Space and astronomy news
[/caption] Ever since the announcement of the discovery of exoplanet Gliese 581g, there has been a buzz in the news, on websites, Twitter – pretty much everywhere, about the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet. But the past couple of days there has been a different sort of buzz about this distant world. Two stories have …
Continue reading “Buzz About Gliese 581g: Doubts of Its Existence; Aliens Signals Detected”
[/caption] Saturn’s rings have several gaps, most of which are caused by small moons shepherding ring debris into breaks in the rocky rings. But one gap may be caused by gravitational perturbations from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, sending tsunami-like waves up to 3 kilometers (2 miles) high in the C ring. This causes one region …
Continue reading “Titan-ic Tsunami Causing Crack in Saturn’s C Ring”
[/caption] Wanna build celestial objects? I mean it sounds easy – you just start with a big cloud of dust and give it a nudge so that it starts to spin and accrete and you end up with a star with a few wisps of dust left in orbit that continue to accrete to form …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – A Snowball’s Chance”
[/caption] An enticing new extrasolar planet found using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii is just three times the mass of Earth and it orbits the parent star squarely in the middle of the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” a potential habitable region where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the …
Continue reading “New Earth-sized Exoplanet is in Star’s Habitable Zone”
[/caption] Venus is so hot, it’s cool! This very groovy 1960’s-looking image shows the temperature distribution within Venus and local mobilization at the surface, and is the result of new model of the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet. The model reveals that the heat in the atmosphere induced from a strong greenhouse warming might actually …
Continue reading “Hot Atmosphere of Venus Might Cool the Interior”
[/caption] Every rocky planet has a lithosphere, but what is lithosphere? It is the rigid outermost shell of a rocky planet. Here on Earth the lithosphere contains the crust and upper mantle. The Earth has two types of lithosphere: oceanic and continental. The lithosphere is broken up into tectonic plates. Oceanic lithosphere consists mainly of …
[/caption] We’ve all seen pictures of erupting terrestrial volcanoes from space, and even eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io in the outer solar system, but would it be possible to detect an erupting volcano on an exoplanet? Astronomers say the answer is yes! (with a few caveats) It’s going to be decades before telescopes will be …
Continue reading “Extrasolar Volcanoes May Soon be Detectable”
Scientists at the European Southern Observatory have identified the closest looking solar system to our own. They located a sun-like star more than 100 light years distant with as many as seven different planets, including one that might be the smallest ever found outside the solar system. “We have found what is most likely the …
Continue reading “Step On The Scales: Weighing Up Planet Earth…”
There is another Sun-like star out there with an intriguing family of planets orbiting about and it could be the closest parallel to our own solar system that astronomers have found yet. European astronomers discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the star HD 10180, with evidence that two other planets may …
[/caption] The first planet from the Sun is Mercury, orbiting the Sun at an average distance of 57.91 million km. It’s also the smallest planet in the Solar System, measuring just 4,879 kilometers across. Mercury is named after the Roman god of commerce; he was the same entity as the Greek god Hermes – the …