EXTRA SOLAR

2,688 articles

The Strange Orbits of 'Tatooine' Planetary Disks
Mar 20, 2020 (SPX)
In the last two decades, thousands of planets have been found orbiting stars other than our Sun. Some of these planets orbit two stars, just like Luke Skywalker...
Snapping A Space Shot
Mar 20, 2020 (SPX)
Over the last three decades astronomers have discovered more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. All but a few of these have been de...
Scientists have discovered the origins of the building blocks of life
Mar 17, 2020 (SPX)
Their study, which predicts what the earliest proteins looked like 3.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National...
ESO telescope observes exoplanet where it rains iron
Mar 12, 2020 (SPX)
"One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron," says David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland....
Observed: An exoplanet where it rains iron
Mar 12, 2020 (SPX)
With ESPRESSO (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations), astrophysicists have identified chemical variations between day...
New technique could elucidate earliest stages of planet's life
Mar 10, 2020 (SPX)
To study a very young planet called DS Tuc Ab a Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics-led team that included six Carnegie astronomers - Johanna Teske,...
Astronomers pinpoint rare binary brown dwarf
Mar 10, 2020 (SPX)
The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, was led by an international team of researchers, including scientists at the University of Birmingham, working on ...
Safety zone saves giant moons from fatal plunge
Mar 10, 2020 (SPX)
Astronomers believe that many of the moons we see in the Solar System, especially large moons, formed along with the parent planet. In this scenario, moons form...
Orbital tilt measurements in youngest planetary star system ever
Mar 10, 2020 (SPX)
"The discovery of DS Tuc Ab in 2019 gave us a unique opportunity to take measurements of a planet around a very young star very soon after the planet's formatio...
Cosmos: Possible Worlds
Mar 09, 2020 (SPX)
This season the emphasis is on storytelling and exploration of possible worlds outside earth. Humans throughout history have journeyed to environments that are ...
Is life a game of chance?
Mar 06, 2020 (SPX)
If there's one thing in the universe that is certain, it's that life exists. It must have begun at some point in time, somewhere. But despite all we know from b...
Hydrogen energy at the root of life
Mar 04, 2020 (SPX)
The starting point of such primitive metabolism of the first microbes is carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas. Microbes that live from these substances first convert...
Life on Titan cannot rely on cell membranes, according to computational simulations
Mar 03, 2020 (SPX)
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a dynamic surface, with seasonal rainfall, and lakes and seas at its polar regions, as well as a dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphe...
What if mysterious 'cotton candy' planets actually sport rings?
Mar 03, 2020 (SPX)
Super-puffs are notable for having exceptionally large radii for their masses--which would give them seemingly incredibly low densities. The adorably named bodi...
NASA approves development of universe-studying, planet-finding mission
Mar 03, 2020 (SPX)
The WFIRST space telescope will have a viewing area 100 times larger than that of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which will enable it to detect faint infrared s...
Large Exoplanet Could Have the Right Conditions for Life
Feb 28, 2020 (SPX)
A team from the University of Cambridge used the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b and determined that it's possible for the planet to ...
Astronomy student discovers 17 new planets, including Earth-sized world
Feb 28, 2020 (SPX)
Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid wa...
Salmon parasite is world's first non-oxygen breathing animal
Feb 26, 2020 (UPI)
Over the course of its evolution, the parasite abandoned breathing and consuming oxygen in order to produce more energy. "Aerobic respiration was thought to be ...
Sub-Neptune sized planet validated with the habitable-zone planet finder
Feb 21, 2020 (SPX)
The HPF provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby low-mass stars, and astronomers used it to validate the candidate pl...
Planet on edge of destruction in 18-hour year frenzy
Feb 21, 2020 (SPX)
It means that a single year for this hot Jupiter - a gas giant similar in size and composition to Jupiter in our own solar system - passes in less than a day of...
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