers with the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, announced a record-breaking discovery of more than fifty new exoplanets. This is the largest batch of confirmed extra solar planets ever announced at once. Another reason the discovery is noteworthy is that sixteen of the planets that were detected fall under the …
[/caption] “I love rocky road… So won’t you buy another gallon, baby…” Yeah. We all love rocky road ice cream, but what do stars like to snack on? In the case of the white dwarf star it would appear that a rocky body – similar to Earth – could be a preferred blend. At one …
[/caption] In planet hunting today, there seems to be one burning question that nearly every new article published touches on: Where did these planets come from? As astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planets, it quickly became obvious that the formation theories that we’d built on our own solar system were only part of the …
Continue reading “Rocky, Low-Mass Planet Discovered by Microlensing”
[/caption] Today at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston, the Kepler team announced the confirmation of a new rocky planet in orbit around Kepler-10. Dubbed Kepler-10c, this planet is described as a “scorched, molten Earth.” 2.2 times the radius of Earth, Kepler-10c orbits its star every 45 days. Both it and its smaller, previously-discovered …
[/caption] With the Kepler spacecraft finding over 1,200 planetary candidates, the next step is verifying their actual status. That will be a big job, but help is on the way. In April 2012, a new spectrograph called HARPS-North will come online to help confirm and characterize Kepler’s planetary candidates. It will be mounted on the …
Continue reading “More Help on the Way for Verifying ExoPlanets in Kepler’s Dataset”
[/caption] With the startling new finding of dozens of Earth-sized extrasolar planets, NASA’s Kepler planet hunting space telescope has just revolutionized our understanding of Earths place in the Universe and the search for Extraterrestrial Life. And the historic science discovery is based on data collected in just the first few months of operation of the …
Continue reading “Kepler Discovers First Earth Sized Planets inside Habitable Zone”
[/caption] NASA’s Kepler planet hunting space telescope has made an historic discovery by finding its first rocky planet – and it’s simultaneously the smallest planet ever found beyond our solar system. The exoplanet, dubbed Kepler-10b, measures barely 1.4 times the diameter of Earth and orbits its star in less than one earth day. Therefore the …
Continue reading “Kepler Discovers Its Smallest and First Rocky Planet”