Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by astrobiologists at the Australian National University. In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets. “The universe […]
The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet – called Kepler-452b – in the “habitable zone” around a G2 star much like our own sun. The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. “On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet […]
Harvard-Smithsonian scientists speculate that little green men may not be “green” at all, and finding them might be a simple matter of looking for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of exoplanets. The remote analysis of distant planets for signs of pollution is discussed in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal and the scientists who […]
Discovered using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes, a brown dwarf star only 7.2 light years distant appears to be the coldest of its kind – as chilly as Earth’s North Pole. “It is very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close,” said Kevin […]
The two images at top reveal debris disks around young stars uncovered in archival images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The illustration beneath each image depicts the orientation of the debris disks.Using a new image processing technique, astronomers combing through data from the Hubble Space Telescope have identified five planetary disks around young stars […]
An international team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a new rocky planet the same size as Earth that could have liquid water on its surface. The potentially habitable planet, dubbed Kepler-186f, was discovered using data from NASA’s Kepler telescope and verified by the Gemini and Keck telescopes. “What makes this finding particularly compelling […]
Pivoting planets that lean one way and then change orientation within a relatively short time period might be surprisingly habitable. That’s according to NASA scientists who say the climate effects generated on these wobbling worlds could prevent them from turning into glacier-covered ice lockers, even if those planets are somewhat far from their stars. “Planets […]
2012 VP113, a newly discovered dwarf planet (pictured) in the distant Oort cloud region of our Solar System indicates the potential presence of an enormous as yet undiscovered planet, perhaps up to 10 times the size of Earth. Details of the discovery of 2012 VP113 and its intriguing orbital characteristics appear in Nature. Our Solar […]
For decades, astronomers have known that the atmospheres surrounding stars are often “polluted” with elements like carbon, silicon, and iron. How these elements came to be there has been an intriguing mystery that an international team of astronomers believe they have now solved. Led by Professor Martin Barstow, President-elect of the Royal Astronomical Society, the […]
Scientists have discovered that when tiny interplanetary dust particles are battered by the solar wind, the ion bombardment can free oxygen and hydrogen atoms from the dust, creating water molecules that can nurture microscopic life in space. The discovery, detailed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was made by researchers from the University […]
