Posts tagged planet
did we just find a habitable super-Earth?! Yup!
Super-Earth Discovered in Star’s Habitable Zone
Scientists added three new planets to three discovered in 2008 orbiting an orange star called HD 40307, which is roughly three-quarters as massive as the sun and located about 42 light-years away in the constellation Pictor.
Of particular interest is the outermost planet, which is believed to fly around its parent star over 320 days, a distance that places it within HD 40307’s so-called “habitable zone.”
“All we know at this point is that it has a minimum mass of about 7.1 Earth-masses. We have no explicit follow-up planned, thought the HARPS team is probably still gathering more data, and may in the future be able to confirm these results, and perhaps add even more planets to the brood,” astronomer Steven Vogt, with the University of California’s Lick Observatory, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
Based on our experience with other star systems this newly discovered planet is likely made of rock and may contain water. It receives 62 percent of the radiation from its star that Earth receives from the sun, but Earth is relatively near to the leading edge of the habitable zone.
TWIDN: Can We Grow Our Organs on a New Planet?
This week in Discovery News we found a planet that might be a good neighbor, but are we too clingy? Plus, we’ll soon be growing spare parts from our own cells and a recap of our live coverage of Felix Baumgartners jump.
Thanks for watching This Week in Discovery News, if you have any ideas on how to make this video better, let me know! - Trace
It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?…
I’ve always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.
Earth-Sized World Found Next Door
Scientists have found an Earth-sized planet circling a neighbor star just 4 light-years away.
No need to brush up on extraterrestrial etiquette quite yet, however. The planet, which flies around its parent star 10 times closer than Mercury orbits the sun, probably is inhospitable for life since its temperature would be more than 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit — far too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface. Water is believed to be necessary for life.
But the newly found planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sun-like star roughly 25 trillion miles away, could have better-positioned siblings.
So far, scientists have only ruled out the possibility of massive planets with orbital periods of 200 days or less around Alpha Centauri B, so that leaves plenty of room for the detection of low-mass planets in the star’s so-called “habitable zone” — the distance where water can exist on a planet’s surface.
this ring shadow is gorgeous!
sometimes I wish Earth had rings.
Saturn’s Southern Side: Big Pic
Saturn’s southern reaches are draped in the shadow of the huge planet’s iconic ring system in a spectacular new picture from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
The near-infrared photo was snapped on June 15 beautifully captures the ring shadow on the planet.
I was afraid we’d get photo-bombed.
good thing that good-for-nothing Pluto wasn’t here…
We let that guy into our club one time and he thinks he’s one of us, amirite?
guys?
Earth, seen in 1990 as a “pale blue dot” from Voyager 1, about 3.7 billion miles away. Listen to the Boston Public Radio interview with a Voyager scientist: http://ow.ly/dIZ7F
Maybe it wasn’t so long ago in a galaxy quite so far, far away.
Star Wars-Like Planet With Two Suns Spotted
Most stars like our sun are not singletons, but rather come in pairs that orbit each other. Scientists had found planets in these binary systems, so-called circumbinary planets with two suns like Tatooine in the “Star Wars” universe.
Intriguingly, the outer planet lurks in the system’s habitable zone, where a rocky planet like Earth is the right temperature to have liquid water on its surface.
One of the stars is much like our sun, and the other is about a third its size and 175 times fainter. The inner and outer planets are respectively 3 and 4.6 times Earth’s diameter — the smaller planet is the smallest circumbinary planet seen yet.
What’s your favorite star? I mean, ours is pretty cool.
Can scientists create a star on Earth?
It’s not just possible — it’s already been done. If you think of a star as a nuclear fusion machine, mankind has duplicated the nature of stars on Earth. But this revelation has qualifiers. The examples of fusion here on Earth are on a small scale and last for just a few seconds at most.
To understand how scientists can make a star, it’s necessary to learn what stars are made of and how fusion works.
MSL Curiosity is starting to look around and will calibrate her camera using the pixelated sticker mounted on her frame (in photo #2)
She may have seen her own shadow, but as Mars is near the end of summer at the moment, so it won’t be having six more weeks of winter. #joke
UPDATE: I changed out the top two images for a spliced one from NASA. w00t!
Remind Me Again, Why Isn’t Pluto a Planet?
In light of the discovery of a fourth moon orbiting Pluto, Mark Thompson ponders what it takes to be called a “planet.”
