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Planetary Formation

Rogue Planets Can Find Homes Around Other Stars

April 17, 2012

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter 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 [...]

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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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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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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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