Space and astronomy news
Image credit: PPARC Astronomers from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council believe they’ve discovered a planetary system around Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Not only that, the star system seems remarkably similar to our own Solar System. So far, they’ve found evidence for a Neptune-sized planet in the same orbit …
Image credit: ESA The European Space Agency is working on a new mission that could be able to detect moons orbiting planets in other star systems. In 2008, the ESA will launch Eddington, which will detect the drop in light as planets as small as Mars pass in front of their parent stars. Astronomers should …
Continue reading “Searching for Moons Around Distant Planets”
An Earth-like planet could come together from a cloud of dust in as short as 3 million years according to a new report from researchers in Florida and Michigan. By studying the pre-planetary disks that form around other stars, the astronomers noticed that the disks form around young stars when they’re 1 million years old, …
Continue reading “Some Planets Could Form In Just 3 Million Years”
A new study has examined all the rocky planets around red dwarf stars and determined that “water worlds” are as common as “Earth-like” rocky planets.
TESS recently discovered a three-planet system orbiting a red dwarf star 35 light years away, increasing the number of rocky planets orbiting nearby stars.
NASA’s InSight lander will launch in May 2018, NASA has announced. InSight will study the interior structure of Mars to learn how it, and other rocky planets, formed and evolved.
The iron meteorites whizzing around the Solar System are probably remnants of objects that helped form the Earth and the other rocky planets. When they fall down to Earth, scientists get an opportunity to study some of the primordial building blocks of our planet. Although many of the Solar System’s asteroids are found in the asteroid belt, they probably emerged out of the same disk of planetary debris that formed the Earth, and then drifted out to their current location.
Our Sun can flare up from time to time, but probably nothing like the superflares it created in its early days. According to new observations by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory of a nursery of young stars in the Orion Nebula, young stars can produce flares on an incredible scale – many times greater than anything we’d see on the Sun today. Surprisingly, these flares might force rocky planets to keep their distance from their parent star, preventing them from spiraling in to their destruction.
Both Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope have provided astronomers with a view of planetary systems forming around other stars similar to our own Sun. Hubble viewed a young star, only 50 to 250 million years old, which could have gas giants, but its rocky planets would still be forming. This could be a view into what our Solar System looked like when it was first forming. Spitzer found 6 much older stars with planetary disks; closer to 4 billion years old, which is the age of our Sun. These stars are known to have gas giants, and probably have rocky planets as well.
A team of European astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS Instrument to find the smallest extrasolar planet ever discovered; it’s believed to be only 14 times the mass of the Earth. The planet orbits a star called mu Arae every 9.5 days, which is located 50 light-years away in the southern constellation of the Altar. A planet this size lies right at the boundary between rocky planets and gas giants. But since it’s so close to its parent star, it’s probably rocky, with a relatively small atmosphere, so it would be classified as a “super Earth”.