NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a “super-Earth” planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.
Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was able to detect a super Earth’s direct light for the first time …
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds. Recent finds include planets with double suns, massive “super-Earths” and “hot Jupiters,” and a miniature solar system. The variety of planets circling distant suns is as wonderful as it is surprising.
Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds. As the numbers mount, it seems to …
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun.
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region around a star where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require … Read the rest of this article
The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth.
Read the rest of this article
An artist’s concept of Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively …
Astronomers have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds are probably outcasts from developing planetary systems and, moreover, they could be twice as numerous as the stars themselves.
“Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected,” said … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers have come up with a new way of identifying close, faint stars with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite. The technique should help in the hunt for planets that lie beyond our solar system, because nearby, hard-to-see stars could very well be home to the easiest-to-see alien planets.
Read the rest of this article
This artist’s concept illustrates a young, red dwarf star surrounded by three …
NASA’s Kepler Mission has released 43 days of science data on more than 156,000 stars. These stars are being monitored for subtle brightness changes as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like planets outside of our solar system.
Astronomers will use the new data to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for brightness variations in several hundred stars. These stars … Read the rest of this article
|
|
The Corot satellite strikes again with another fascinating planet discovery. This time, the newly discovered gas giant planet may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.
Very few planets are temperate enough to allow the presence of … Read the rest of this article
|
|
January 14, 2010: The premiere observatory of the next decade, the James Webb Space Telescope, will launch in 2014 in search of “big game”–namely, the first stars and galaxies ever formed in our Universe. But the “little game” could turn out to be just as interesting. There’s a dawning awareness among … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
|
The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
|
|
Aurora Oval
(Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
|
