Kepler Error Means Possible End To High-Accuracy Observations
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA announced on Wednesday that its Kepler spacecraft was sitting in safe mode once again, possibly putting an end to its high-accuracy observations. Kepler went into a...
Latest Planetary systems Stories
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The field of exoplanet research – the study of planets outside of our solar system – has exploded in the last decade as new instruments have come online that have dramatically increased our ability to find new worlds. Perhaps the most important player in the game is the Kepler mission. It primarily works by analyzing stars in our galaxy and looking for tiny changes in a star’s brightness. As a planet passes in front...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One commonly used method in astronomy is to study spectra and light curves from stars and compare the data to known values, allowing researchers to derive information such as chemical composition, size, and surface temperature. The trouble with this method is it only works on stars that are bright enough or close enough to study in detail. Unfortunately, this precludes nearly three-quarters of the stellar population, which...
WASHINGTON, April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel space observatory has snapped images of a dust belt orbiting a subgiant star that hosts a planetary system. The space observatory's sensitive far-infrared detection helped astronomers resolve bright emission around Kappa Coronae Borealis, indicating the presence of a dusty debris disc. The star is a little heavier than our own Sun at 1.5 solar masses, is around 2.5 billion years old, and sits...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers has made the most detailed examination to date of the atmosphere around a Jupiter-like exoplanet using the Keck Observatory, one of the two largest optical telescopes in the world. The young exoplanet, orbiting the star HR 8799, has water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere. It does not, however, have methane, suggesting that a particular planet-forming mechanism, known as core accretion, brought...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research from Carnegie Institution for Science looks at how gas giants similar to Jupiter and Saturn formed and evolved. Using theoretical modeling, lead researcher Alan Boss provides clues that gas giants may form in the presence of gas disks that surround stars in their infancy. The work was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. By observing young stars that are surrounded by gas disks, Boss demonstrated that...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Another new planetary system has been discovered by Kepler scientists, and this one happens to be home to the smallest planet ever discovered, circling around a star that is strikingly similar to our Sun. The Kepler-37 system sits about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Only slightly larger than our moon, smaller than Mercury, and about a third the size of Earth, one of its planets is the smallest ever identified by...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of...
[ Listen to the Podcast: “How Planets Form” With Guest Dr. Eric Mamajek (Part 1): Your Universe Today Podcasts ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Subaru Telescope has helped astronomers capture the first vivid infrared image of a distant planet forming from a young star. Astronomers wrote in Astrophysical Journal Letters about an image of a curved arm of dust extending over a hole on a disk, which is a feature that could provide evidence that there are...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Finding planets outside of our own Solar System has become a bit of a hot topic in the scientific community, and the enthusiasm behind the discovery of "Earth-like" planets has been on the rise, but a new study suggests we may want to tone down our excitement a bit. A new study led by Dr. Helmut Lammer of the Space Research Institute (IWF) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences says that maybe these "Earth-like" planets may not be so...
Latest Planetary systems Reference Libraries
Cosmogony -- Cosmogony is the study of the origins of celestial objects. It is most commonly used to refer to the study of the origin of the solar system. Currently, the most widely accepted theory is that the solar system was formed roughly 5 billion years ago with the collapse of a nebula of gas and dust, likely caused by shock waves generated by a nearby supernova. The solar system would have formed as a member of a star cluster, now long-since dispersed throughout the Milky Way...
Solar Nebula -- In astronomy, the solar nebula is the gaseous cloud from which, in the so-called nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, the Sun and planets formed by condensation. In 1755 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that a nebula in slow rotation, gradually pulled together by its own gravitational force and flattened into a spinning disk, gave birth to the Sun and planets. A similar model, but with the planets being formed before the Sun, was proposed...
Extrasolar Planet -- An extrasolar planet is a planet orbiting around a star other than the Sun. Extrasolar planets were first discovered in the 1990s as a result of improved telescope technology, CCD and computer-based image processing which allowed far more accurate measurements of stellar motions. The first extrasolar planets were reported by the astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan in 1993, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Subsequent investigation has determined that they are only planets...
Asteroid Belt -- The Asteroid belt is a region of the solar system falling roughly between the planets Mars and Jupiter where the greatest concentration of asteroid orbits can be found. It is believed that, during the first million years of the solar system history, planets formed by accretion of planetesimals. Ripetute collisions led to the familiar rocky planets and to the gas giant's cores. However, in this zone of the system the strong gravity of Jupiter inhibited the final stages...
Epsilon Eridani -- Epsilon Eridani is a main-sequence star in the constellation of Eridanus (the river). It is often used in science fiction because it is extremely sunlike, and in the fictional Star Trek universe it is the home sun of the planet Vulcan which is home to Mr. Spock. It is the third closest star visible without a telescope. It has 85% of the Sun's mass, almost that much of its diameter, and 28% of its luminosity. It is 10.5 light years from Earth. Its spectrum is...
