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Jupiter twin discovered around solar twin

Saturday, August 8th 2015 02:49 AM

Artist's impression showing a newly discovered Jupiter twin gas giant orbiting the solar twin star, HIP 11915. The planet is of a very similar mass to Jupiter and orbits at the same distance from its star as Jupiter does from the Sun. This, together with HIP 11915's Sun-like composition, hints at the possibility of the system of planets orbiting HIP 11915 bearing a resemblance to our own Solar System, with smaller rocky planets orbiting closer to the host star. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers have used the ESO 3.6-metre telescope to identify a planet just like Jupiter orbiting at the same distance from a Sun-like star, HIP 11915. According to current theories, the formation of Jupiter-mass planets plays an important role in shaping the architecture of planetary systems. The existence of a Jupiter-mass planet in a Jupiter-like orbit around a Sun-like star opens the possibility that the system of planets may be similar to our own Solar System. So far, exoplane...

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Brown Dwarfs Behave More Like Planets Than Stars

Friday, July 31st 2015 12:56 AM

Artist's impression of an auroral display on a brown dwarf. Credit: Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech Brown dwarfs are relatively cool, dim objects that are difficult to detect and hard to classify. They are too massive to be planets, yet possess some planetlike characteristics; they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, a defining characteristic of stars, yet they have starlike attributes.   By observing a brown dwarf 20 light-years away using both radio and optical telescopes, a team led by Gregg Hallinan, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, has found another feature that makes these so-called failed stars more like supersized planets—they host powerful auroras near their magnetic poles.   The findings appear in the July 30 issue of the journal Nature.   "We're finding that brown dwarfs are not like small stars in terms of their magnetic activity; they're like gian...

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Amazing Photos of Pluto Reveal Glaciers and Hazy Atmosphere

Sunday, July 26th 2015 01:36 AM

  Stunning new images of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show flowing ices, a complicated surface covered in mountain ranges and a surprisingly far-reaching atmosphere.   At a news conference today (July 24), members of the New Horizons team spoke about the incredible new science being pulled from data collected by the probe, which performed history's first flyby of Pluto on July 14. Among other findings, scientists announced big surprises in the study of Pluto's atmosphere, as well as the discovery of what appear to be flowing fields of ice in Pluto's "heart." "Pluto has a very complicated story to tell," Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, said at the news conference. "There is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place."   The dwarf planet Pluto is seen in true color in this stunning four-image mosaic created by photos from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during the probe's historic flyby...

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Pluto & Charon Photos: "Baffling...Wonderful"

Friday, July 17th 2015 03:24 AM

The New Horizons spacecraft has only had time to downlink seven LORRI images since its flyby of Pluto yesterday. Today's press briefing at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland was preceded by hours of New Horizons team members cryptically dropping hints on Twitter at astonishing details in those few images. And the images are astonishing, as well as beautiful, surprising, and puzzling. Team member John Spencer aptly summed them up when he described them as "baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way."   NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Charon’s surprising, youthful, and varied terrain Remarkable new details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 466,000 kilometers. The LORRI image has been combined with color information obtained by New Horizons’ Ralph instrument on July 13.     Here's how Cath...

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Pluto Measures Up. New Horizons Settles Debate.

Wednesday, July 15th 2015 03:18 AM

A portrait from the final approach. Pluto and Charon display striking color and brightness contrast in this composite image from July 11, showing high-resolution black-and-white LORRI images colorized with Ralph data collected from the last rotation of Pluto. Color data being returned by the spacecraft now will update these images, bringing color contrast into sharper focus. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI   NASA’s New Horizons mission has answered one of the most basic questions about Pluto—its size. Mission scientists have found Pluto to be 1,473 miles (2,370 kilometers) in diameter, somewhat larger than many prior estimates. Images acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were used to make this determination. This result confirms what was already suspected: Pluto is larger than all other known solar system objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. “The size of Pluto has been debated since its discovery in 1930. We are excited...

