Space and astronomy news
The answer to ”how long is a year on Jupiter” is 11.86 Earth years. There is so much more to know about the Jovian system, that we can not just leave you with one fact, so here are some more interesting facts about Jupiter. At perihelion Jupiter is 741 million km from the Sun(4.95 AU). …
Asteroid 10537 (1991 RY16) is a rarity. It is composed of basaltic rock (i.e. rock that cooled quickly after formation from a molten state) and appears to have evolved independently from the large asteroid Vesta. Vesta suffered a huge impact billions of years ago, and the debris from this collision litters the inner asteroid belt. …
Continue reading “Rare Asteroid Studied by Hawaiian Scientists”
When astronomers looked at the orbits of the planets, they felt that there could be a planet “missing” in between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. In fact, this is where the asteroid belt is; a collection of large and small rocky objects. Could this be the missing planet? Astronomers think that Jupiter formed early …
Continue reading “Was There a Planet Between Mars and Jupiter?”
Of all the Jovian related questions that we get here at Universe Today, what is Jupiter made of is one of the most common. Jupiter is mainly composed of hydrogen and helium just like a star. Answering that question seems to open a flood of other questions about the gas giant, so here are some …
With several space- and ground-based telescopes, as well as dedicated space missions searching for exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, the count of new discoveries keeps rising. The current total now stands at 287 planets. The newest spacecraft dedicated to this search, the COROT Mission (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), announced the finding of two …
Continue reading “Exoplanet Count Rises With New Discoveries”
Unlike all of the other planets in the Solar System, Mercury is just bare rock. It does have a tenuous atmosphere, but ground and space-based observations see just the gray rocky color of Mercury. This gray color comes from Mercury’s molten surface that cooled and hardened billions of years ago after the formation of the …
No longer a planet, Pluto is just a member of the Kuiper Belt; a collection of icy objects that extend out past the orbit of Neptune. If you brought Pluto into the inner Solar System, it would start to act like a comet – blasting out gas and particles from the solar wind. It’s a …
We’re getting closer to finding an Earth-like planet out there in the universe. Spanish astronomers announced the discovery of the smallest exo-planet found to date, located 30 light years from earth. “I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth,” team leader Ignasi Ribas said at a …
Earth, four billion years ago, was a lifeless, hot and violent place. Not exactly a world where you’d expect life to form. But this was the scene where the first life-forming amino acids appeared. And how did this happen? According to new research, a lump of rock floating though space may have been irradiated by …
Continue reading “Did a Cooked Meteorite Seed Life on Earth?”
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has measured huge quantities of water and organic compounds surrounding the star AA Tauri, 450 light years from Earth. AA Tauri is a young star, only a million years old, not too dissimilar to our Sun when it was a baby. What makes AA Tauri even more special is that it …
Continue reading “Could AA Tauri Hold the Biochemical Key to Extra-Terrestrial Life?”