Two Earth-Like Worlds Found Orbiting a Red Dwarf Only 12.5 Light-Years Away
The CARMENES project has detected two more Earth-like planets that orbit a red dwarf star just 12.5 light years away
The CARMENES project has detected two more Earth-like planets that orbit a red dwarf star just 12.5 light years away
Ceres, at almost 1,000 km (620 miles) in diameter, is the largest body in the asteroid belt. Between 2015 and 2018, NASA’s ion-powered Dawn spacecraft visited the dwarf planet, looking for clues to help us understand how our Solar System formed. Ceres is the first dwarf planet ever visited by a spacecraft. Now that scientists …
Saturn’s moon Mimas is the smallest of the gas giant’s major moons. (Saturn has 62 moons, but some of them are tiny moonlets less than 1 km in diameter.) Two new studies show how Mimas acted as a kind of snow-plow, widening the Cassini division between Saturn’s rings.
Astronomers have discovered a very rare, very unusual planet in a distant solar system. The planet, called NGTS-4b, is three times the size of Earth, and about 20% smaller than Neptune. It’s hotter than our very own Mercury. At about 1,000 degrees Celsius, it would be the hottest planet if it were in our Solar …
A recent study of samples from the asteroid Itokawa has revealed that “dry” asteroids may have delivered up to half of Earth’s water billions of years ago.
NASA’s new planet-hunting telescope, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), just found its first Earth-sized world. Though the Earth-sized planet, and its hot sub-Neptune companion, were first observed by TESS in January 2019, it’s taken until now to confirm their status with ground-based follow-up observations. The discovery is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The OSIRIS-REx mission has revealed some interesting things about the asteroid Bennu, which includes the 11 plumes it witnessed in the past 3 months.
A new study conducted by an international team of scientists examines what the term “habitable zone” means and how next-generation telescopes will test our assumptions.
Jupiter: a massive, lifeless gas giant out there on the other side of the asteroid belt. It’s a behemoth, containing 2.5 times as much mass as all the other planets combined. To top it off, it’s named after the Roman God of War. Earth: a tiny rocky world, almost too close to the Sun, where …
Continue reading “Jupiter or Earth? Which One’s Which, and Why Do They Look so Similar?”
A new study has placed new constraints on the emergence of complex life, which effectively narrows what what we would consider to be a star’s “habitable zone”