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Rare Venus Transit Reveals More About Atmospheric Composition

Saturday, July 11th 2015 11:59 PM

This is a composite of images of the Venus transit taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 5, 2012. The image, taken in 171 angstroms, shows a timelapse of Venus's path across the sun in 2012. Credit: NASA/Goddard/SD   Two of NASA's heliophysics missions can now claim planetary science on their list of scientific findings. A group of scientists used the Venus transit -- a very rare event where a planet passes between Earth and the sun, appearing to us as a dark dot steadily making its way across the sun's bright face -- to make measurements of how the Venusian atmosphere absorbs different kinds of light. This, in turn, gives scientists clues to exactly what elements are layered above Venus's surface. Gathering such information not only teaches us more about this planet so close to our own, but it also paves the way for techniques to better understand planets outside our solar system.   Transits of Venus are so rare that they only happ...

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Watching the Birth of a Planet

Thursday, July 2nd 2015 07:34 AM

Astronomers at ETH Zurich have confirmed the existence of a young giant gas planet still embedded in the midst of the disk of gas and dust surrounding its parent star. For the first time, scientists are able to directly study the formation of a planet at a very early stage. The formation of a giant gas planet near the star HD 100546 is not yet complete, allowing astronomers to observe the process. (Artist’s impression: ESO / L. Calçada) Observing time at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on Paranal Mountain is a very precious commodity -- and yet the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile spent an entire night with a high-resolution infrared camera pointed at a single object in the night sky. The data collected by the Naco optics instrument enabled an international team headed by ETH Zurich's Sascha Quanz to confirm its earlier hypothesis: that a young gas planet -- presumed not unlike Jupiter in our own solar system -- is orbiting the star desig...

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See Asteroid Icarus Wing By Earth This Week

Thursday, June 18th 2015 04:57 AM

Ignoring his father's warning, Icarus falls from the sky and plunges to his death in this 17th-century painting by Jacob Peter Gowry Ya burnt! That would probably be today's cheeky reaction to Icarus's ill-fated flight. In theGreek myth, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, attempt to flee Crete by building wings of wax and feathers. On departing, Daedalus cautions his son to fly neither too low above the sea nor too high, lest the Sun melt the wax and cause the wings to fall apart. Icarus gets caught up in the thrill of flying and ignores his father's warning. When the wax melts, he plunges to his death in the sea.   The overly confident son may have passed on, but his asteroid namesake, 1566 Icarus, lives. It was discovered by none other than Walter Baade (of Baade's Window fame) on June 27, 1949, at Palomar Observatory in California.   In what has to be one of the most fitting names ever given an asteroid, Icarus was chosen bec...

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The Earliest Stars That Enriched the Cosmos

Thursday, June 18th 2015 04:20 AM

Astronomers said on Wednesday that they had discovered a lost generation of monster stars that ushered light into the universe after the Big Bang and that jump-started the creation of the elements needed for planets and life before disappearing forever.  Modern-day stars like our sun have a healthy mix of heavy elements, known as metals, but in the aftermath of the Big Bang only hydrogen, helium and small traces of lithium were available to make the first stars.   Such stars could have been hundreds or thousands of times as massive as the sun, according to calculations, burning brightly and dying quickly, only 200 million years after the universe began. Their explosions would have spewed into space the elements that started the chain of thermonuclear reactions by which subsequent generations of stars have gradually enriched the cosmos with elements like oxygen, carbon and iron.   Spotting the older stars in action is one of the prime missions of the James We...

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Dawn's First Fly-Over of Ceres

Sunday, June 14th 2015 02:10 AM

  A new animated video of dwarf planet Ceres, based on images taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, provides a unique perspective of this heavily cratered mysterious world. The video is based on observations of Ceres that were taken from Dawn’s first mapping orbit at an altitude of 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers), as well as the most recent navigational images taken from 3,200 miles (5,100km). Data from 80 images are combined into the video. Analysis of overlapping images provided 3-D detail. The vertical dimension is exaggerated by a factor of two in the video. “We used a three-dimensional terrain model that we had produced based on the images acquired so far,” said Ralf Jaumann of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin. “They will become increasingly detailed as the mission progresses, with each additional orbit bringing us closer to the surface.” Dawn entered its second mapping orbit June 3. It will spend the rest of the month observin...

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