planets

"Super-Earth" planets are giant-size versions of Earth, and some research has suggested that they're more likely to be habitable than Earth-size worlds. But a new study reveals how difficult it would be for any aliens on these exoplanets to explore space. To launch the equivalent of an Apollo moon mission, ...

Known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short, the futuristic spacecraft will venture out into the cosmos to discover potentially life-harboring planets. TESS lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and separated from it rocket ride after a 49 minute launch. TESS is taking over ...

Uranus is one of the solar system's most mysterious planets. Scientists had long believed that the "ice giant" world has clouds of hydrogen sulfide, a compound that smells bad to people, but they couldn't be certain. New telescope observations confirm the planet is clouded by the chemical. The discovery ...

The hunt for planets beyond our Solar System has led to the discovery of thousands of candidates in the past few decades. Most of these have been gas giants that range in size from being Super-Jupiters to Neptune-sized planets. However, several have also been determined to be “Earth-like” in nature, ...

NASA has put a new set of eyes in space to search for other worlds. The Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite, or TESS, had countless earthly eyes full of excitement following its launch, including Rutgers physics professor Saurabh Jha. “It's a great leap forward in our ability to understand planets outside ...

It is this debris that eventually coalesced into our current lineup of planets. The Almahata Sitta meteorite is the first evidence of this early stage. “What we're claiming here is that we have in our hands a remnant of this first generation of planets that are missing today because they were destroyed or ...

With all that extra room, hopefully, EDEN ISS will clarify how to expand space farming beyond orbits, onto other planets, says Anna-Lisa Paul, who is also a space biologist at the University of Florida. Learning how to set up and operate a greenhouse in Antarctica, the researchers say, should be good ...

MIDDLETOWN — A. Meredith Hughes, assistant professor of astronomy at Wesleyan University, has received a Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The money will allow her to develop an alternative method for assessing the presence of extra-solar planets by ...

Look up at the night sky. If you did that in the early 1980s, you might have speculated. You might have guessed. But you wouldn't have been certain if planets existed beyond our solar system. At the time, NASA's Kepler mission was just an idea from scientist Bill Borucki. But after the mission launched in ...

But an international team led by UC Santa Barbara physicist Benjamin Mazin has developed a new instrument to detect planets around the nearest stars. It is the world's largest and most advanced superconducting camera. The team's work appears in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of ...

When astronomers looking for new exoplanets planets gaze up at the tranquil night sky and wish upon a star, they're really just wishing those stars would get the hell out of the way. That's because, when it comes to looking for planets, light can be the enemy. Starlight tends to totally wash out the planets, ...

When it comes to searching for life, we've usually assumed that all parts of our galaxy are equally likely contenders. Maybe not, according to Cardiff University astronomers Jane Greaves and Phil Cigan, who presented some new findings at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in ...

The dusty disks around these stars harbor planetismals, which are essentially baby planets, the ESO reports. The stars, located between 230 to 550 light-years away, create some seriously distinct shapes. Some are oddly reminiscent of that old Windows Media Player visualization called “Dance of the ...

Specifically, the disks are seen around nearby young stars and contain gas, dust, and planetesimals which combine to form developing planets. Researchers have observed a remarkable variety of these disks, differing in size, shape and structure, according to a statement from ESO. [The Strangest Alien ...

Next week, NASA is launching its new exoplanet hunter: a satellite that will stare out at the cosmos searching for never-before-seen worlds. Dubbed TESS, the spacecraft is tasked with looking for planets circling around stars outside of our Solar System to help scientists figure out what these planets are ...

Kepler's thousands of discoveries revolutionized our understanding of planets and planetary systems. Now, however, the spacecraft is nearly out of its hydrazine fuel and will end its fantastic life sometime in the next few months. Luckily for planet hunters, NASA's upcoming TESS mission is waiting in the ...

LIVERPOOL, U.K.—Alpha Centauri, a three-star system just 4 light-years away that is the sun's nearest neighbor, ought to be a great place to look for Earth-like planets. But last week, at a meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) here, astronomers lamented the way the system has thwarted ...

For centuries, human beings have wondered about the possibility of other Earths orbiting distant stars. Perhaps some of these alien worlds would harbor strange forms of life or have unique and telling histories or futures. But it was only in 1995 that astronomers spotted the first planets orbiting sunlike stars outside of our ...

Researchers have developed a new technique that uses artificial intelligence to classify planets and, in turn, determine whether life may exist on other worlds. The new technique uses so-called artificial neural networks, known as ANNs, to classify planets, based on whether they resemble present-day Earth ...