By Unknown
planet
This video explains the difference between a planet, like Earth, and a dwarf planet, like Pluto.
The Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets, including many that are similar to our own. But how many of these alien worlds have water, and do any host extraterrestrial life?
No answers to those questions just yet. But astronomers using a new infrared technique say they've discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant planet called "tau Boötis b."
The finding suggests that the technique may play an important role in identifying which exoplanets might be hospitable for life.
By Unknown
A new planet was discovered that is similar to Earth in size and composition, meaning it has a rocky surface and an iron core. But that is where similarities end. This twin, named Kepler-78b, has an orbit so close to its parent star, that the surface is about 2,000 degrees hotter than Earth's. The planet's orbit around the star takes only 8.5 hours, instead Earth's 12 month orbit. Located 400 light years away from Earth in the constellation Cyngus, this hellish Earth shouldn't exist. For a planet only 20% larger than Earth with such a small orbit, astronomers can't figure out how it was formed.
Astronomers studying a newborn star have caught a detailed glimpse of planets forming around it, revealing a never-before seen stage of planetary evolution.
By Unknown
Astronomers have discovered an alien planet that wobbles at such a dizzying rate that its seasons must fluctuate wildly.
Throughout all of the planet's fast-changing seasons, however, no forecast would be friendly to humans. The warm planet is a gassy super-Neptune that orbits too close to its two parent stars to be in its system's "habitable zone," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist.
Via: Scientific American:
Whatever you call may call it, Ceres is one of the most geologically interesting and strange objects in the solar system. Its shape, size and composition—round, roughly the size of Texas and at least 20 percent water ice—place it at the poorly understood transition point between rocky worlds like Earth and icy worlds like Jupiter’s Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus, and other large moons of the outer solar system. Other than blurry Hubble Space Telescope images from 2004, its surface had scarcely been glimpsed until Dawn’s approach. As the spacecraft’s ion engines slowly push it toward Ceres, the dwarf planet’s details are now coming into focus, revealing tantalizing new details with practically every new image.
By Unknown
This planet, GJ 504b, is about the size of Jupiter, but has several times its mass. It's actually so far the smallest planet that's ever been directly imaged with a telescope, rather than being observed by eclipsing its parent star.
