When you look up at the stars, what do you think about? That we may be not be alone? The vastness of it all?
There’s a lot to wonder about space. The fact is we don’t know all the answers about it. We know it’s vast and beautiful, but we’re not reall…
Category: Planets
A super-Earth orbits a famous star not far from our sun
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Since the 1960s, scientists and exoplanet hunters have searched for evidence of planets orbiting one particular star. It’s called Barnard’s star and it’s only six light-years from our sun — a stone’s throw in a cosmic sense.
Now, an international team of astronomers has managed to discover a possible planet, known as a super-Earth, orbiting the star.
Published in the journal Nature this week, the discovery was made by a team at Hawaii’s W. M. Keck Observatory, using, among other instruments, the observatory’s High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES).
Artist’s impression of Barnard’s star planet under the orange tinted light from the star.
Image: IEEC/SCIENCE-WAVE, GUILLEM RAMISA Read more…
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View More A super-Earth orbits a famous star not far from our sunNASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live Kepler.
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All good things must come to an end, on Earth and even in space.
NASA announced on Tuesday that the Kepler mission — which has transformed how we understand planets outside of our solar system — is officially over.
According to the space agency, Kepler has run out of fuel in space, ending its 9.5-year planet hunting mission.
“Before we launched Kepler, we didn’t know if planets were common or rare in our galaxy,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director, said in a press call Tuesday.
Thanks to Kepler’s data, which was all safely beamed back to Earth before the end of the mission, we now know that planets are, in fact, exceedingly common. Read more…
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What you need to know about the two spacecraft launching to Mercury Friday
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Most deep space missions send spacecraft hurtling far from the sun, into the frozen unknown hundreds of millions of miles beyond Earth. But on Friday, the European Space Agency (ESA) will blast two orbiters to heavily cratered Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.
Liftoff of the two craft — collectively called BepiColombo — is scheduled for 9:45 p.m. ET on Friday. It can be watched live here.
A European Ariane 5 rocket will lift BepiColombo into space. The two craft will then spend seven years traveling through the void before arriving at their Mercury destination, a metallic outpost in a relatively warm part of the solar system. Read more…
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Listen to Saturn interact with its moon Enceladus in deep space
A planet and its moon are getting chatty in deep space.
A new video from NASA shows off the complicated interactions between plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus and back.
The new video, produced by converting plasma wave…
Dunes of methane ice dot Pluto’s cold surface
Pluto is an oddball.
The dwarf planet plays host to mountains made of ice that could rival the Rockies alongside a heart-shaped plain of ice that looks like the world’s dominant feature when seen from high above.
But that’s not all. …
The first photo from NASA’s planet-hunting TESS satellite is full of so many stars
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A new NASA telescope, sailing toward its assigned orbit, took a moment to look around before it starts its ultimate mission: searching the galaxy for alien planets.
NASA’s TESS spacecraft — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — beamed home one of its first photos taken from space, and it’s a doozy.
The photo, which effectively amounts to a test of one of the satellite’s four cameras, contains more than 200,000 stars, NASA said.
But that’s only a fraction of the number of stars it will eventually study in order to find alien worlds out there circling them. Read more…
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View More The first photo from NASA’s planet-hunting TESS satellite is full of so many starsHow will the sun die? A new study has some ideas
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One day our sun will die.
About 10 billion years from now, our nearest star will run out of its stellar fuel, effectively marking the end of its life in space.
Ok, but then what happens?
According to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers may have a new understanding of exactly what will become of the sun after it reaches the end of its life.
Effectively, the study suggests that the star will become what’s known as a planetary nebula, a mass of gas and dust.
“When a star dies it ejects a mass of gas and dust – known as its envelope – into space. The envelope can be as much as half the star’s mass,” astronomer Albert Zijlstra, one of the authors of the new study, said in a statement. Read more…
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View More How will the sun die? A new study has some ideasHere’s how NASA’s TESS will hunt for alien planets
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Billions and billions of worlds lurk beyond our solar system. But most of the time, we can’t see them.
Alien planets large and small are usually drowned out by the light of their own stars when we try to spot them from Earth.
However, NASA’s TESS — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — is expected to change that after it launches to orbit on Monday.
The satellite is designed to seek out alien worlds circling far-off stars and reveal them to scientists on the ground.
“TESS is kind of like a scout,” TESS scientist Natalia Guerrero said in a statement. Read more…
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View More Here’s how NASA’s TESS will hunt for alien planetsCrunch Report | This Black Friday could be the biggest ever for mobile and we found a new planet
Today’s Stories This Black Friday could be the biggest ever for mobile shopping Amazon blames the postal service for Amazon Fresh delivery issues Scientists found a new Earth-sized planet nearby Credits Written by: Sarah Buhr Hosted by: Sarah Buhr Filmed by: Joe Zolnoski Edited by: John Murillo Notes: Tito’s continues his journey out in the Outback this week so… Read More
An Earth-sized world 11 light-years from home may be our next best shot to find alien life
Eleven light-years away, an Earth-sized world orbits a cool, red star, and it may be just right for life.
The planet, known as Ross 128b, completes an orbit of its star, Ross 128, about once every 10 days, according to new research published in the j…