Latest Planetary systems Stories
The planet Mercury's magnetic field appears to be strong enough to fend off the harsh solar wind from most of its surface, according to data gathered in part by a University of Michigan instrument onboard NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.U-M's Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) on Jan. 14 took the first direct measurements of Mercury's magnetosphere to determine how the planet interacts with the space environment and the Sun.The solar wind, a stream of charged particles, fills the entire...
170 light-years away from earth exists a particularly puzzling orbiting object. This object, 2M1207B, seems to be physically impossible. Nothing about it matches any established astronomical theory. Eric Mamajek of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced in a press conference, "This is a strange enough object that it needs a strange explanation." During this press conference, the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, astronomers announced that 2M1207B might...
AUSTIN, Texas — A quartet of stars has been discovered in an intimate cosmic dance, swirling around each other within a region about the same as Jupiter's orbit around the sun. Astronomers say a gaseous disk might have once engulfed and pushed the stars into their tight orbits. Though bright, the stellar system was thought to be a single star dubbed BD -22°5866. Now, research presented here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society reveals the pinpoint...
What superficially resembles a giant moth floating in space is giving astronomers new insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems.This is not your typical flying insect. It has a wingspan of about 22 billion miles. The wing- like structure is actually a dust disk encircling the nearby, young star HD 61005, dubbed "The Moth." Its shape is produced by starlight scattering off dust.Dust disks around roughly 100-million-year-old stars like HD 61005 are typically flat,...
Astronomers, including one at The University of Arizona, have successfully predicted the existence of an unknown planet, the first since Neptune was predicted in the 1840s. This planet, however, is outside our own solar system, circling a star a little more than 200 light years from Earth.The UA's Rory Barnes and his associates predicted the unknown planet from their theoretical study of the orbits of two planets known to orbit star HD 74156. Barnes announced the discovery today at the...
The space-borne telescope, COROT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), has just completed its first year in orbit. The observatory has brought in surprises after over 300 days of scientific observations.Pioneering precision measurement over long periods of time COROT is observing a large number of stars, up to 12 000, simultaneously, at a very high precision - unprecedented in ground-based astronomy. The key to the high-precision is that the observations can be carried out over very...
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers a fascinating new insight into the atmosphere of a planet in orbit around another star. The observations provide evidence of the presence of hazes in the atmosphere of the planet HD 189733b.A team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to detect, for the first time, strong evidence of hazes in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star. The discovery comes after extensive observations made recently with...
Stars in our galaxy may often pump out waves of million-degree gas that make surrounding nebulas glow with x-rays. These new findings could shed light into how planetary systems form—including our own solar system, researchers said. Astrophysicists focused on the Orion Nebula, a cloud of dense and turbulent gas visible to the naked eye in the night sky, right below the belt of the constellation Orion. Four extremely bright and massive stars, called the Trapezium,...
PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers have announced the discovery of a fifth planet circling 55 Cancri, a star beyond our solar system. The star now holds the record for number of confirmed extrasolar planets orbiting in a planetary system. 55 Cancri is located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer and has nearly the same mass and age as our sun. It is easily visible with binoculars. Researchers discovered the fifth planet using the Doppler technique, in which a planet's gravitational tug...
Pack your bags because Goddard's "suitcase science" is taking off. Coming on the heels of two Lunar Sortie Science Opportunities (LSSO) awards for Goddard are two more, this time in the field of astrophysics. As before, the awards are funded by NASA Headquarters for studies that could result in simple, automated "suitcase science" instrument packages deployed on the lunar surface by astronauts. The first proposal, "Precision Lunar Laser Ranging", is being led by...
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...
