Planetary Formation

Will This Be The Fate Of The Earth?

May 3, 2012

Astronomers have found four nearby white dwarf stars surrounded by disks of material that could be the remains of rocky planets much like Earth — and one star in particular appears to be in the act of swallowing up what’s left of an Earthlike planet’s core. The research, announced today by the Royal Astronomical Society, [...]

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Rogue Planets Can Find Homes Around Other Stars

April 17, 2012

As crazy as it sounds, free-floating rogue planets have been predicted to exist for quite some time and just last year, in May 2011, several orphan worlds were finally detected. Then, earlier this year, astronomers estimated that there could be 100,000 times more rogue planets in the Milky Way than stars. Now, the latest research [...]

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‘Nomad’ Planets Could Outnumber Stars 100,000 to 1

February 23, 2012

Could the number of wandering planets in our galaxy – planets not orbiting a sun — be more than the amount of stars in the Milky Way? Free-floating planets have been predicted to exist for quite some time and just last year, in May 2011, several orphan worlds were finally detected. But now, the latest [...]

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Recent Geologic Activity on the Moon?

February 20, 2012

Recent images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera provide evidence that the lunar crust may be pulling apart in certain areas. The images reveal small trenches less than a kilometer in length, and less than a few hundred meters wide. Only a small number of these features, known as graben, have been discovered on the [...]

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Scientists Find New Clues About the Interiors of ‘Super-Earth’ Exoplanets

February 13, 2012

As we learned in science class in school, the Earth has a molten interior (the outer core) deep beneath its mantle and crust. The temperatures and pressures are increasingly extreme, the farther down you go. The liquid magmas can “melt” into different types, a process referred to as pressure-induced liquid-liquid phase separation. Graphite can turn into [...]

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How Well Can Astronomers Study Exoplanet Atmospheres?

January 30, 2012

Exoplanet discoveries are happening at a frenetic pace, and some of the latest newly discovered worlds are sometimes described as “Earth-Like” and “potentially habitable.” The basis of this comparison is, in many cases, based on the distance between the exoplanet and its host star. Unfortunately the distance between a planet and its host star is [...]

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Goldilocks Moons

January 14, 2012

The search for extraterrestrial life outside our Solar System is currently focused on extrasolar planets within the ‘habitable zones’ of exoplanetary systems around stars similar to the Sun. Finding Earth-like planets around other stars is the primary goal of NASA’s Kepler Mission. The habitable zone (HZ) around a star is defined as the range of [...]

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NASA’s Unprecedented Science Twins are GO to Orbit our Moon on New Year’s Eve

December 29, 2011

In less than three days, NASA will deliver a double barreled New Year’s package to our Moon when an unprecedented pair of science satellites fire up their critical braking thrusters for insertion into lunar orbit on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. NASA’s dynamic duo of GRAIL probes are “GO” for Lunar Orbit Insertion [...]

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Dr. Alan Stern Answers Your Questions!

December 27, 2011

Some of you may know, we recently launched a new “Ask” feature here at Universe Today. Our inaugural launch features Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. We collected your questions in our initial post and passed them along to Dr. Stern who graciously took the [...]

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Is Jupiter’s Core Liquifying?

December 21, 2011

Jupiter, the largest and most massive planet in our solar system, may be its own worst enemy. It turns out that its central core may in fact be self-destructing, gradually liquifying and dissolving over time. This implies it was previously larger than it is now, and may dissolve altogether at some point in the future. [...]

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Dawn swoops to lowest orbit around Vesta – Unveiling Spectacular Alien World

December 13, 2011

NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter successfully spiraled down today to the closest orbit the probe will ever achieve around the giant asteroid Vesta, and has now begun critical science observations that will ultimately yield the mission’s highest resolution measurements of this spectacular body. “What can be more exciting than to explore an alien world that until [...]

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Carbon “Super Earths” – Diamond Planets

December 6, 2011

During a laboratory experiment at Ohio State University, researchers were simulating the pressures and conditions necessary to form diamonds in the Earth’s mantle when they came across a surprise… A carbon “Super Earth” could exist. While endeavoring to understand how carbon might behave in other solar systems, they wondered if planets high in this element [...]

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Asteroid Lutetia… A Piece Of Earth?

November 12, 2011

According to data received from ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, ESO’s New Technology Telescope, and NASA telescopes, strange asteroid Lutetia could be a real piece of the rock… the original material that formed the Earth, Venus and Mercury! By examining precious meteors which may have formed at the time of the inner Solar System, scientists have found [...]

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Was a Fifth Giant Planet Expelled from Our Solar System?

November 10, 2011

Earth’s place in the “Goldilocks” zone of our solar system may be the result of the expulsion of a fifth giant planet from our solar system during its first 600 million years, according to a recent journal publication. “We have all sorts of clues about the early evolution of the solar system,” said author Dr. [...]

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New ESA Images Reveal Volcanic History of Mars

November 10, 2011

Earlier this week, The European Space Agency released new Mars images taken by instruments aboard the Mars Express spacecraft. The images show details of Tharsis Tholus, which appears to be a very large and extinct volcano that has been battered and deformed over time. On Earth, Tharsis Tholus would be a towering giant of a [...]

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Did A Supernova Shape Our Solar System?

November 4, 2011

Away in space some 4.57 billion years ago, in a galaxy yet to be called the Milky Way, a hydrogen molecular cloud collapsed. From it was born a G-type main sequence star and around it swirled a solar nebula which eventually gelled into a solar system. But just what caused the collapse of the molecular [...]

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Are Black Holes Planet Smashers?

October 31, 2011

Some supermassive black holes are obscured by oddly shaped dust clouds which resemble doughnuts. These clouds have been an unsolved puzzle, but last week a scientist at the University of Leicester proposed a new theory to explain the origins of these clouds, saying that they could be the results of high-speed collisions between planets and [...]

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Russia Fuels Phobos-Grunt and sets Mars Launch for November 9

October 29, 2011

Russia’s Space Agency, Roscosmos, has set November 9 as the launch date for the Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars and its tiny moon Phobos. Roscosmos has officially announced that the audacious mission to retrieve the first ever soil samples from the surface of Phobos will blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Zenit-2SB rocket [...]

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Herschel Observatory Detects ‘Oceans’ of Water Around Distant Star

October 20, 2011

There’s enough water in a planet-forming disk around a distant star to fill several thousand Earth oceans, according to new observations with the Herschel space observatory. Astronomers have found evidence of water vapor originating from ice on dust grains in the disc around a young star, TW Hydrae. The star is between 5-10 million years [...]

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How Did Jupiter Shape Our Solar System?

August 23, 2011

Jupiter hasn’t always been in the same place in our solar system. Early in the history of our solar system, Jupiter moved inward towards the sun, almost to where Mars currently orbits now, and then back out to its current position. The migration through our solar system of Jupiter had some major effects on our [...]

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