Posts tagged planets
nybg:
“Mums!” is totally our buzz word right now. Our kiku display is running in the Bourke-Sullivan Display House through November 18, and visitors are voting on their favorite varieties to help the NYBG determine what gets planted outdoors in the future. Come to think of it, that vote ends this week, so feel free to chime in. —MN
MUMS THE WORD
KIKU - a display of chrysanthemums at the New York Botanical Garden’s Bourke-Sullivan Display House - a greenhouse of awesomeness.
my master gardener mother would love this post. no seriously, she’s a Master Gardener Level II (and a Woodland Manager) #YouGoMom
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.
Kepler Spots ‘Perfectly Aligned’ Alien Worlds
When NASA’s Kepler space telescope started finding planets at odd angles to their parent stars, scientists wondered if our solar system’s tidy geometry, with the planets neatly orbiting around the sun’s equator, was an exception to the rule.
That idea can be laid to rest thanks to an innovative use of the Kepler data which aligned three planets circling the sun-like star Kepler-30 with a giant spot on the star’s surface.
The study showed the trio of planets orbiting within one degree, relative to each other and relative to the star’s equator. That finding is an indication that Kepler-30, like our own solar system, formed from a rotating disk of gas.
Image: The planets of the Kepler-30 system, seen here in an artist’s impression, all transit the same starspot, indicating that they lie in the same geometric plane. Credit: Sanchis-Ojeda et al
Pluto: Not a Planet; Still Very Interesting
With the discovery of a fifth moon orbiting Pluto came the inevitable protests about the little world’s planetary status: Can it be called a planet yet?
Sorry Pluto fans, this latest revelation can’t supersize Pluto’s standing in the Planetary Rotary Club, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse at the dwarf planet’s history.
See Dazzling Venus at Its Brightest This Week
Although Venus is always one of the brightest objects in the sky, this week it is at its brightest.
By all accounts Earth should be a “snowball planet” like the frigid world Hoth in the 1980 Star Wars film “The Empire Strikes Back.”
Why? Because common theories of stellar evolution predict that the sun was only 70 percent of its current brightness when it first lit its fusion engine 4.5 billion years ago. The sun has been steadily growing brighter since then and will continue so into the future, eventually evaporating away Earth’s oceans.
As the planets put on a show, astronomer Mark Thompson discusses how you can hunt them down.
This last month saw a boom in planetary sightings across the world. Wherever you observed the night sky from you couldn’t fail to have seen, and been impressed by, the view of Venus and Jupiter dancing around in the twilight after the sun had set.
While these two planets were setting, Mars and Saturn were rising in the East, continuing the celestial show. It’s easy enough to still spot these planets with the naked eye, but to really get the most out of them a telescope or powerful binoculars are needed.
There is no better time than now to learn about how to get the most out of your equipment for planet spotting.
First things first: magnification. To be able to see any decent level of detail, a magnification of at least 20 is needed. Anything less than this and you’ll just see the planets as bright stars.
